I am being prevented from praying at the chapel and my religious leader is being ignored.
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This post was created on the previous version of the MRFF website, and may not be fully accessible to users of assistive technology. If you need help accessing this content, please reach out via email.Mr. Weinstein and MRFF,
I am a Catholic soldier in the U.S. Army. Throughout my career in the army, I have come up against difficulties when trying to practice my Catholic faith. On almost every occasion in which I have made a request for religious accommodation my request was ignored and, many times, treated disrespectfully by a corrupt and uninformed chain of command. Moreover, the general mentality and approach taken by leadership in dealing with religion and requests for accommodation has ALWAYS been that “one size fits all”. Unfortunately that “one size” has been a form of ‘fundamentalist’, Protestant Christianity that shows disdain for any need to go somewhere to pray, to ‘attend’ a Mass, or to ‘see’ a priest, or to respect these events and encounters as ‘obligations’. A perfect example of this is one of my platoon sergeants on active duty who responded to my request to attend Mass with “What?! I just pray my bible…why do you need to go anywhere?” Suffice it to say, he sat on my request, never bringing it up the chain, because ‘he’ viewed my desire to meet an obligation as wholly insignificant. Moreover, leaders, like this platoon sergeant, believe their thinking is perfectly in line with proper command policy, or that their is no violation of any regulation. They believe they are completely in the right when issuing out this sort of all-encompassing judgment regarding the nature and extent of religious practice. Their version trumps all others…they even trump the U.S. Constitution…and unfortunately, their false wisdom seems to permeate the army. Mr. Weinstein, I have nowhere else to turn except to you and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
Please let me elaborate some more. While in Basic I was being made to do pushups for no reason on a Sunday morning almost missing the Sunday worship formation. After the push-ups, I grabbed my battle buddy, who was Catholic and had previously agreed to attend Mass with me after chow, and asked him if he would run with me to catch up to the formation that had already departed from the barracks area. My battle buddy replied that it was too late. He decided not to go with me. I was incensed at this injustice. I was a 30 year old man at the time with an education and experience, thinking that it would be all too easy to ‘brain-wash’ young 18 year old recruits into giving up on their religion. So, without my battle buddy (this was a breaking of the rules), I ran after the worship formation. No one noticed. I am a firm believer in the warrior ethos that one should ‘never leave a fallen comrade,’ but in this case, I felt that the army had left a fallen comrade (my battle buddy) by not restraining a drill sergeant who was hampering the freedom of a soldier to attend worship. By allowing such a thing to occur I felt that our training was setting up a specious set of priorities, with religion or ‘freedom of religion’ and the U.S. Constitution at the bottom. And, in particular, if a soldier was unwilling to accept what seemed to me the indifferent attitude of the prevailing fundamentalist version of Christianity that disdained the need for a Catholic to ‘go’ somewhere for worship, that soldier would get left behind and unjustly victimized by the establishment. It seemed that the brain-washing had begun. This was my first experience with the sort of conflict I would endure while a U.S. army Soldier, even while on active duty and in the National Guard. Also in Basic, I made a request to attend Mass on a Holy day. An assistant drill sergeant told me that we would not be doing anything during the times I requested and, believe it or not, asked me to circulate a petition throughout the company, and then present my request to the head drill sergeant. I circulated the petition and obtained a list of approximately 15 names. I presented the petition to the head drill sergeant. The head drill sergeant took the list and told me to wait for his decision on the Holy day in question. I waited. When the day arrived and the company had been dismissed for the day, prior to the Mass time that was to occur at the nearby post Chapel, I approached the head drill sergeant and repeated my request. The head drill sergeant angrily looked at me, as I stood there at attention. And with one finger, in extreme disapproval, with what seemed like disgust or even hatred, pointed to the stairs leading up to our Platoon’s barracks room. He never said a word. I stood there dumb-founded. I felt helpless and incapable of doing anything in the face of ‘the advantage of the stronger’. I remember looking at the E6 rank on his collar, at his drill sergeant hat, the hateful look on his face, his rude, careless, and disrespectful body language (all of which appeared different and ‘truly’ threatening and hateful in relation to this issue of religion), and feeling intimidated and shaken to the depths of my soul. I felt I had no other choice but to give up. I said ‘hooah’ with the little emotional strength and courage I had left to muster, did an about-face, and ran up the stairs into the barracks. Our platoon did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for the next five hours. This latter incident reveals the fact that in the army, in my experience, ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to granting religious freedoms. If one falls outside of the correct size–a narrow, sterilized and iconoclastic form of Protestant fundamentalism that shows disdain for Catholics, Catholics who may have additional needs outside the usual Sunday worship requirement, it becomes all but impossible to get a fair hearing from leaders. And even when seeking the help of the chaplaincy, as a Catholic, I have always been confronted with head chaplains who espoused the Protestant fundamentalist, anti-Catholic, position; and who prevented me from practicing my Catholic faith because they prevented Catholic chaplains from performing their Catholic ministry. I know very well active duty military Catholic chaplains who feel terribly abused by this same prejudice themselves and are helpless to confront it. Needing to ‘attend’ a Mass on Sunday, much less a Mass on any other day than Sunday, was viewed as simply unimportant or even stupid. While I was not taken seriously, these leaders and chaplains believed that I could not and should not be taken seriously. The two Basic training experiences described above were proto-typical of my later life on active duty and in the guard, where terribly painful and degrading, fundamentalist Protestant ignorance, hostility and discrimination all bared their ugly heads, and continue to do so. It’s everywhere. Noone stands up to it for fear of being horribly victimized in retaliation as only the military can do. Please, Mr. Weinstein and MRFF, help me and help all the other Catholics who are facing this blatant prejudice and degradation.
