Northeast Tennessee city’s crosses face legal challenge, stir offer of counsel

A set of three crosses on a city-owned mountain in Elizabethton, Tennessee, seems primed to trigger a legal challenge and a public-interest law firm has already offered to help defend the decades-old installation.

At issue are three crosses erected on Lynn Mountain, a 2,000-foot elevation in the city close to the Tennessee-Virginia border.

The crosses, reportedly installed by Sunday school students “in the 1950s,” are controversial because the plot where the crosses stand on the mountain is city-owned land.

While there “wasn’t a government decision to put them up in the first place,” attorney Karen M. Heineman of the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation acknowledged in a telephone interview, “they were put up on city property and then they’ve just been maintained since that time.”

Ms. Heineman cited a 2018 complaint from an unnamed Elizabethton resident who did not feel “comfortable” with the crosses on the site.

“It’s hard to see a secular purpose that these crosses have somehow taken on a meaning that is not religious, that is not Christian,” the attorney added.

She said her group had contacted the city four years ago, but never heard back and has decided to resurrect its complaint.

But Roger Byron, a senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, a public-interest law firm in Plano, Texas, says religious meaning is not relevant under a 2019 Supreme Court ruling on a World War I peace memorial cross in Bladensburg, Maryland.

“There is no indication the Lynn Mountain cross display runs afoul of the Constitution,” Mr. Byron wrote to the mayor and city council of Elizabethton, offering to represent the city. “The display’s reported history and tradition alone make that clear.”

Citing a case involving a Pensacola, Florida, cross erected in a city park for Easter services, Mr. Byron wrote the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Bladensburg decision set forth “a strong presumption of constitutionality for established, religiously expressive monuments, symbols, and practices.”

Arrangements of three crosses generally signify the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion, which biblical accounts depict as occurring between two thieves.

For about a decade beginning in the early 1980s, the Rev. Bernard Coffindaffer of West Virginia spent about $3 million of his own money to install similar groupings of crosses in 29 U.S. states and overseas.

The Elizabethton crosses predate Mr. Coffindaffer’s project by roughly 30 years.

Ms. Heineman said that because the crosses were reportedly an “illegal” installation, that might differentiate them from the Bladensburg cross. However, like the Maryland monument, the Elizabethton crosses have apparently been maintained by the city in the decades since, which might offset the origin issue, she said.

The FRFF attorney said she hopes for “a conversation” with Elizabethton’s city attorney, Roger Day, that might lead to a resolution. She offered no indication of a pending legal filing, however.

That strategy, First Liberty’s Mr. Byron told The Times in a telephone interview, is a typical gambit for the Wisconsin-based group.

He said the organization “will send complaint letters to small government entities around the country, attempting to coerce them or scare them into removing some symbol … simply hoping that the fear of legal action will cause that government entity to collapse and do what the organization wants them to do. Almost never do they actually take any legal action whatsoever.”

Neither Elizabethan Mayor Curt Alexander nor Mr. Day, the city attorney, responded to multiple calls seeking comment.

Mr. Day told the local Elizabeth Star newspaper that his office wouldn’t address the matter “because of the potential threat of litigation.”

The Star reported more than 1,300 people responded to an online poll on the matter, with 97% supporting the retention of the crosses on Lynn Mountain.

Ms. Heineman, noting those results, said, “I would just ask that people look at it from the other side of the fence. And maybe be open to a resolution that respects everybody’s beliefs.”