God on Trial by Peter Irons

Author:Peter Irons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

“I Am the Lord Thy God”

The Ten Commandments Cases from Kentucky and Texas

Whitley City, Kentucky, is not really a city at all. Just eight miles from the state’s southeastern border with Tennessee, it is barely more than a village, with only eleven hundred residents, spread out on both sides of the Norfolk & Southern Railway tracks and Highway 27, a two-lane road that stretches from Miami to the Canadian border in northern Michigan. Despite its small population, Whitley City is the largest town in McCreary County, which itself has only seventeen thousand citizens, most of whom live in hamlets with names like Honeybee and Pine Knot. Whitley City houses the county’s government in a two-story brick courthouse on Main Street, topped by a white spire and fronted with an American flag. The county’s residents visit the courthouse to pay their property taxes, obtain copies of birth and death records, and perform jury service in cases that rarely generate headlines outside the local newspapers.

Before the fall of 1999, no big-city reporters or television crews had reported anything from McCreary County. But they descended on Whitley City in droves after county officials provoked a six-year legal battle that began in the Main Street courthouse and ended in the chamber of the United States Supreme Court. What began with a simple act—posting a copy of the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall—produced a decision in June 2005 that upheld lower-court orders to remove the Decalogue from the wall. The McCreary County decision, and the Court’s seemingly inconsistent ruling in a companion case from Texas, allowing the display of a Ten Commandments monument on the state-capitol grounds, revealed the continuing judicial debate over the proper role of religion in the public square. But the vast majority of McCreary County residents had no interest in that debate. Eric Williams, who works for the U.S. Forest Service, voiced the prevailing reaction to the decision: “This is the Supreme Court interfering with small-town America’s business, where the people were happy with the Ten Commandments.”

Visitors to Whitley City pass a billboard on Highway 27 that reflects the deep-rooted beliefs of its people: “WARNING. Jesus is coming. RU ready?” This is hard-shell Baptist country. Some thirty-four hundred of McCreary County’s four thousand churchgoers attend services at one of the nine Southern Baptist churches; while another three hundred are Methodists; and most of the rest belong to the Church of God and smaller Pentecostal churches. The county has only one Catholic church, with fifty-five members, and a small Mormon congregation. The nearest Jewish synagogue is more than sixty miles away, across the county’s border, in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Not only are most of McCreary County’s residents evangelical Protestants, they are unabashedly patriotic and politically conservative. During World War II, more than half of the county’s young men volunteered for service; of these 923 soldiers, thirty-two lost their lives in battle. Seven died in the Korean War, another eight in Vietnam. More recently, 162 men and women have served in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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