(U.S. Army Soldier’s name, rank, MOS, military installation and location withheld)
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I don’t find this so much as a one-sided religious view in the military, but more of one where there is a lacking of thinking people in the ranks. From my 10 years of experience in two different branches (four if you count the Guard as a separate branch), I can say most people aren’t dedicated to their religion – and this goes for civilians too – and only are when it’s convenient.
Another thing is that the military is a very service first organization. So it’s hard for some people to accommodate anything out of the normal flow of things. You can say it’s Basic, you can have your deeply religion time in the magic buildings with the wizard master after you’re done. But as you trace it down the line, at some point someone will be saying how come he/she gets a couple hours off – or even the day – because of their religion. Then undoubtedly those that aren’t religious, either out of laziness or by belief, will want their time too. When most go to their respective religious service and will zone out or just go through the motions. Does the atheist or agnostic get time to their self to practice what they believe? For some science is their religion or history or music or thoughtful meditation. Are they allowed to get their time in, or should they have to wait until the end of the duty day and they are back in their barracks/dorm or single family home? Why can’t the religious person wait then if the non-believe in religion X can? Maybe it’s my studies in Anthropology and Archaeology that clouds my thinking, but every culture has some sort of practice in which we call religion. Other than popularity or majority standing, what says someone else’s “religion” is less important than yours? As silly as many will think it is, but Jedi is a growing religious practice. I’m one of those, but it just goes to show you that many that do “practice” it as religion, there are inevitability some that take it seriously. This should make a statement about all religion to you.
Being an agnostic myself, I can personally say, I don’t care if I get equal time as someone of the more popular Western religions. Sometimes it certainly would feel nice, but I feel I have the mental capacity to understand the situation and not be so selfish and press on getting something accomplished for my paycheck. Even when I was a card-carrying Republican, conservative and Christian, I didn’t understand why a person at Basic would force a table at the chow hall to wait for them to pray before everyone could eat (the practice at least in my squadron at Air Force Basic in 2000) when we had such a short amount of time to eat. Could you not just pray to yourself as you ate? Does God frown on multitasking (particularly in such times)? I found Basic allowed me to be a better Christian. I might not have been able to do it in the traditionally noticeable way to the public, but do you need such physical structures to do so? Me, I said no. It might say something about a person as to whether they can truly put service before self. We can’t push service before self so hard all the time but make exceptions for religion. Just because an individual, a majority or someone with higher rank may say religion is bigger than the self or the service, does that mean any other core value is subject to exceptions? Where is the line drawn? Equality for some, but not you? What about male vs. female hair regulations? Why haven’t we had the talk about there are A LOT more women in the military now than a couple decades ago when our current higher leadership was new? Why can’t males in the outside the non-female jobs have their hair longer? It’s certainly not a hygiene or uniformity issue anymore. Why not more facial hair options for when not in a risk of gas mask usage?
By not having these conversations or other topics like these addressed fully, it’s hard to think we can address one of greater complexity as religion with any just and reasoned results.
As a Roman Catholic Christian it is our obligation to go to Holy Mass on Sunday, not for personal time. Yes we have to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar (work, school, gov. , bills) But we have to give God what belongs to God…. our worship. In this sense a faithful Catholic IS putting service before self; the service rendered to God. Caeser may own the world but God owns Caeser! HooaH!