Thou Shalt Not Judge

Judge Roy Moore, former chief justice of the supreme court of Alabama, I was told, would be pleased to give me an interview. He was currently running for the Republican nomination for state governor, so I'd have to catch him on the stump, but if I could make it to his Wednesday lunchtime campaign stop, he'd surely give me a few moments of his time. I'd find him at the Po' Folks Restaurant in the town of Enterprise, addressing the members of the Coffee County Republican Women's Club.

Enterprise was not exactly where I wanted to go, being diametrically at the opposite end of the state from where I was in Birmingham.

It was 180 miles away, down in the south-east corner, near the Florida border, but a chance to meet the judge was too good an opportunity to miss. I set out early, driving through the early summer morning heat, across the flat farmland of Alabama shimmering in the haze, through villages of neat bungalows and trailer homes, past barrack-like churches, fenced-in social housing estates like prison camps and deserted gas stations.

Judge Moore was a key man to find. He had made headlines around the world a couple of years before after insisting on placing in the foyer of his court a two-and-a-half-tonne granite block whose top was carved in the shape of an open Bible incised with the Ten Commandments. This ostentatious proclamation of faith, which he had paid for, was in open defiance of America's long-established doctrine of separating Church and state, but Moore repeatedly defied judicial attempts to order him to get rid of it.

Outside the courthouse in Montgomery, Christian groups from as far away as California and Illinois gathered in their hundreds to preach, pray and expostulate against the iniquities of secularists and liberal judges. National politicians and leaders of the religious right such as James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, had flown in to offer their support. Dobson told them: "The liberal elite and the judges at the highest level and some members of the media are determined to remove every evidence of faith in God from the entire culture ... It is time we said enough is enough."

The crowds stayed through the night and one elderly woman in a wheelchair, named Karen Kennedy, was arrested after she attempted to chain herself to the granite.

Judge Moore saw himself igniting a godly insurrection: "The sparks of hope and faith from those impromptu rallies on the steps of the Alabama Judicial Building ignited a fire that continues to burn across this land. Those who came to Montgomery to protest the removal of a monument were witnesses to another movement, a movement of God ..."

Judge Moore's defiance did not impress the supreme court in Washington, which decided he had violated the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics and, as he had given no assurance that he would not do it again, ordered his removal from office. The state ethics panel duly ruled: "We are faced with a situation in which the highest judicial officer of this state has decided to defy a court order." Even so, there were some in the state court who wanted him to stay. Judge Moore's monument was also eventually removed, but not put into storage. It became known as Roy's Rock and it toured the country with its owner, like a holy relic on a flatbed truck, to be exposed before the faithful at churches and even in supermarket parking lots. Videos extolling the judge and his stand for Christ were sold through evangelical outlets. "The Ten Commandments judge" embarked upon the conservative lecture circuit to lucrative effect, becoming what one Alabamian political scientist described as "a rock star of the Christian right".

Just why Judge Moore, unlike all other Christian judges in the previous 200 years, felt he needed to make such a defiant proclamation of faith when he did, at such a risk to his career, remains slightly unclear, even from his book, characteristically entitled So Help Me God: the Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny and the Battle for Religious Freedom.

What is clear was that he believed Christianity was under attack. He has been quoted as telling an audience in Tennessee: "In homes and schools across our land, it's time for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Qur'an but the Bible. This is a Christian nation."

In any event, Judge Moore had achieved a sort of martyrdom and the Christian right had gained a victim of the forces of liberal secularism. Now, with polls registering double-digit leads, he was stomping his home state to address his supporters - possibly the most famous Alabamian since the segregationist George Wallace. To gain a new platform, he was running for Wallace's old office: standing to be the Republican party's candidate for governor in the state primary against the incumbent, Bob Riley, himself a former US Congressman and a Christian conservative. The governor had already been sufficiently rattled to make an unscheduled appearance on the US version of Pop Idol to endorse a local Alabama contestant to show how "with it" he was.

Enterprise proved to be a pleasant, anonymous town, spread out along the highway and lined with chain restaurants, of which the Po' Folks was one. It was a folksy, self-consciously Southern sort of place, built like a barn, adorned with old tin advertisements and ancient farm implements and decorated with archly badly spelled messages. Tucking into their ribs and hamburgers out at the front was the normal clientele in farm dungarees and polyester business suits, while in a backroom, gathering around tables covered in gingham cloths, queuing for their iced teas and southern fried chicken and awaiting the candidate, were the Republican ladies and their spouses.

They were definitely not themselves po' folks. They had driven up to the parking lot in large sedans and shiny SUVs and had come in their Sunday best, as if for a church meeting. Almost all of them were white, all were resolutely middle-class, and a fair proportion were elderly. The accents were "wha' ah dodeclaire ..." They whiled the time away listening to candidates for various local political offices, all promising to do better than whoever was doing the job at the moment.

The candidate himself was an hour late. It turned out he had come from even further upstate than I had, driven in a heavy Lincoln sedan by his bodyguard Leonard Holyfield, cousin of the more famous boxer, who would be the only black man in the room during the meeting, and accompanied by his trusty press officer, a former local radio presenter named Jack Holland. Dressed in a blazer and seersucker shirt, a small replica badge of the Ten Commandments on his lapel, Holland was part PR man and part evangeliser. "I felt God was telling me to do this," he told me confidentially.

