GOD AND MAN IN ALABAMA

The cradle of the Confederacy provides a fitting ground zero in a religious war. For generations, Alabama has suffered the obloquies of Yankee halfwits who would have us believe that the state is littered with inbred illiterates who spend their days under muscle cars on blocks in front of homes with trailer hitches, emerging only to scratch their low-sloping foreheads, hock chaw, and think backwards. Such defamation tends to breed a scrappy mulishness, making Alabamians a people unabashed about public expressions of faith.

Traverse the state, and these expressions manifest themselves everywhere. You see it in the billboard admonition outside Montgomery that whispers, “Go to church or the devil will get you.” And in the marble and mahogany lobby of Birmingham’s Tutwiler Hotel, which features glass-encased church-service schedules. At Ollie’s Barbecue, salvation tracts and Bibles are secured as easily as Ollie’s vinegar-based, Carolina-style sauce. Even overpass graffiti artists implore commuters to trust in Jesus.

Alabama, however, is not just a Christian state. It is a fighting state. Defiance is in its citizenry’s genes the way baldness or polydactyly encodes our weaker stock. The state motto is “We dare defend our rights” — a disposition that has led to fighting over civil rights and states’ rights and, when the University of Alabama plays Auburn, bragging rights.

It comes as no surprise then that two of the most heated religion cases since the Supreme Court removed prayer from public schools in 1962 have unfolded in Alabama. The first involves the battle between county-circuit judge Roy Moore and the American Civil Liberties Union (resolved for the time being in Moore’s favor). The judge has stirred ire by conducting jury prayer and posting the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. The conflict’s natural drama was compounded when the governor, Fob James, announced that he would deploy the National Guard, state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Moore’s tablets on the wall. (Locals doubt that Fob could pull off the Auburn/Alabama merger — even for this worthy cause.)

The second case concerns the DeKalb County public schools, which have been sued by an assistant principal for permitting and sponsoring all manner of religious activity. Montgomery circuit judge Ira DeMent has slapped the schools with a permanent injunction, banning the activity as unconstitutional. To enforce compliance, which has not come readily, DeMent has mandated in- service training for teachers (called “re-education” by DeKalbians) and ordered a court monitor (dubbed the “prayer police”) to enter the schools.

With all sides firmly entrenched and short odds that both issues will require resolution by the Supreme Court, impassioned natives and meddling outsiders have turned the state into a battleground of secularists vs. pietists, evolutionary constitutionalists vs. originalists, brother vs. brother. Onlookers include evangelicals, atheists, scholars, Congress, and enough out-of-town reporters to cause a run on hotel mini-bars. Wearing black trunks in both cases is the ACLU, which has poked its nose into nearly every state/religion case since the Scopes monkey trial. Donning crimson trunks is Gov. James, a Christian fundamentalist who has mocked evolution by stooping like an ape at press conferences so reporters could ponder their ancestry.

Such behavior is not atypical of the former barbell manufacturer who possesses the country-fried affability and populist obstinance that New Southerners curse and feature writers pray for. Fob regularly boasts that, in the religion cases, he has retained the counsel of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. He became the first governor ever to secede from the National Governors’ Association — on account of its general uselessness. And when his wife was criticized for flying to evangelical crusades on the state jet, Fob tweaked his critics by having “First Lady” painted on the plane’s hull. (But more on Fob later.)

Apart from such picaresque accents, the Alabama struggle is shaping up as a fight of — forgive me — Biblical proportions. Specifically, 1st Kings 18. In this chapter, the prophet Elijah challenges King Ahab to round up his 450 prophets of Baal and meet him on Mt. Carmel. There, they prepare two altars to their respective gods, slap two bulls on the altars, and wait for whoever’s god means business to fire up the grill. Elijah wins. But the point here is to substitute Fob for Elijah, with God staying in as Himself. The ACLU is Ahab, and the 450 false prophets are the federal judiciary. Baal would be Supreme Court precedent — the god of the federal judiciary. Here, Fob has his hands a bit fuller than Elijah. Because after the last six decades of constitutional puzzling over state-sponsored religion, the Court has not blessed the God of Fob and Elijah over the ACLU’s god of separation of church and state.

