The religious assault
on America's military

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

By Ron Bohr

A campaign is being waged by religious extremists to undermine the commitment of America's military to defending our country and our constitution, converting it to a recruiting camp for fundamentalist/evangelical sectarians.

This covert action has been going on for several years, and has rarely been covered in the mainstream media. This month, though, a report by Jeff Sharlet in Harper's Magazine sheds needed light on the abuse. Sharlett has found "...a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps." Apparently this effort has been taking place over a number of years, and is described as a "...quiet coup within the armed forces...of religious authority replacing the miliatry's once staunchly secular code."

He cites the participation of a number of generals, like Johnny A Welda, Robert Caslen, Bruce L. Fister and others in videos for fundamentalist organizations like the Christian Embassy and Trinity Broadcasting network, appearing in uniform, in violation of military rules of conduct. At present, about 15,000 members belong to the Officers' Christian Fellowhip. It is headed by General Fister, a retired Air Force officer quoted as saying the Afghanistan war is a "spiritual battle of the highest magnitude." It is reported to have members on eighty percent of military bases, and to be growing at about three percent a year.

The Campus Crusade Military Ministry has been given encouragement for proselytzing in the military, which it views as its mission field. An evangelical/fundamentalist organization, CCMM estimates that twenty percent of military personnel have no religious preference, while another twenty percent identify themselves as Christian without an affiliation. Another twenty-two percent are evangelical/pentacostal, and seven percent are mainline evangelical. Nineteen percent are Roman Catholic.

Many of the most egregious violations of military norms have occurred at the Air Force Academy, where several of the last superintendents have permitted harassment of non-fundamentalist cadets. National Day of Prayer services have been exlusively Christian.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, directed by Michael "Mikey" Weinstein, a highly decorated retired officer, has led opposition to this sectarian takeovert. Early warnings were given by Captain Melinda Morton, a Lutheran chaplain at the Academy, in 2006. After conducting a study of religious harrassment and proslytzing with Kirsten Leslie, a Yale Divinity School professor, she was reassigned to Japan. Reaction by the Air Force to alleged abuses has been described as slow and tentative. General Roger Brady who investigated them concluded that abuses were isolated incidents "...rather than any systemic problem.

How have we gotten into this mess? As with many other religious conflicts today it has its genesis in the growing influence of extreme fundamentalist/evangelical in attempts to redefine Protestantism. The battle is being waged against mainline historic denominations by a growing number of literalistic pre-millennialists who await the tribulation and the rapture. (Don't worry, I'll explain in the future.)

Today's attack on the military goes back to regulatory revisions initiated in 1987 in the late stages of the Reagan administraction that helped create the fundamentalist stronghold in the miliatry. At the time, military chaplains were apportioned by denomination according to the religious makeup of the military as a whole. Beginning in 1987, all Protestant denominations were lumped together.

In effect, this move ended the ability of mainline denominations to select and train their own candidates for the chaplaincy. When the Pentagon began accrediting hundreds of evangelical and pentacostal "endorsing agencies," who have no uniform educational standards, they flooded the Protestant allotment. Today, two-thirds of the military's 2900 active-duty chaplains are evangelical or pentacostal. Their overt mission is religious proselytizing, which they see as their primary objective. Other non-evangelical Christians are felt to be unsaved, allied with evil, or postmodernists, depite how patriotic they may be.

Vicky Rast, an evangelical officer who teaches the diversity program the Air Force Academy was pressured to develop, feels that political correctness is irrelevant, and that her main objective is to promote loyalty to the military and defense of the Constitution.. "If you must proselytize in order to express your faith," she says, "you may need to reconsider your place in the military. When you put on that uniform, you speak for 300 million Americans, most of whom disagree with you."

For more info: See Jeff Sharlet, Jesus killed Mohammed: the crusade for a Christian military, Harper's Magazine, May 2009, pp. 31 - 43. (His title refers to a slogan chanted and painted on military vehicles by some U. S. forces in Iraq. Needless to say, it did not help win sunni or shite hearts and minds.) I was first made aware of the religious abuse issue and of Captain Morton's role by Amy Frykholm, Cadets for Christ: evangelization at the Air Force Academy, Christian Century, January 10, 2006, pp. 22 -25. For background on recent religious history, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American culture: the shaping of twenthieth-century evangelicalism, 1870 - 1925. 1980

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