Parties remain a big part of Savannah's social life. Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet was born in Savannah and lived there until he was 11 years old. In "Strange Moonlight," an autobiographical short story, he suggests his father, who killed his mother before he killed himself, did it because she did nothing but party. "It's two parties every week, and sometimes three or four, that's excessive," he told her just before pulling the trigger. "You know it is." She replied: "Darling, I must have some recreation!" Bang. Bang.
But for all of the perverse pride in decadence, residents of Savannah are immensely proud of their religious heritage. It's rare to pass a public park in the historic district that doesn't call attention to faith and tolerance.
Christ Church, "the mother church of Georgia" where John Wesley, who never abandoned his Anglican faith, preached nearly three centuries ago, continues to link religious and social life. When a young woman deduced from an overheard luncheon conversation that I was from Washington, she stopped to talk. She would visit Washington soon and wondered if there was still an Episcopal church that still uses the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.
Plaques throughout the city celebrate Christians of different denominations. Two Baptist churches are descended from the oldest black congregation in the United States. Although the early settlers tried to keep "the papists" out of Savannah, the Catholic Church flourishes. A large Jewish community boasts of a lineage that goes back to 1533, when Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent, victims of the Inquisition, arrived by boat five months after James Oglethorpe, Savannah's founder arrived.
They brought with them a Torah that was handwritten before 1492 and established the oldest Jewish congregation in the state. After the Jews congratulated George Washington on his inauguration, the first president wrote to the congregation. "May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors planted them in the promise, whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation, still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven. And to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessing of that people whose God is Jehovah."
So the Ten Commandments, without a monument, command respect, too. It was the garden of good, after all, as well as evil.