But in a state where 96 percent of the population identify themselves as Christians, DeKalb County has never taken care to feign much separation. There are seminaries less homogenous than large pockets of Alabama. And in DeKalb, nestled in the scenic red-mapled, sweet-gummed Appalachian foothills near the Georgia border, religious expression is as natural as exhaling.

A good bar bet around here is to see if you can kick a Holstein patty off your boot heel without hitting a church. Or it would be, if there were any bars — which are outnumbered by churches 172-0. This isn’t so impressive, considering DeKalb is a dry county. What is impressive is that churches outnumber RV dealerships, propane retailers, and everything else except sock mills (DeKalb is the “Sock Capital of the World,” and if you are wearing socks now, or hosiery in general, there’s a one in eight chance they came from DeKalb).

In spite of the court’s 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision, DeKalb schools have for years conducted prayer before class, ball games, and graduation, and have let Gideons distribute Bibles in class. The Alabama legislature offered tacit sanction of such activity. It passed a school- prayer law in 1993 that not only ensured the right of students to pray at all school functions, but allowed teachers to lead a voluntary state-drafted prayer acknowledging “the Creator and Supreme Judge of the World” — more supreme, even, than the Rehnquist court.

Nobody seemed to mind, except for Michael Chandler, an assistant principal at Valley Head School. For nearly 10 years, he documented and complained about religious activity in school. In 1996, with the help of the ACLU, he filed suit against the school system and the governor, charging an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Last March, Judge DeMent concurred and struck down Alabama’s prayer law. (The Alabama legislature is already at work on a new one.) Fob James agreed with DeMent’s decision — but for reasons of his own. He called the school- prayer law “beggarly and anemic,” a curtailment of First Amendment liberties that dictated to students and teachers how and what to pray.

The real friction came in the intervening months in a tangle of conference calls and threats and cessation agreements. In October, when DeMent determined the schools weren’t complying with his order, he slapped them with an injunction. DeMent, it should be noted, is no one’s fire-snorting liberal. He’s a Republican, appointed by Bush in 1992, was a major general in the Air Force Reserves, and is a devout Methodist. Former law partners say DeMent keeps a Bible in his chambers that contains more dog ears and post-it notes than most of his legal briefs.

Since the injunction, DeKalb’s prayer warriors have staged a mini-rebellion. The civic center in Rainsville, usually the tabernacle of tractor and engine shows, has been the site of thunderous rallies that have even attracted the governor. Students have conducted walk-outs and pray-ins, and bitter football rivals have broken out of pep-line formations to bow their heads at midfield while giving Ira DeMent an intercessory finger.

People are hoppin’ mad, like Gary Carlyle, the principal of Sylvania High School — who knows that, as far as targets go, DeKalb is a slow, hanging cantaloupe, just waiting to be pegged by the ACLU. We sit in his wood-paneled office, which features a mounted ram’s head trimmed with a baseball cap on each horn.

Carlyle has a cinder-block torso and a salt-and-pepper goatee, and like most southerners, he has an affinity for the patron saints of lost causes. A pewter bust of Robert E. Lee sits on his desk, and behind him is a framed picture of Jefferson Davis. Facing Jeff on the opposite wall is a photograph of Louis Crews, a black man. In the mid-’70s, Carlyle played football at the historically-black Alabama A&M, where he eventually became team captain. (Almost every Alabamian I speak with has played football on the college level, or committed an equally valorous physical feat.) Crews was his coach, and a man “I’d be proud to call my daddy,” Carlyle clarifies — lest an observer get the impression he’s still smarting from the War of Northern Aggression.

Carlyle discounts himself as “just a redneck from Sand Mountain.” But like most Alabamians I visit, his office is flush with history and law books, and he can give you semi-learned disquisitions on the two-pronged argument of most of the rebels: (a) The First Amendment prohibition on congressional establishment of religion is as it reads — a prohibition on Congress, intended to protect the states against a national church like the no-account Anglicans were running back home. (The states themselves maintained established religions for decades after the amendment’s ratification.) And (b) : Even if you don’t buy (a), as the federal judiciary hasn’t since the 1940s, God’s law supersedes man’s — so come and get us.

