Executive Summary - new MRFF obtained evidence shows Christian right religious indoctrination programs have become institutionalized at the US Air Force Academy and at US Military training facilities. The report continues to build MRFF's case that US military personnel are violating DoD regulations by endorsing these ministries.
The huge "para church" organization that's leading the effort to turn US military personnel into "stormtroopers for Christ", Campus Crusade For Christ, was founded by Bill Bright - a key founder of the modern Christian right who believed the American political and cultural left amounted to a "satanic", "anti-God", communist, atheist conspiracy.
A new Military Religious Freedom Foundation* report describes the extent to which basic training institutions of the United States Military have been penetrated by sectarian, right wing Christian religious organizations and the degree to which US military members have taken to endorsing, while in uniform and thus in violation of Department Of Defense regulation, these ministries. Here's the full version of the MRFF report, and here is the short version courtesy of Chris Rodda and Talk To Action.
[ click on image, above, to watch Campus Crusade promotional video, shot at the USAF academy, in which a Campus Crusade employee states "when they leave here, they're governent paid missionaries"]
***
I suppose the consensus on a website like this might be that such a report, as the new MRFF report on ongoing religious indoctrination at Fort Jackson and at the United States Air Force Academy, might be somehow alarmist...
Yes, it's true that, in a recent new trend, donations from the US military to political campaigns have, overall, begun to favor Democrats over Republicans. But that's an aggregate figure, and what the majority of the US military thinks is less relevant than what the military's leadership caste thinks.
Why aren't our elected Democratic Party members in Congress and the Senate more responsive to the overwhelming disapproval of Americans concerning the war in Iraq ? Why doesn't Congress push harder for a US withdrawal from Iraq ?
Well, it would seem reasonable to conclude that there are other political pressures in play.
William Rohl Bright vs. The 'Satanic, Atheist, Anti-God Conspiracy'
Bill Bright, who founded the [1/2 billion dollar per year nonprofit] Campus Crusade For Christ and died in 2003, was a key founder of the modern American religious right (as a political movement) and I may be the only writer on Earth who has devoted much attention to Bill Bright's political beliefs which belied Bright's charming and upbeat persona. I titled a subsection, in the piece of mine linked to above, Bill Bright and the Satanic Communist, Humanist, Secularist, Atheist, Public Education, Hippie Attack on Godly Christian America and that title sums up much of Bright's political views.
After reading Bill Bright's 1998 book ominously entitled Red Sky In The Morning: How You Can Help Prevent America's Gathering Storms [co-written with John N. Damoose] I summarized Bright's views, showcased in the book:
The beliefs of Campus Crusade For Christ's founder William Rohl Bright extended to the claim that the Theory Of Evolution was a fraud and an "anti-God" religion invented specifically to undermine Christian beliefs, and also to the claim that American public education has become subverted by communist, atheist and humanist ideologies that were "anti-God" and had destroyed public education, "destroyed much of the moral and spiritual moorings of America", and rewritten American history to deny America's alleged Godly heritage. Bright saw two poles in a grand cosmological struggle, with fundamentalist Christianity on the side of good and, ranged against it on the side of evil, every other religion and belief system on Earth.
"Power From The Barrel Of a Gun..."
It's easy to grasp that corporate interests exert covert influence, but the American left has been astonishingly resistant to analysis and reporting on how the Christian right exerts considerable influence of its own, and that's especially startling given that it is has been thoroughly, gruesomely established, historically, that the toxic interplay of religion and corporate power is the very essence of fascism. Whenever religion and corporate power, especially corporate military industrial power, intermingle one can inevitable smell the aroma not of Jesus Christ but of fascism.
Why isn't the Democratically controlled Congress more responsive to widespread American public dislike of the continued US military involvement in Iraq ?
There obviously are some non electoral sources of political pressure in play. There are many non electoral ways to exert political power, and those methods, and strategies, are almost as a rule covert. They're inherently anti-democratic. This post describes one particular sphere in which the American Christian right is developing non electoral political power, and it's worth considering that Spanish fascism vectored through the military too, and it was inherently pro-church, wedded to the most conservative elements of the Catholic Church ; Franco's forces didn't have the numbers, at first, but they certainly had the guns, weaponry, and training, so in the end all the elan, the glorious communitarian spirit of the leftist Spanish Republic celebrated in an Abba song and the memories of survivors of the Lincoln Brigade didn't matter - Franco's tanks and planes rolled over Spain, to institute grim decades of Spanish fascism.
Thought Experiment : 'They' Have The Guns & You're The 'Enemy'
As a thought experiment, imagine this - far right Christian ministries haver set up shop on US military basic training facilities and are teaching the future leaders of the most powerful armed forces on the planet that people with the wrong sort of ideological and religious beliefs should be forcibly converted to Christianity or else killed and, maybe, ground up into pet food and processed into industrial fertilizer.
