The image, right, is from a current Fort Benning chaplains page entitled "Protestant Religious Education". click on thumbnail for full size image.
I'd like to bring to your attention a recent 20 minute story, by Dan Rather and showcased on HD TV ( you can watch it online here ). The Christian Science Monitor, in a piece by Jane Lampman, has also just done a significant piece on MRFF entitled Are U.S. troops being force-fed Christianity? and I'm not showcasing these as an endorsement of their journalistic treatment of MRFF necessarily. I'm almost always critical of media coverage of the Christian right, especially for the stock journalistic "he said"/"she said" frame that seems to warp most such reporting*.
But as far as I'm concerned mainstream media is probably taking MRFF's charges, of extensive, and improper, Christian fundamentalist evangelical influence in the United States Military, more seriously than have the big liberal and progressive blogs.
I know that might sound odd to readers here at the Daily Kos and - it's true - all too often in recent times the blog world has produced better news, faster and more accurately, than the mainstream media and press. But in this case, the mainstream media may well be beating the blogs, and that's odd considering the gravity of the issue.
[see here for collected media coverage of MRFF]
image, right: click on picture to see short promotional video from Military Ministry, which is one of the several ministries from Campus Crusade For Christ that target the US military and whose Christian Embassy ministry evangelizes in the US Pentagon. Another Campus Crusade ministry, Officers Christian Fellowship, has tens of thousands of members in the US military officer corps. Campus Crusade is only one of many fundamentalist, evangelical, and typically apocalyptic religious organizations that target the US military for recruitment, and the operating budgets of many of these organizations have greatly increased in the last several years.
Why It Matters
Lately, I've found evidence that the DoD has been promoting apocalyptic dispensationalist Christian views to US troops in the field, and I've uncovered a number of cases that help substantiate the assertion that apocalyptic Christianity has become the dominant religious view of the Pentagon.
Does this matter ? Should the blogs pay attention ? Well, I can't say but, for my part, I'm paying attention because in my opinion elements in the US military are actively trying to provoke an all-out religious war between Christianity and Islam, and as bad as things are in Iraq currently I can assure you that a US attack on Iran and a subsequent widening of the regional conflict into a religious war (it's moving in that direction already) would in itself be disastrous on a whole new level. But, such grim expansion of war would tend to preclude the imagining let alone the planning and politicking necessary to bring into existence positive visions for the future - of the United States and the World.
Let me suggest that we are at a critical bifurcation poin both in American and World history, and that the path we choose could have an impact on a magnitude close to the geologic:
First of all the United States is moving towards the formalization of its role as the new world empire. Unless Americans consciously reject that role, inertia will bring us there. That's our trajectory.
The current US trajectory tends to lead towards increased conflicts and wars, religious wars even, and the withering of American Democracy with the rise of a spartanized military regime seeking world empire.
There's a certain logic to that although if we go that route we'd be well advised to at least offer the same benefits to the nations we conquered as did Rome - imperial citizenship. But if the US seeks world empire then we're botching it. We'd need soft power, hegemonic power - and a lot of it. But imperial hegemony requires a level of diplomacy and tact we're not currently showing.
Or, the US can seek to reverse the course of the Bush years and seek to rebuild international agreements and trust, and work to foster international cooperation.
That may be the only viable way we can address emergent challenges, such as the unprecedented challenge of Global Climate Change in earnest.
As I wrote yesterday:
If a US attack an Iran ignited a religious war, and to an extent even if it did not, the widening of war in the Mideast would tend to preclude positive futures that humanity needs to not only imagine and plan but also implement very rapidly if it is to forestall catastrophic climate change.
I'm considering going into a period of public mourning about the continuance of the war in Iraq and the possibility of a US attack on Iran ;
In a very real sense the fate of current life Earth, and of human civilization, may be in the balance.
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The Blogs Are Indifferent
Early last Spring, before I started working for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I had begun to unearth very disturbing findings...
I was concerned for getting the message out and thought "Aha ! The Blogs !"...
So, I emailed about a half dozen leaders of a big liberal blog [not this one but it might as well have been] to let them know that I had hard evidence on the influence of the Christian right in the US military. At this point, in retrospect and with a few miles under my belt, I would have added the modifier "unconstitutional" to "influence", and that's key - People in the US military have the right to whatever religious or philosophical beliefs they want.
But, I never heard back on my query. Meanwhile, my research findings have been fed into a lawsuit waged by an attorney whose work was pivotal in kicking "Intelligent Design" out of Kansas Public Schools, so I know my concerns are endorsed by someone who is grounded enough to win substantial church-state separation legal battles. Still, I can't get the time of day from liberal blogs and this seems to me to be weird...
That last observation is a little misleading - actually, the membership of this, and other big group blogs, is starting to take the issue quite seriously and rightly so ; anyone who has studied the typical process by which the politicization of military establishments can lead to military coups knows that Democratic governments can not long withstand substantial differences between the political, and religious, cultures of civil and military society.
But with some notable exceptions ( Buzzflash, Truthout, and Cursor ) the leadership of liberal and progressive blogs has been, so far, depressingly slow to comprehend the gravity of the problem that MRFF confronts.
Not so with the mainstream media. In fact, mainstream media has taken MRFF's cause more seriously than have the blogs, and it's my suspicion that this is so because few bloggers know very much about the issue, which presupposes considerable knowledge about the Christian right and also requires that one take the Christian right seriously as a political threat rather than dismiss it as a phenomenon whose influence has crested.