It is the view of many DeKalbians that they are now being gotten. Fob James has called the court-ordered monitor “the secret police,” and Carlyle likens it to “the Gestapo — I don’t know if they’ll be carrying guns or not.” They won’t be. The position will largely involve fielding phone complaints and administering a quarterly check-up on schools to make sure they comply with the judge’s order until the appeal is heard by the Eleventh Circuit. DeKalbians have also somewhat overstated the injunction’s restrictions. Students may still conduct voluntary prayer and Bible reading, express religious beliefs in assignments, and assemble in religious clubs, as long as secular counterparts can do the same in their own clubs. But school officials who participate could be found in contempt, and may be praying from the pen.

The injunction’s impetus was largely Michael Chandler. And the burden shows on his face when we meet at Shoney’s in the county seat. He hunches over a back booth while sipping sweet tea and speaking in hushed tones, as if the surrounding geriatrics might recess from their patty melts, jump the formica, and give him a pasting. “You can’t be too careful,” he says.

He records his calls now, and he quit driving his Corvette to work so it wouldn’t get keyed. He reports no violence or threats of violence, but I’d heard an ugly rumor that his 14-year-old son had his head baptized in a commode by unhappy classmates. “That happened,” Chandler shrugs, “but it was unrelated — just kids being kids.”

Chandler’s stance, to his thinking, is every bit as principled as Gary Carlyle’s. He believes — and the law backs him — that schoolchildren are in a compulsory setting and therefore should not be subjected to anything that smacks of state-sponsored religion. Because of his stand, he has naturally been called an atheist. But the lapsed Baptist is now a semi-regular Unitarian: “They’re non-judgmental, open, and believe in separation of church and state.”

What Chandler cannot abide is his son’s being harassed in school as a result of his lawsuit. And he alleges that, for months, whenever Jesse entered the cafeteria, 180 or so classmates stood over their trays and recited the Lord’s Prayer.

The state is choosing not to contest the actual complaint allegations, figuring they’re generally true. So attorney general Bill Pryor is taking the tack that the injunction is “vague and overbroad” in declaring, for instance, that students cannot lead graduation prayer, which the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals about. But many DeKalbians do contest the actual facts. Danny Ashley, the principal at Fyffe, where Chandler’s son attends, says lunch prayer wasn’t directed at Jesse — kids would pray even when Jesse wasn’t present, as had an earlier lunch period. Chandler also besmirched the name of Annette Waldrop, the 4-H Club lady who visits all county schools making sure students know that milk “doesn’t just come from the Winn-Dixie.” Waldrop used to hold a one-minute devotional during a 45-minute class period and in 21 years never had a single complaint. Until Chandler’s. Now she has a generic ” thought of the day” that’s “inspirational, not religious” (kind of like a Unitarian service).

But the most calumnious of Chandler’s allegations involves the Gideons, who formerly were permitted in classrooms once a year to distribute Bibles. Chandler banished them to the curb at his school, but that didn’t stop the Gideons, who Chandler says started winging Bibles into the school bus windows, busting a child’s lip. “That makes me so mad,” says Gary Carlyle. “Have you ever seen the Gideons? Most of them are too old to throw anything.”

But not Gideon Gary Holcombe, who’s a robust 53 and calls Chandler’s allegation “a flat lie”: “If we caught anyone doing that, we’d bounce them out of here.” He says that, at worst, Gideons were lobbing the Bibles underhand, and besides, “the kids were screamin’ for ’em.” And from the three- ounce, soft-covered mini New Testaments he shows me, it’s clear that one of the elderly gents would need some serious heat on his release to damage a kid’s grillwork — even with the additional heft of Psalms and Proverbs.

For now, no amount of civil disobedience would get the teachers out of DeMent’s mandated sensitivity classes. He was wise enough to let them select their own curriculum, but had suggested an Anti-Defamation League text with lots of multicultural pap about “heterosexism” and “ableism” and “sharing life experiences” as participants “strengthen pluralism” in “diverse teams.” That approach would have been utterly useless, as pluralism in DeKalb County has historically meant there were Southern Baptists and Primitive Baptists and Two-Seeds in the Spirit Predestinarian Baptists.

