My Journey into Coal Country, II

How Environmental Stewardship Also Cares for the Widow and the Orphan

I arrived at the Bristol, Tennessee Tri-Cities Airport on Wednesday evening June 18^th. Pastor Ethan Johnson picked me up. It was still 70 miles to Tazewell, but definitely the closest I could get by air. He was disappointed that it was already dark as I wouldn’t be able to see the beauty of the region during our two-hour drive … nor its demise. A local retreat center specializing in traumatized veterans had offered me a place to stay. Krea Meritt was my host. Between delays and the drive we arrived late, but even in the dark, I was struck by the silence of the deep woods, the smell of the Virginia Pine, and the coal black sky sprinkled with stars. The crunching of the gravel under my boots was the only sound as I made my way to my room. Appalachia, a jewel in the Maker’s palm.

Morning came early. Ethan and I headed “downtown” to grab a coffee at The Well--a cute little coffee shop on Main Street. Settling down outside, it eventually dawned on me that besides Ethan and I, the sidewalks were empty. At nine in the morning. On a Thursday. The Mayberry RFD storefronts lining the street made it obvious that this was once a bustling working class town, but ours was the only car parked outside of what I quickly realized was the only coffee shop in town.

We headed over to Ethan’s church. An imposing brick building dating back to the 1800’s, easily three stories high and adorned with beautiful stained glass windows. The economy that produced Main Street United Methodist Church was obviously enjoying prosperity. But as Ethan would tell me, this landmark of community and faith in Tazewell is failing. Although deeply committed to outreach, and a church that’s attracted a number of new families in the past five years, the reality is that far more have been forced to leave Tazewell due to a failing economy and lack of medical care. And too many of those who remain are struggling with addiction, agoraphobia, and tangles with the law. As a result, membership at Main Street UMC has dropped by 50% since Ethan arrived, attendance now topping out at 80. Brad Davis of McDowell County reports the same of his five point charge. As both pastors asked, how does one go about doing outreach and building programs when your community is experiencing profound unemployment, a myriad of mental and physical health issues, and has no reason to hope that anything better lies ahead? Particularly when that community is convinced they’ve been forgotten.

We toured the church. The cathedral ceilings, plastered walls and crown molding; the solid wood pews and wainscoting communicated the history of the place—the craftsmanship and pride. Vibrant and intricate stained glass windows marked every external wall. But the marks of a declining population were everywhere. Portions of the structure essentially abandoned; classrooms being utilized for storage; deferred maintenance. And then there was the enormous coal burning stove in the basement. Now I’ve seen my fair share of coal burning stoves, but this was a big one. Ethan explained to me that in his region power is extraordinarily expensive. As Appalachia was one of the epicenters for powering America’s industrial revolution, I found this ironic. Folk with older homes spend as much as a $1000 a month to heat their houses. And as that price point is simply out of reach for many, propane heaters designed for industrial buildings have become the norm. As a result, so have house fires. Ethan reported that 3-4 houses in his county burn down every year largely due to the common man utilizing uncommon practices to keep his children warm. Main Street UMC? It burns two tons of coal every couple of weeks.

From Tazewell, we headed over to Bishop. On the drive I asked Ethan about the role of the local church in Tazewell and surrounding communities. He spoke with passion of how the local church provides one of the few centers for social cohesion in the region. There are almost no public spaces—the pubs, parks, libraries, playgrounds, and diners one would expect in a typical town can’t seem to stay open. The local library? Closed for two years for structural repairs. So most folk hang out in either private spaces … or churches. But actual church attendance? Well, many congregations are down to less than a dozen people.

In Bishop I met Pastor Daniel Bradley. Dan pastors Alexander Memorial United Methodist Church—a church built for coal miners, by coal miners. The first thing that struck me as we pulled up was the monument that marks the turn onto Church House Hollow Road. Marked with the seal of the United Mine Workers of America, the monument (now streaked by algae and acid rain) commemorates “The men who gave their lives to the coal industry at Bishop Mines 33, 34, 35.” Do you hear it? Not the men who gave their lives for freedom or the defense of hearth and home … but to the coal industry. A sentiment that runs as deeply in the veins of this community as coal runs in the seams of their mountains.