As the new MRFF report demonstrates, we're not that far away from there, and I am not saying to scare people. This is not a cheap Hollywood horror film young can watch and then safely go home. We're living in this film. We can't run away.
The beliefs of leaders of the American Christian right, such as Campus Crusade For Christ leader Bill Bright, came fairly close to such beliefs, described above [see text excerpt, from book by Bright, at the end of this post], so to the extent the American left doesn't realize it's being vilified and set up to be politically marginalized or (at worst) "dealt with" in some manner less than completely pleasant it probably should consider learning about the sort of problem represented in the new MRFF report.
Are We Not Sheep ?
To the extent professed leaders of the American left don't acknowledge the sort of growing threat posed by the religious indoctrination described in MRFF's new report (read it and don't weep, for God's sake. Read it an make noise about it. Tears will accomplish nothing.) and exert the sort of political pressure it will take to prevent the ongoing conversion of America's military personnel into "stormtroopers of Christ", in the end we may suffer a fate that we, in our collective apathy, allow to occur.
Image, below : Fort Jackson is one of the US military's basic training facilities. The picture below is from a Ft. Jackson course, developed by Campus Crusade For Christ, called "God's Basic Training". Note the proximity, in the photograph below, of Bibles and automatic weapons. Also of interest, especially for Jewish readers : the Bibles visible in the forefront of the picture only comprise the New Testament.
A Leading Evangelical Scholar Walks Right Up To It...
Last year, noted Christian evangelical scholar David P. Gushee gave a lecture, in a number of prominent venues, religious and theological schools, in which he said:
"...If one sees similarities, parallels, and possible analogies, it is easy to be misread as equating, say, the United States with Nazi Germany, or US Christians with the Deutsche Christen. I am not attempting to offer
such an equation...
Following the disclaimer, Gushee then proceeded to pretty much do just that:
It was this cultural despair—a toxic brew of reaction against secularism, anger related to the loss of World War I, distress over cultural disorientation and confusion, fears about the future of Germany, hatred of the victorious powers and of those who supposedly stabbed Germany in the back, and of course the search for scapegoats (mainly the Jews)—that motivated many Germans to adopt a reactionary, authoritarian, and nationalistic ethic that fueled their support for Hitler's rise to power. A broadly appealing narrative of national decline (or conspiratorial betrayal) was met by Hitler’s narrative of national revenge leading to utopian unity in the Fuhrer-State.
Conservative American evangelicals in recent decades have been deeply attracted to a parallel narrative of cultural despair. Normally the story begins with the rise of secularism in the 1960s, the abandonment of prayer in schools, and the Roe decision, all leading to an apocalyptic decline of American culture that must be arrested soon, before it is too late and "God withdraws his blessing" from America. While very few conservative evangelicals come into the vicinity of Hitler in hatefulness, elements similar to that kind of conservative-reactionary-nationalist narrative can be found in some Christian right-rhetoric: anger at those who are causing American moral decline, fear about the future, hatred of the "secularists" now preeminent in American life, and the search for scapegoats. The solution on offer—a return to a strong Christian America through determined political action--also has its parallels with the era under consideration.
Although its efforts to transform America's military members into "government paid missionaries" have recently moved onto US basic training facilities, Campus Crusade For Christ's "Military Ministries" and other "military ministries" of the American Christian right, have worked especially hard to target the leadership of the military, and those doing so espouse the sorts of accusatory narratives of culture despair and national betrayal described by David P. Gushee, above.
The new video recently uncovered by MRFF, shot at the United States Air Force Academy, all but says that Monday night Bible study classes are compulsory. The academy simply "encourages" cadets to attend the religious instruction Monday night classes held by Campus Crusade For Christ.
What's important to realize is that this newly discovered Campus Crusade For Christ video, discussed in the post, was filmed with the approval of the Air Force Academy. People don't simply wander onto the Academy grounds, randomly, wielding movie cameras, to interview Academy personnel and officers. Commanding officers have to give their approval.
Ongoing, Pervasive Violation Of DoD Regulations
Writing on Talk To Action, Chris Rodda gets to the one key part of MRFF's legal argument against the ongoing, pervasive violations of the Department of Defense's own regulations which MRFF's new report substantiates:
Everybody remembers the Christian Embassy video, right? and that the officers who appeared in this video were found guilty of misconduct by the Pentagon Inspector General for violating the regulation prohibiting the endorsing of a non-federal entity while in uniform? Well, it seems that our military has been training enlisted recruits and military academy cadets to violate this very same regulation -- before they've even finished basic training or graduated! And, guess what, these recruits and cadets have not only violated the same regulation as the Christian Embassy officers, but have done so to promote the same organization -- Campus Crusade for Christ! The evidence? Two videos, and numerous photos, recently uncovered by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
For readers unfamiliar with the "Christian Embassy", the Washington, DC based ministry focuses its evangelical efforts, to a sort of "ecumenical, fundamentalist Christianity", Pentagon personnel, foreign diplomats, Capitol Hill members, and White House personnel for evangelism. Christian Embassy, a ministry of Campus Crusade For Christ, recently became embroiled in controversy following publicity over a Christian Embassy promotional video, shot within the Pentagon, in which top Pentagon officials, in uniform, appeared in the video to endorse Christian Embassy and its efforts.