While it is uncertain how DeKalb will fare in the Eleventh Circuit, the county has one sympathetic judge in nearby Gadsden, Alabama. Judge Roy Moore has blasted DeMent’s decision, assuring the citizens of his own county, Etowah, that the DeKalb restrictions have no bearing on them. (Fob James has assured the citizens of all of Alabama the same thing — though DeMent disagrees.) Moore, too, knows something about acknowledging God on state time, having been sued by the ACLU for hanging handcarved redwood Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall, as well as for inviting clergy to conduct prayer before each jury term.

Moore’s travails have made him a genuine cause celebre. Evangelicals like James Dobson do mailings in his behalf. Congress has passed a resolution supporting his position. Dean Young, Moore’s former spokesman and founder of the Christian Family Association, has sold granite Decalogue tablets (in rose or slate) over the Internet to raise money for his defense.

But sitting in Moore’s chambers, one gets the feeling that the judge needs little defending. His manner rests somewhere between minor prophet and Patrick Henry. And as he rocks back in his swivel chair with coal-black eyes and a scales-of-justice tie, he rasps and rumbles and wrestles accordion folders full of Federalist Papers and old case law to the floor. Everyone in Alabama can pinch his share of Jefferson and Madison, but Moore recites from memory hulking swaths of Blackstone commentaries, old congressional records, constitutional convention notes, and other arcana — all of which he knows better than most know their own offspring.

Moore enjoys the support he’s getting, though he’s used to walking alone. He was a military cop in Viet-nam, but left the service after coming home, when morale collapsed and everyone went soft. Running for district attorney in Etowah County in the early ’80s, he campaigned against rampant cronyism and corruption in the county’s legal system. Though he named no names, four judges sued him, eliciting his King James retort: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” He lost the election, went broke in the process, and wandered the earth to decompress. Moore became a ranch hand in Australia, then kickboxed his way across Texas while working as a roofer. He also took up karate “for fun” — though it wasn’t much fun for the third-degree black belt Moore took down in a tournament.

When Moore became a county circuit judge in 1992, he inherited the tradition of jury prayer, which is conducted by outside clergy and is voluntary. A devout Baptist, Moore immediately hung his tablets on the wall, along with the state seal, pictures of Washington and Lincoln, an old Coca- Cola lithograph of the Magna Carta, and a Declaration of Independence parchment found for 25 cents at a yard sale.

In 1995, the ACLU and an atheist organization sued him in federal court, the ACLU’s venue of choice. What the ACLU didn’t count on was that Fob would get so riled. While the governor’s threat to call in the National Guard first gave the story legs across the country, we might not be talking about it today had Fob not decided the case had no business being decided in a federal court. Fob sued both the ACLU and Moore in state court to force a declaratory judgment on whether Moore’s actions were constitutional. The ACLU, convinced the suing was theirs to do around here, filed a counterclaim against the state and Moore. (Moore also filed a crossclaim against the ACLU and the state, just to stay in the action.)

Meanwhile, the federal judge dismissed the ACLU’s original claim for lack of standing. That would have freed them to regroup, or return to their regular regimen of defending lesbian adoptions and child pornographers while attacking nudity ordinances and nativity scenes. Instead, Moore’s supporters whoop, the ACLU was already in a Gordian Fob-lock.

But the ACLU caught a break in state court. Judge Charles Price ruled in their favor though case law, in the Ten Commandments area, has been mixed. First, Price banned prayer and allowed the Ten Commandments to stay. Then he reneged after further entreaties by the ACLU. He determined that Moore’s tablets were strictly religious and could stay only if surrounded by other documents that placed them in a “historic context” (ignoring the historic decor already adorning the other walls of Moore’s courtroom). Many Alabamians now wonder whether Price wishes to be retired from the bench so he can fulfill his calling as an interior decorator. But for his troubles, he picked up a “Profile in Courage Award” from the Kennedys, who all but declared him a saint.

Price’s decision was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, and the case seemed destined for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the state’s high court has temporarily settled matters without actually picking a victor. At January’s end, after a controversial 11-month delay that saw four justices recuse themselves, the state supreme court threw the case out on a jurisdictional technicality without ruling on the constitutionality of Moore’s actions. The state justices vacated Price’s order, allowing Moore to continue religious expression in the courtroom. But they also ruled that Fob’s suit was not a “justiceable action” — that he had no standing to force a ruling on an issue in which he was essentially colluding with a defendant in the suit.

