San Diego

Mission San Diego de Alcala was founded in July 1769, the first of the twenty one Franciscan missions of Alta California and the beginning of permanent European settlement on that coast. Its early years were hard: the site was moved inland to better water and land, and in 1775 a large Kumeyaay force attacked and burned it, killing the priest Luis Jayme, who is counted the first Christian martyr of California. It was rebuilt.

What the mission system did is the substance of the modern argument. Indigenous people who accepted baptism were not free to leave, were housed in crowded quarters, worked the fields and herds, and were subject to corporal punishment for absence or disobedience. Mortality from introduced disease was severe, and the indigenous population of coastal California fell catastrophically during the mission period and the decades after secularisation in 1834.

Junipero Serra, who founded the mission and led the system, was canonised in 2015. The Vatican and his defenders presented him as a man who defended indigenous people against soldiers and civil officials and who wrote a formal representation on their behalf. Many descendants of the mission communities and many historians answered that whatever his intentions, he built and defended an institution of coerced labour and cultural destruction. Statues of him were removed from several Californian sites in 2020. The atlas records both positions rather than choosing.

Heaven's Gate began in 1975 when Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles persuaded a few dozen people at public meetings in the American west to leave their lives and follow them. Their teaching combined a reading of the gospels with the vocabulary of unidentified flying objects: the earth was a garden about to be recycled, a higher evolutionary level existed above the human one, and the body was a vehicle to be discarded when transport arrived. Members lived communally under a detailed discipline, gave up names, property, sex and family contact, and several of the men including Applewhite were surgically castrated to remove the difficulty.

By the 1990s the group was small, ageing and supporting itself by building websites, and it published its beliefs on one of them, which is why its own account of itself survives in its own words rather than only in other people's.

In March 1997, with the comet Hale-Bopp visible and rumours circulating of an object accompanying it, thirty nine members took barbiturates in applesauce and vodka in shifts over three days at a rented house at Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County, lay down in identical clothing and new trainers, and were covered with purple cloth. Each carried a five dollar note and some coins.

The county's religious life is otherwise unremarkable in scale but not in composition: a large border region Catholic population, Vietnamese Buddhist temples, and one of the largest Chaldean Catholic communities outside Iraq in the eastern suburbs.