"they're government paid missionaries when they leave here"
In the Campus Crusade For Christ video showcased in this post and shot at the US Air Force Academy, a narrator describes how USAF cadets are cut off from civilian life and how the Academy "encourages" them to attend Monday night Bible study classes, including a Campus Crusade For Christ class known as "Cru" - "Crusade".
As Colonel Steve Sill, Senior USAF Academy Chaplain states in the video :
"Well, we're very pleased with what Campus Crusade does here, along with a number of other organizations. We have one night of the week, especially, which is set aside by the Academy for the cadets to be involved in religious education, Bible study, those kinds of things..."
Campus Crusade For Christ's campus director at the USAF Academy, Scott Blom, states in the video:
"Campus Crusade always has been very intentional, I feel, about going after the leaders, or the future leaders, and that's why Dr. Bright [Campus Crusade Founder Bill Bright] initially picked the college campus - because it's the future leaders. As I lool ak the the Air Force Academy, where else can I have an impact for 4,000 future leaders ?"
Blom concludes, in this video which was filmed with the knowledge [and almost certainly with the consent of the Air Force Academy - or else there was gross negligence involved]:
"they're government paid missionaries when they leave here".
From Chris Rodda's Talk To Action post describing the report:
So, just how dangerous is Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry? Just take a look at their goals, which they are well on their way to achieving, with the endorsement and help of countless military commanders.
The primary goal of the Military Ministry is to:
"Evangelize and Disciple All Enlisted Members of the US Military. Utilize Ministry at each basic training center and beyond. Transform our culture through the US Military."
According to Maj. Gen. Bob Dees, U.S. Army (ret.), the Executive Director of Campus Crusade's Military Ministry, in the October 2005 issue of the organization's "Life and Leadership" newsletter:
"We must pursue our particular means for transforming the nation -- through the military. And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens...."
And then there's the Military Ministry's slogan:
"Reaching the World through the Military of the World"
There's also the Military Ministry's frequent use of the term "government paid missionaries." Describing one of their ministries at Lackland Air Force Base and Fort Sam Houston, for example, the Military Ministry website states:
"Responsibilities include working with Chaplains and Military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as Government paid missionaries."
The following explanation of their "gateway" strategy appeared on Campus Crusade's Military Ministry website in 2002:
"Young recruits are under great pressure as they enter the military at their initial training gateways. The demands of drill instructors push recruits and new cadets to the edge. This is why they are most open to the 'good news.' We target specific locations, like Lackland AFB and Fort Jackson, where large numbers of military members transition early in their career. These sites are excellent locations to pursue our strategic goals."
Similar statements can be found for each of the various Military Ministry divisions, like this one from their Valor Ministry:
"The Valor ROTC cadet and midshipman ministry reaches our future military leaders at their initial entry points on college campuses, helps them grow in their faith, then sends them to their first duty assignments throughout the world as 'government-paid missionaries for Christ.'"
Here's what Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade For Christ, believed. The following excerpt is from a book Bright co-authored and which was published in 1998:
Primarily during the past 50 years, militant anti-God forces, which have been active during and since the Continental Congress, have finally succeeded not only in rejecting our nation's biblical heritage and our traditional values, but in rewriting history and convincing our people, especially students, that we never had this wonderful heritage....
Marx's and Lenin's ideas spread to America, taking root among academia and some labor leaders. Both the philosophies of educator John Dewey and Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have had a profound influence in mobilizing the anti-God forces. Dewey, of course, was the chief influence in modern "progressive" American education. His anti-God emphasis has resulted in the present decadence and disintegration of our entire educational system...
Such influence began to reach the top levels of government in mid-20th century and finally, in 1947, resulted in the infamous "separation of church and state" ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, and later decisions rejecting the God of our fathers in the public life and schools of America. A parallel anti-Christian philosophical influence has been that of anti-God secular humanism and existentialism. These beliefs provided the foundation for the radical hippie movement of the 1960s. From these roots arose some of the most threatening anti-Christ ideologies, which have destroyed much of the moral and spiritual moorings of America.
*MRFF, The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is a nonprofit organization that fights for religious liberty in the US military, and-- out of the thousands of complaints the foundation has received from US military members who allege experiencing religious persecution or discrimination in the US military --about 90% of complaints MRFF has received from US military members have been from Christians who simply do not hold the "correct" (non-fundamentalist) type of Christianity now favored in the US military.