This means that Moore has essentially won the battle by default, though his disappointed supporters accuse the court of cowardice and know that the decision is only a temporary stay. Moore, like the rest of Alabama, has about had it with the ACLU feelings that the ACLU has reciprocated by calling the state “the most egregious offender of church/state laws in the nation.”

The ACLU drilled Moore for inviting clergy to pray in front of juries, claiming that such activity is sectarian and compulsory and that Moore’s clergy all hail from a Christian tradition. But Moore has nothing to do with the content of the prayer and permits anyone to leave who doesn’t want to participate. As for Christian exclusivity, there aren’t a lot of Baha’i priests mulling about the Gadsden barber shop. Moore’s attitude is that when Congress fires its chaplain and the president starts taking his oath of office on the Koran and the Supreme Court crier intones, “Vishnu, save the United States and this Honorable Court,” and you stop buying jawbreakers at the Stop ‘n’ Shop with “In God We Trust”-inscribed currency — then come talk to Judge Roy.

To truly understand the fight in Alabama, one must understand the governor who has led the fight: Fob James. And he is best understood by an anecdote — first related to me by attorney general Bill Pryor — that begins in a Georgia lagoon and ends with an evening in the Macon County jail. It seems when Fob was an All-American halfback at Auburn in the mid-’50s, he went fishing with some teammates, including quarterback Vince Dooley, the future Georgia coaching legend. They brought their tackle boxes and rods and coolers of beer.

But Fob had also made a stop by the Davis Dyar Hardware store. “They got in a boat, went out, and Fob started throwing sticks of dynamite in the water,” says Pryor. “Dooley went berserk. But Fob just handed him a stick and said, ‘Are you gonna talk or are you gonna fish?'”

I catch up with Fob at a Montgomery AM radio station where he does a weekly call-in show that allows any nut-job to have a crack at the “guv’nah,” forcing Fob to talk about fictional state-mandated sterilization or the controversial virtues of hunting deer with dogs. “Some of Fob’s friends hunt with dogs, some hunt without dogs,” says one of Fob’s staffers. “On huntin’ deer with dogs — Fob follows his friends.”

Fob is surrounded by a gaggle of men who look like castoffs from Elvis’s Memphis mafia, with faces like pocked catcher’s mitts and the occasional five- point buck on a tie. When I bring up the dynamite fishing, Fob grows a mischievous smile and admits, “all those big ol’ carp just came to the top. We were puttin’ ’em in baskets fo’ an how-ah.” He says this into a microphone and a tape recorder that don’t belong to me, but to his own staffers. I later learn they record all his interviews, not just because they don’t trust the media — but because they don’t trust Fob.

He has a knack for being provocative. Fob brought chain gangs back to Alabama after a 30-year hiatus. And last summer, he suggested that if the state wanted to be more efficient, it could model itself after the Waffle House, which he finds “comforting to the soul.” He eats the Waffle House’s ” potatoes with onions and cheese” every chance he gets, as the establishment ” is highly disciplined, just like a well-executed play from scrimmage.”

Fob has a big meaty face and wears his tie loosened, which makes him look like a sluggish cop nursing a low-grade fever. He has never been the stump- burner that George Wallace or Big Jim Folsom was before him, but he’s incorporated a bit of both characters. Naturally, he has drawn comparisons to Wallace for his National Guard threat. And he does share Wallace’s loathing of an activist federal judiciary, for which Wallace once prescribed “a barbed- wire enema.” The difference, Fob says, is that Wallace’s resistance to civil rights was immoral — and Wallace himself admitted he was wrong. Fob says his resistance is more analogous to that of Lincoln, who fought another errant Supreme Court ruling, the Dred Scott case.

