Granite Trust Building downtown Quincy Quincy Center
Downtown Quincy. (Max Youmans/Wikimedia Commons)

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, I was baptized in St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. I ran around with the other kids in a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of St. Michael. I was taught he was a protector, a guardian, a force for justice.

Last year, all of us in the City of Quincy discovered that – without consulting the City Council – our mayor had spent $850,000 in taxpayer funds to commission 10-foot bronze statues of St. Michael and St. Florian to bracket the entrance of our beautiful new public safety headquarters. I was appalled.

My Christian faith sustains me. In a world of beauty and of terrible wrong, my heart rests secure in a loving God who moves in justice and compassion, who cherishes each of us and rejoices in our unfolding. I also firmly believe that everyone deserves the same freedom of conscience I enjoy: to worship as our faith leads us and to know that our religious liberty will be respected.

This project in Quincy undermines those essential American rights. Installing two larger-than-life Christian saints to loom over the entrance of our public safety building sends a clear message that non-Christians are not welcome.

That’s why I sued my city last year. I am one of more than a dozen plaintiffs seeking to block the mayor from installing the bronze statues.

The artworks depict St. Florian, a Catholic and Orthodox saint, putting out a fire. St. Michael, revered in Catholic and Orthodox faith and in some Protestant traditions, including mine, is portrayed with wings, shield, and superhero muscles, stepping on the neck of a demon with a human face. My fellow citizens and I won a preliminary injunction in Superior Court. On May 6, the Supreme Judicial Court will hear the case.

It’s not easy to take on your city and your mayor in court. Yet I felt that I had no choice — because of my God and my Girl Scouts.

My husband and I moved to Quincy over two decades ago for strong, diverse schools. We looked for a city where our kids would learn about topics we couldn’t teach them.

Almost half of children in Quincy enter our elementary schools speaking a first language other than English, and a third of city residents were born in another country. Sure enough, our oldest came back from his first day in kindergarten indignant that he didn’t get seasoned seaweed in his lunchbox like all the other kids, and our middle-schoolers debated at the dinner table where to find the best banh mih.

When our daughter was six, my husband started a Girl Scout troop. I was troop coordinator from middle school until they graduated from high school several years ago. Most of the girls came from immigrant families. Some were Buddhist. Some were Catholic or Protestant. Some were from families who were fiercely non-religious.

All of them laughed and played and learned together. We went hiking, we went to art museums, we wrestled with college essays. The girls took seriously the Girl Scout Law, which calls on each Girl Scout to “make the world a better place.” They volunteered. They worked to get out the vote in Quincy. They called on civic leaders to pay more attention to women’s history.

We also marched in local parades at Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, and Flag Day. Some of those Girl Scouts had families who had come through war and terrible danger to secure liberty in the United States. For us, waving flags was no hollow gesture.

Those Girl Scouts belong in Quincy. They are the fabric of the city.

But if these saint statues go up on the public safety building, they will send a powerful message to many in our troop that they are lesser. That they do not belong. That they are not worthy of protection from our city’s first responders.

When I made the baptismal covenant at St. Michael’s in Little Rock, the priest asked, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” I responded, as every baptismal candidate does, “I will, with God’s help.”

I was a skinny kid with knobbly knees when I made those promises, but they have shaped every day of my life since.

The presence of two larger-than-life Christian saints on the new public safety building would undermine the dignity of every human being — the dignity that I promised at my baptism to respect. It would elevate one faith above all others. It would turn some of my friends and neighbors, some of my former Girl Scouts, into second-class citizens.

I take strength from images of St. Michael in church. He does not belong on the new public safety building of my city.

Conevery Bolton Valencius is a professor of history at Boston College. She is a Quincy resident and worships at Church of Our Saviour Episcopal parish.