Up at the top table, Judge Moore was getting into his stride. His message was that of insurgent candidates everywhere: his rival had been sucked into corrupt politics and was in the pockets of special interest groups in the big city in Montgomery, evidently a place not unlike Gomorrah, while he himself was going to stand up for the working people of the state. He did not have the governor's money for his campaign, but people were placing him in their hearts. There were too many illegal aliens being let into the country - they should just close the borders - and why should driving tests be conducted in different languages?

"If you can't read 'bridge' in Persian, you gotta problem," he said, somewhat illogically. The judge was not the most fluent of speakers and his answers to questions were perfunctory. Afterwards, as folk milled round the candidate, I asked one, Perry Hooper, son of the chief justice who had preceded Moore, whether he would be voting for him. Hooper smiled wryly and said, "I don't know, I ain't made up my mind yet," though with every indication that he had and that he would be sticking with the incumbent.

I had expected a few moments with the judge, but Holland suggested they would find somewhere for lunch and I could tag along behind. This was easier said than done. The judge's sedan roared out of the parking lot and down a slip road, then on to the main highway, crossed it and turned left, then doubled backed at high speed, leaving me trailing in its wake. It crossed into the slip road on the other side of the highway and then did a U-turn on that as well. Either the judge was trying to lose me, I decided, or he was a victim of chronic indecision about his luncheon arrangements. Eventually we pulled up at a steak house opposite the Po' Folks.

The judge got out, adjusting his sunglasses. "Kept up then?" he said. I tried jocularity: "Takes more than that to lose me," I said. He grunted disdainfully. I had the impression that he regarded me rather as he might a stain beneath his shoe. I was certainly glad I was not appearing before him on some ungodly charge. He was, after all, the judge who had placed three children in the custody of an abusive father in preference to their lesbian mother because her homosexuality was "abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature".

Judge Moore was lean and leathery with, I guessed, little sense of humor or small talk. In Vietnam, where he had served in the Military Police, he had earned the nickname Captain America - "they did not mean it as a compliment" - because of his habit of patrolling round camp at night armed with a sawn-off shotgun in search of marijuana smokers. Later on, he had been a professional kick boxer and worked for a time on a farm in Australia before returning home to resume his legal career.

Judge Moore's profound Baptist faith really came to him, he said, following defeat in a murky campaign to be elected district attorney in 1982. "I was done wrong by the political system. We were not an ultra-religious family before, but after I ran for public office I came to a closer relationship with God. I had hard feelings towards people and I prayed about that. God touched my heart and made me forgive them."

The steakhouse's teenage waitress, who had been suspiciously eying the judge's immaculately dressed bodyguard as he sat with us at the table, now sidled up and asked nervously about the gun sticking out of his holster. The judge waved her away impatiently. "He's with me," he said.

As we sat sucking our diet sodas and iced water in the steakhouse, Judge Moore suddenly started reciting large chunks of the writings of William Blackstone, the 18th-century British judge whose commentaries were influential for many years in shaping the common law in both England and America. Long cadences, pronounced in the judge's Alabama drawl, rattled the baseball photographs on the wall. He had evidently learned them by heart, though he was occasionally assisted in remembering them by a little booklet he had written called Our Legal Heritage, adorned with pictures of George Washington and the Stars and Stripes on the cover.

Blackstone was very much a man of his time, a tad reactionary even for some of his contemporaries, with his support for the physical chastisement of wives by their husbands and a distinctly ambiguous attitude towards slavery, but his commentaries still endured in the mind of the judge. I was at somewhat of a disadvantage here, having only the haziest notions of who Blackstone was or even when he lived, nor knowing that his commentaries were written in the years shortly before the American War of Independence. So I asked the judge whether he had ever been to England, or met an English lawyer. No, he had not. It would not have mattered if he had. He was in full flow by now: "All law comes from God. Man's laws are bound by God's law. Human laws are of no validity if they are contrary to these foundations. Politicians think they are above that now. They put themselves in the place of God."

He might not know England but he knew where it was going, with the US following in the same direction. I asked him whether he really believed America was heading for perdition. "That's it. We're going the same way England is now, without God. Read Blackstone: there is no law without God, no truth without God. America is watching Alabama in this and the world is watching America. The truth will spread."

Sitting in Alabama, where nine out of 10 inhabitants call themselves Christians, where half are Baptists and where just 1% of the population belong to non-Christian faiths, here was the judge telling me he was living in a godless country.

A quick burst from the Epistle to the Romans followed and then there came a rumination: "I am not running because of ambition: I am running to serve the will of God. If he judges that is not the place I serve him, well, I will probably be happy." There was a pause before he corrected himself: "I will be happy."

I told him what Perry Hooper had said at the meeting. He almost spat: "Pah! I know Perry Hooper's never goin' to vote for me. Do you know his father swore me into office as chief justice? They're not going to vote for me, ever."

The judge called for a pen and inscribed both his autobiography and the Legal Heritage booklet for me before sweeping out of the restaurant. I was left with my half-eaten and now cold hamburger and fries, watching as the sedan pulled out of the car park on the next stage of its long haul to do the Lord's work. In the booklet he had written in a large and flowing hand: "To Stephen, May God grant you wisdom and understanding of His law and our own!"

Three weeks later, Governor Riley won the primary easily. He would go on to win re-election in November 2006. God had obviously spoken.

· This is an extract from God's Own Country: Tales from the Bible Belt by Stephen Bates, to be published by Hodder & Stoughton on July 19 at £12.99.