Input

Dear Military Religious Freedom Foundation:

I’m not an overly religious sort but who are you to tell someone what they can or cannot say to someone else? If that person does not want to hear it, then they should say so and the initiator should move on. But it is not your right to try to deface or slam someone else for what they believe. Your organization chooses not to believe and that is your right. These cadets choose to believe and that is their right as well. You, nor anyone else, has the right to take that away from them.

It’s a double edged sword and there is never a good answer to this because someone always feels out of place. The answer all around is tolerance. Tolerance for non-believers and tolerance for believers. Calling for the removal of the superintendant only demonstrates that this organization is hypocritical at best. Let it go.

(name withheld)

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Hi (name withheld),

We’re sort of busy right now as you can imagine. There are lot of communications both in the Pro and Con stacks of e-mails and other missives.

First of all let me thank you for your note to MRFF. I can’t decipher your e-mail address but it appears you are in or attached in some fashion to the armed forces. If that’s the case, let me also thank you for your service to America.

MRFF has no desire to censor or disrupt in any way, the religious freedoms of all Armed Forces members. Quite the contrary. It is our sworn duty to expose coercive and command influenced proselytizing in the military which has, of late, reached epic proportions.

I won’t have time to go into a case by case review but I can say that MRFF is currently investigating over 22,000 client case complaints from military members in Basic, AIT and other training facilities, cadets and staff at Service Academies, First Station troops, garrisons and even combat zones.

The primary complaint centers around coercive and command influenced Christian proselytizing. But not the standard mainstream Christian offer to take you to church or passing out a Bible. A growing sect of Christendom known as Christian Dominionists has infiltrated the armed forces to the extent that many of our young men and women are frankly in the clutches of some pretty tough cookies. The main thrust of this movement is called “Christian Reconstructionism” introduced in America in the 70’s by Rev. John Roussas Rushdooney. This movement is convinced that Jesus will not return unless all world populations are either converted to Christianity or “cast into the lake of fire.” We assume this means death.

It is their declared desire to develop an All Christian Fighting Force to guarantee compliance with conversion efforts and to mop up any undesirables following the “Rapture.” This would require elevating existing Christian military members to a higher level of obedience and willingness to respond to a “Higher Authority” than the Constitution. Given the military’s proximity to weapons of immense destructive power and the ability to deploy and man such weapons, it is easy to see why we are trying to interdict this unAmerican proselytizing.

The complainants, of whom over 96% are Christian, are saying that they are told they are not “Christian Enough” and the non-Christians, Atheists and Agnostics are pretty much marginalized if they don’t show some interest in converting.

Such awful religious bias has been going on for some time at the Air Force Academy as well as other service academies and installations and several cultist organizations given access to the cadet body 24/7.

Whether all this is credible to you at this time is unimportant. As you get to know more about Christian Dominionism from your own independent examination of it (Just Google “Dominion Christianity” and “Christian Reconstructionism,” you will come to understand the need for not only MRFF but other fair-minded people to help protect our young military members. As a side note, we are supported by The ACLU of America, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way, The California Council of Churches, several Jewish Organizations, The Interfaith Alliance, Veterans Groups and others.

Our objection to Lt. McClary is that he is not an inspirational war hero speaker but rather has become an near psychotic self-described proselytizer who spends his presentation calling for converts. His is a unilateral, Christian-Only presentation which is a constitutional violation in itself.

MRFF consists of many staff and volunteer personnel. Of this compliment are a number of practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Agnostics, Buddhists and Pagan based worshippers. The majority have had military experience and a number of those are combat veterans.

I am a former Air Force Officer and Rescue Pilot having served two combat tours in Vietnam. I and our other veterans are therefore very careful to remain within the boundaries of fairness and law nor do we have any problem with mainstream Christianity.

I hope I have assuaged your concerns and invite you to view our web site at militaryreligiousfreedom.com for more information and examples of what I have been talking about.

Rick Baker
Regional Coordinator
Military Religious Freedom Foundation

Attachment follows:

Here is a brief outline of why this type of presentation is illegal and why, in the act of procuring this spectacle, General Gould has abrogated his oath to the Constitution.

A simple set of criteria is that the government (and by extension militray officials) may not:

promote one religion or faith group over any other

promote a religiously based life over a secularly based life

promote a secularly based life over a religiously based life.
There is some opposition, particularly among Fundamentalist Christians to this interpretation of the First Amendment by the courts. They feel that the Amendment should be interpreted literally to mean that the government may not raise any one denomination or religion to the status of an official or established religion of the country. They feel that the First Amendment contains no wording that prohibits the government from engaging in certain religious activities, like requiring prayer as part of the schedule at public schools, requiring schools, courts and government offices to post the Ten Commandments, allowing public schools to have organized prayers as an integral part of public school sports events, praying before board of education or municipal government meetings, etc.