We sat in Daniel’s office as he told me about his congregation. The son of a coal miner, Dan grew up on company stores and company medicine and furniture and toys. As he would later show us, coal mining towns like Bishop always have an “Upper Camp” where the bosses live; and a “Lower Camp” where the miners live (in Dan’s town “the colored people”). Daniel spoke of the 1980’s when the mines shut down and the town collapsed. A student at Duke Divinity, Dan took over Alexander Memorial in 2010. A church which had recently declined from “100 people with $100K in the bank to five people with $56 in the bank.” He speaks of how his people have been forgotten, and the harsh reality that “if you’re on the wrong side of the mountain, you’re sub-human.”

But Daniel isn’t leaving. He sees his church as a “lighthouse in a stormy sea” and he spends his days distributing meals (120 per week), clothes, personal hygiene products, and sharing the Gospel in word and deed. He believes that if his church closed, the town of Bishop would collapse. And after meeting some of his people, I believe him. Who are the wolves in this man’s pasture? “Drug dealers” he tells me—both the illegal sort and the pharmaceutical sort. You see, the mixture of broken bodies from years in the mines, economic collapse, corporate corruption, and despair have left his flock deeply vulnerable. As a result Daniel has a stack of Narcan boxes on his file cabinet—he never goes on a pastoral visit without it.

So we piled into Dan’s truck, and went to visit “Lower Camp.” Within one hundred yards of the church building we find a row of what had once been lovely old two-story farm style houses with big front porches, and generous windows. Many of them had been designed as two-family dwellings. The first house was still relatively whole, but the side yard was filled with abandoned equipment and building supplies, covered with weeds and piled within a few feet of the family’s swing set. The next house? Just a cement slap covered with debris. House after house had missing rooves, blue tarps pulled over broken windows, front porches mostly collapsed. Overgrown and broken down, many with evidence of past fires. But this was not an abandoned neighborhood—there were still families living in these houses. Dazed men sat on collapsing front porches. According to my hosts, these men were likely lost in meth.

We stopped at one such porch and Daniel jumped out to check on news. His parishioner, an older woman with a ready smile, came bounding out eager for the visit. Her adult son, sitting to the side, seemed unaware of our presence. We got the update on her grandson (also living in the home). Apparently the boy had collapsed at his high school basketball practice. An emergency evacuation ensued. It turns out that the lack of local medical care had resulted in an infection pushing him into renal failure, and as there is no hospital within reach, the emergency evacuation was required to save his life. As I sat and listened I was so deeply aware that everyone standing on that front porch had just learned to accept these conditions as “normal.”

So what does a pastor do? What does the Church do? Bishop is not the “inner city.” These housing conditions and drug issues, the food and medical desert these folk are experiencing has not emerged from crime or gangs or the range of ills resident in the bowels of our urban centers. These were the widows and the orphans left behind by the coal industry.

One of the things I speak of in Stewards of Eden: What the Scripture Has to Say About the Environment and Why it Matters is the inextricable link between environmental abuse and the widow and the orphan. As Pavan Sukhdev, author of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report states: “Poverty and the loss of biodiversity are inextricably linked.”¹ And as both the Old and New Testament demand that our faith display itself in our care for the marginalized, we need to pay attention. “Reprove the ruthless! Defend the orphan! Plead for the widow!” Isaiah preaches (1:17). “Real religion” James teaches us is “to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties” (James 1:27). I am proud to say that typically the Church is very good at caring for the widow and the orphan. The Church created both the concept and institution of the hospital; we created both the concept and the institution of the orphanage. Our hall of fame includes giants like George Müller, Mary Slessor, Charles Spurgeon, Amy Carmichael, Catherine Booth, Lyman Stewart, Rebecca Pratts, and hundreds, thousands more. But what today’s Church often does not realize, is that environmental degradation produces widows and orphans and the first people to be impacted by environmental degradation are always the “least of these.”

In Coal Country, these orphans and widows have been created by a predatorial industry who has taken what it wanted … and walked away. The counties of West Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia and Eastern Kentucky are riddled with stories of big coal moving into the ancient forests of Appalachia, stripping the land, poisoning the water, crippling the populace, and then packing up to go do the same a county away.