And, there are only a handful of people - outside of those who are actually engineering the evangelical takeover of the US military - who know much about the issue. So, big blogs, which tend to prefer having their regular front-page writers cover issues, can't compete.
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Christian religious coercion at Camp Pendleton
Although I usually don't talk to people who come to MRFF complaining of religious persecution in the US military ( MRFF has received roughly 6,000 complaints, 90% of which are from Christians ) but I fielded one such contact yesterday, and talked to the wife of someone who was deployed early in 2007. She told me that the religious coercion, forced prayer, had caused enough stress to almost break up the marriage, which would have impacted in turn their several young children. I can't divulge more details than that, but religious coercion in the military is real and has a real impact on enlisted service members.
Let me venture another, more detailed anecdote. Someone else's. About Marine recruits at Camp Pendleton being forced to pray...
The following incident supposedly occurred at Camp Pendleton in 1990:
"...I'll never forget a night back in 1990 when my quartet was invited to sing for the Marine recruits at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. It was a Saturday night, and at the end of the training day, 600 recruits were marched to the base chapel to attend the concert.
I was sitting in our bus before the concert as the platoons were lined up outside the chapel. The Drill Instructors, who looked like they'd been chiseled out of marble, proceeded to give the recruits their last minute instructions that went something like this:
"If they tell you to sing, YOU SING!!!"
"If they tell you to pray, YOU PRAY!!!"
Each of these instructions was given from approximately 2 inches away from the face of a young marine and at about 150 decibels. It was something to watch, and I'm glad they weren't screaming at me.
When we walked into the chapel to begin the program, it was wall-to-wall with hot, tired, sweaty guys who had been out working their butts off all day. The smell was unbelievable, but I wouldn't have traded that experience for anything. They were a great audience (maybe they had to be), and I couldn't help but think that part of the reason they had such a good time is that it was the first time in weeks that someone wasn't screaming a them."
I have found indications that coercive proselytizing of recruits in basic training at Camp Pendleton may currently be going on.
For example, here is one interesting story, entitled "1400 Marines Pray To Receive Christ, about evangelist Phil Downer of DNA Ministries (scroll down linked page for story) who has been repeatedly invited to Camp Pendleton to evangelize. "The Navigators", another evangelical ministry, has been on the base for decades, and recently another "military ministry" from a local area megachurch has also set up shop at Pendleton, giving regular services and also setting up satellite sub-ministries : a "surf ministry" and a "skateboard ministry". The same ministry has organized on base barbecues and "crusades", with sermons and Christian bands.
What important to know is that these fundamentalist, apocalyptic ministries need to be invited on base by the base commander. They can just waltz in and set up shop. They need top level approval and that suggests the base commander at Pendleton is sympathetic with their evangelical mission.
Further, if you visit the DNA Ministries page I've linked to, for the "1400 Marines...", you'll notice that evangelist Phil Downer does not seem to be addressing Marine recruits in a chapel. Indeed, in one picture Downer seems to be preaching at recruits in an what could be a weapons locker room - they've all got assault rifles. This in itself does not demonstrate coercion, but I also have found evidence that recruits are compelled, by their drill sargeants and as a brief reprieve from the grueling nature of basic training, to attend Christian rock concerts. The music is actually quite good too, but it's quite decidedly Christian as well.
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Here's some testimony, from atheists serving in the US military [read more here:
"I was on one of the first aircraft carriers to start dropping bombs on Afghanistan in October of 2001 (USS Theodore Roosevelt). One night, during our daily dose of "state sponsored religion" (the evening prayer) the chaplain was beseeching Yahweh's (the Judeo-Christian god) blessing on our efforts, proclaiming that we were on the side of righteousness. I remember saying to one of my shipmates that I was quite sure that the folks on whom our bombs were falling were praying the exact same prayers, just with Allah (essentially the same as the god of the old testament) substituted for Yahweh, adding that this belief that WE had a lock on the absolute TRUTH, and THEY were irredeemably WRONG and therefore EVIL, is the sort of attitude that got the planet into this mess in the first place."
"A friend of mine was on a ten month deployment ( I arrived in the middle) and it was a common practice to have certain members of the crew read the "evening prayer". I'm not a big fan of this activity, since there's no way to escape it unless you're asleep (They even stop the movies that are playing on the TV network and put up a splash screen saying "Standby for the evening prayer"). My friend happened to be Wiccan. Her request was denied and she was told that not only was she not allowed to read the evening prayer (because only the Chaplain(s) were allowed to do so) but that her group could no longer meet in the chapel because the Xtians had to purify the sanctuary after every time the Wiccans met. It's a shame really, that those people are so closed minded. I've been lucky and only had a few run ins with particularly religious persons, and not been discriminated against on a general basis. As for prayer in combat, whatever floats your boat. As long as you're still paying attention! You can't glorify your god if you get killed with your head down, sniveling for protection. That's what your training was for."
*By Journalistic Convention, The Moon is 50% Camembert: Here's how it works. Party 'a' says "the moon is made of various types of rock, etc.", party 'b' says "no. the Moon is made of cheese." and so, by journalistic convention the audience for such journalism will tend to come away with the impression that, truth lying somewhere in the middle, the Moon is 50% rock and 50% Camembert.