Fob loves a good scrap, say his friends, and he has managed to alienate nearly everyone at one point or another. Teachers’ unions hate him for his education reform and cutbacks, and establishment Republicans hate him for not courting industry and for getting too cozy with the trial lawyers in a state that has been called “Tort Hell.” Even Montgomery mayor Emory Folmar is frustrated with Fob, and he has a pretty high tolerance for eccentricity. Folmar has been called the “Mayoratollah,” he still calls gays “quee-ahhrs,” and he used to pack a .38 in his belt, often beating the police to murder scenes. Now, however, he keeps a gun only in his desk, his car, and by every door in his house. “I believe not only in a strong national defense, but a strong personal defense,” he says.

Folmar is chairing Fob’s ’98 reelection campaign — “if he and I don’t kill one anothah first,” Folmar says. Fob, so far, isn’t listening to Emory — he’s not mending fences with Republicans or raising any money. But he does have one issue in his favor — the religion cases. There’s a name for moderate Republicans in Alabama: “Democrats.” And even Fob’s Democratic challenger, lieutenant governor Don Siegleman, who’s nipping him in polls, is trying to kick to the right of Fob on school prayer.

The religion cases are the issues Fob cares about most — many say to the exclusion of all others, which means he’s invested in the fight. And Alabamians will fight with him. This is a state where the first Republican governor since Reconstruction (Guy Hunt, elected in 1986) was a Primitive Baptist preacher. This is a state where even the Democratic party chairman sends questionnaires to his candidates urging them to detail their religious practices. This is a state where 77 percent of the population believes in daily classroom prayer, and where 76 percent identify themselves as “born- again” (compared with one-third nationally).

As Pam Sumners, the ACLU lawyer handling both religion cases, says, “Nobody ever lost an election here by trashing the ACLU.” The ACLU has largely dumbed down Fob’s position as: The Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to the states; therefore these issues are a state matter. And Sumners says Fob’s position is “so far out there” that she wonders if he didn’t “take too many knocks in the head playing football.”

But Fob’s contention is that the Supreme Court has been “in errah” over its longstanding interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from depriving “any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Since the 1940s, nearly 80 years after the amendment’s ratification, the Court has used this due-process clause to apply, against the states, the First Amendment protection that keeps Congress from making a law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Fob argues, and he’s joined by constitutional scholars like Princeton’s Robert George, that this is a clear misapplication — that the First Amendment’s establishment clause was intended to protect the states from congressional establishment of religion. Applying that amendment against the states is as logically untenable as applying the Tenth Amendment (reserving rights to the states) against the states.

Though the Supreme Court isn’t about to kick over that can of worms, what may be unsustainable legally could pay off in spades politically, as both school prayer and the Ten Commandments have caught fire nationally. There are campaigns afoot in at least 10 other states to get the Ten Commandments on the walls of public buildings. Polls regularly show over 70 percent of the American public favoring prayer in public schools and a constitutional amendment to protect it. (The Religious Freedom Amendment, protecting student- initiated prayer, currently has 150 co-sponsors in the House.)

Moreover, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council is leading a coalition of evangelicals and constitutional-law professors in an effort to persuade Congress to erect a “federalism shield.” The plan, which Bauer will push this spring, calls for Congress to pass a law protecting religious expression by federal and state employees instead of merely issuing fanny-patting resolutions, as it did in the case of Moore. Such a maneuver, Bauer contends, would give legal standing to renegades like Fob and Judge Roy and would also help the legislative branch to regain equal footing on church/state matters after a long spell of judicial usurpation.

Back in DeKalb County, I walk the ocher halls of Sylvania High School. Hanging next to the trophy cases — still — is a picture of Washington praying at Valley Forge, and another of Robert E. Lee reading a Bible to a child. I interview the sons and daughters of poultry farmers and sock-mill workers. Even many of the more urbane among them have hat-hair and tobacco- tin jean rings. I approach the steakheads and the shop rats and the coltish little buds who might be thinking about midterms, or Friday-night games, or back-seat rumpus. But they’ve all got religion on the brain.

About 95 percent of them go to church every Sunday. About 75 percent belong to the school’s “Christians in Action” club. Many bring Bibles to school, and only one girl knows any atheists — “them four boys in black with shaggy hair. ”

Right now, there is but one certainty here. You can try to knock God out of the public square in Alabama. But with principals like Gary Carlyle, with judges like Roy Moore, and with a dynamite-fishing governor — Alabama’s going to knock you back.

Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.