So where is our federal government? How could these conditions be tolerated in the United States of America? I am outraged when I think that the coal fields of Appalachia lie within a three hour’s drive of our national capital and that our current Vice President spent his summers in Eastern Kentucky. He has seen what I have seen. And yet … the only federal plan for “change” in Appalachia is more coal. (see Executive Order 14241, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/reinvigorating-americas-beautiful-clean-coal-industry-and-amending-executive-order-14241/).

In my next installment I’ll tell you about some of the early resistance to the abuses of the good people of Appalachia, the march of the “Red Neck Army” in 1921, the largest single environmental disaster east of the Mississippi at the Big Sandy River, and the agonies of Rawl West Virginia. But right now let me say that in the past fifty years our country has made great strides against the abuses of the coal industry. There has been a steady decline of coal use in our country. We have gone from a 52% dependence on coal to generate our electricity 20 years ago, to a 16% dependence in 2024. In 2024, Appalachian Voices reported that nearly 40% of the “active” surface permits in KY had been sitting idle since the Biden administration. New legislation has forced the coal industry to restore the land and water it has destroyed and to support their retired miners with pensions and health insurance. But the coal companies have found avenues around that new legislation.

As Joshua Macey & Jackson Salovaara offer in their essay, “Bankruptcy as Bailout: Coal Company Insolvency and the Erosion of Federal Law in the Stanford Law Review in 2019, our country’s Bankruptcy Code has been systematically engaged to evade corporate responsibility. Thus, whereas the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 requires a coal company to restore the lands affected by surface mining to “a condition capable of supporting the uses which it was capable of supporting prior to any mining,“² reality is that such reclamation is expensive. So if a company manipulates its assets carefully, it can shirk those responsibilities by filing Chapter 11. Thus, in the 2017 restructuring of Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources (the second and third largest coal producers in our country):

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of the Interior (DOI), these restructuring agreements were “obviously a carefully constructed scheme to evade environmental liabilities through discriminatory classifications and treatments of environmental general unsecured creditors as opposed to other general unsecured creditors.³

For those of us who are not attorneys, this means that Chapter 11 was utilized to “discharge or otherwise avoid” $1.9 billion in environmental liabilities, leaving those costs instead to the “taxpayers, regulators, and retired miners” who must now address the degraded mines; polluted water and farmland that big coal has left behind.⁴ The 250,000 abandoned and inactive mines that have yet to be reclaimed in Kentucky alone, testify to the profound irresponsibility of these massive and massively profitable companies. And what of the Coal Act that demands that these companies support their retired miners with pensions and health insurance? Via bankruptcy claims Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources just a few short years ago dodged $3.2 billion worth of owed retiree benefits as well as the ongoing health insurance that could have addressed the disease and injury that a career in the mines leaves in its wake. The cases are complex, but the outcome is the same—the Coal company gets rich, the land entrusted to us by our Creator is stripped of its fecundity, the forests are eradicated, and the poor are “crushed at the gate” (Prov 22:22).⁵

Here is a bit of the story of Coal Country from my hosts, Rev. Brad Davis of Welch, West Virginia and Dr. Rev. Ethan Johnson, Clinch Mountain District, Emory Virginia (previously of Tazewell).

Would you like to learn more? See what the Nature Conservancy is doing to redeem and preserve Appalachia for its people https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/appalachians/. And check out Appalachian Voices, a grassroots organization committed to the care of the people marginalized: https://appvoices.org/ And while you’re on those websites … pull out your credit card. Let’s put our money where our mouths are and shore up the folk on the ground bringing about change.

1. Stewards of Eden, 79-82.

2. Macey and Salovaara, “Bankruptcy as Bailout,” 894; cf. 30 U.S.C. § 1265(b)(2).

3. Macey and Salovaara, “Bankruptcy as Bailout,” 883.

4. Ibid., 884.

5. Ibid., 899-901; cf. Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-486, tit. XIX, subtitle C, 106 Stat. 2776, 3036-56 (codified as amended at I.R.C. §§ 9701-9722 (2017); and 30 U.S.C. §§ 1231-1232 (2017)).