Thirty-nine clients of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) at Fort Drum, New York, the majority of whom are Christians, have raised serious concerns about the choice of speaker for their division’s Family Spiritual Readiness Breakfast & Annual Remembrance Ceremony, to be held on June 20.
While the military continually insists that “Spiritual Readiness” doesn’t mean religion, Fort Drum’s choice of former Army Ranger and chaplain Jeff Struecker for its Family Spiritual Readiness Breakfast screams the opposite. Struecker’s whole reason for being seems to be to proselytize his fundamentalist Christian faith.
As an Army chaplain, Struecker’s tactic to proselytize Army Ranger trainees was to wait until they had gone days without food or sleep before he “confronted” them with his religion, preying on these soldiers when they were so worn down that they didn’t have the strength or will to resist. You can watch Struecker, as a chaplain, brazenly admitting to doing this in the video below (at the 2:50 mark), in which he boasted about his utterly reprehensible proselytizing tactic, saying:
“It puts the Ranger student in the worst possible conditions. Most of them will go a couple of days with no food. Some of them have gone as long as three days without any sleep whatsoever. My goal has been to meet them when they're at their absolute worst, when they're coldest, and the most tired, and the most hungry that they're gonna be, because the more difficult the circumstances, the more receptive the average person is to issues of faith. Many of them are just confronted with the gospel for the first time with no distractions, and I think that’s part of the reason why a number of them will respond.”
Now out of the military and a civilian pastor at 2 Cities Church in Columbus, Georgia, Struecker hasn’t lost his penchant for proselytizing, strategically locating his church on the campus of Columbus State University, as the church’s website says, to be “positioned to reach college students, the military community and our metro area with the gospel, train these men and women up in the faith, and send them out to change the world.”
Struecker’s church is also far out of step with DoD and Army policy with its anti-LGBT and repulsively misogynistic “Statement of Beliefs,” according to which, as quoted below, the husband is the leader and the wife must submit to her husband (emphasis added):
“Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of union between Christ and his church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord.”
As one of MRFF’s Fort Drum clients who have “been asked to help facilitate” Struecker’s speaking engagement wrote:
“… the speaker, Mr. Jeff Struecker appeared to me to be chosen specifically as a result of his extreme fundamental religious beliefs. I and others here at Fort Drum have been asked to help facilitate this major Army event where, for all I know, this bible literalist who might likely have my LGBTQ child put to death, if he was able to, would be a headline speaker. There was no question in my mind that I needed to contact the MRFF. Mr. Struecker not only uses these events to proselytize to a captive audience, the belief system of the very church he founded is in direct conflict with Army values. He makes it clear that the LGBTQ community is not welcome, women are not to hold leadership positions, and his ‘biblical view’ of PTSD support is vile and a contradiction to widely accepted evidence based practices.”
While Struecker is presumably planning to use his appearance at Fort Drum’s Family Spiritual Readiness Breakfast as an opportunity to proselytize an audience of soldiers and their families, MRFF will not be demanding that he be disinvited from the event as it has successfully done in the past with the likes of Jerry “Jesus-is-coming-back-with-an-AR-15” Boykin and Franklin Graham. Rather, MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein will be sending a demand to the leadership at Fort Drum that Struecker be instructed that a “Spiritual Readiness” event is not supposed to be religious, as the Army claims, and that he refrain from proselytizing his Christian religion and confine his speech to topics that are appropriate for an audience made up of people of all religions or none. If the Army’s claim that “Spiritual Readiness” is not a promotion of religion is true, Fort Drum leadership should have no problem telling Struecker he can’t proselytize at this event.
If you can, please help MRFF continue to fight these battles on behalf of our service men and women who can’t fight back against the military’s Christian nationalists alone!