There is so much that is just so wrong with this story I don’t know where to begin:
The Army said Friday it was investigating a claim that dozens of soldiers who refused to attend a Christian band’s concert at a Virginia military base were banished to their barracks and told to clean them up. […]
Pvt. Anthony Smith said he and other soldiers felt pressured to attend the May concert while stationed at the Newport News base, home of the Army’s Transportation Corps.
“My whole issue was I don’t need to be preached at,” Smith said in a phone interview from Phoenix, where he is stationed with the National Guard. “That’s not what I signed up for.” {…]
Smith, 21, was stationed in Virginia for nearly seven months for helicopter electrician training when the Christian rock group BarlowGirl played as part of the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concerts.”
Smith said a staff sergeant told 200 men in their barracks they could either attend or remain in their barracks. Eighty to 100 decided not to attend, he said.
“Instead of being released to our personal time, we were locked down,” Smith said. “It seemed very much like a punishment.”
(cont.)
Banished for refusing to attend a Christian concert? What is happening to our military? When did it morph into you must be a Christian to serve or else? And what the hell does being a Christian, or following any other religion, have to do with being a soldier? What the F is “Spiritual Fitness?” What it is is using the military to coerce soldiers to become Christians whether they want to or not, and to make them feel unwanted and punished if they refuse to “get with the program.”
Smith said he and the other soldiers were told not to use their cell phones or personal computers and ordered to clean up the barracks.
About 20 of the men, including several Muslims, refused to attend the concert based on their religious beliefs, he said.
Smith said he went up the chain of command and traced the concert edict to a captain, who said he simply wanted to “show support for those kind of events that bring soldiers together.”
While not accepting blame, the officer apologized to the soldiers who refused to attend the concert and said it was not his intent to proselytize, he said.
“But once you get in there, you realize it’s evangelization,” Smith said.
How many other commanding officers are using their positions of power over the lives of our young men and women in the service to impose their religious views on them? How extensive is this type of “evangelization” within the officer corps? We already know the Air Force Academy is practically a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fundamentalist Christian Right.
Reporting from Denver — The Air Force Academy, stung several years ago by accusations of Christian bias, has built a new outdoor worship area for pagans and other practitioners of Earth-based religions.
But its opening, heralded as a sign of a more tolerant religious climate at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., was marred by the discovery two weeks ago of a large wooden cross placed there.
I’m not a Wiccan but they have as much right to worship and practice their faith as Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and Christians of whatever sect. And athesists have just as much right to not practice any faith. Joining the muilitary doesn’t mean you give up your first amendment protections against the government imposing anyone’s religious values upon you. It shouldn’t mean that your Christian superiors can force you to attend events where they proselytize you to accept their faith or elese face punishment.
Any officer, no matter how high or how low should be drummed out of the military for such behavior. Court martials should be held and officers who violated these d=soldiers fundamental constitutional rights should be stripped of their commands and given dishonorable discharges.
The people who fought an American revolution did not fight so that any member of the government, much less a military commander could use his position of authority to coerce anyone to accept his or her religious beliefs. Quite the contrary. They came to America to escape religious persecution, not create a new means by which their faiths would rule supreme over everyone who believed differently than them.
This is just one of many dangerous signs over the last few years that our military is being corrupted by these Fundamentalist Christians. We know that their goal is to Christianize the government and the military and use that political and military power to impose their version of “Biblical Law” on the rest of us.
In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it secretly helped the Carter Administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and more recently, in 2001, it brought together the warring leaders of Congo and Rwanda for a clandestine meeting, leading to the two sides’ eventual peace accord last July. Such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa’s postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand “Communists” killed marks him as one of the century’s most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise. “We work with power where we can,” the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can’t.” […]
Two weeks into my stay, David Coe, Doug’s son and the presumptive heir to leadership of the Family, dropped by the house. My brothers and I assembled in the living room, where David had draped his tall frame over a burgundy leather recliner like a frat boy, one leg hanging over a padded arm.
“You guys,” David said, “are here to learn how to rule the world.”
Obviously one place they have been building up their power to “rule the world” is in the US Military. And that is a very dangerous sign for our future as a free nation.
The most effective wedge for the insertion of evangelicals into every rung of military life was the NAE and its influential chaplain-endorsing agency, the Commission on Chaplains, which worked tirelessly as a liaison for a wide array of fundamentalist denominations, from the Assemblies of God to the Southern Baptist Convention to the full index of offshoot and splinter congregations. Notwithstanding the military’s policy of allotting chaplaincies on a quota system designed to roughly reflect the religious affiliations of society as a whole, by the late ’60s evangelical denominations were regularly exceeding their allotments.
The phenomenon mirrored, in part, the explosive growth of fundamentalist Christianity in America and, in part, the assiduous efforts of the NAE and its Commission on Chaplains to fill posts left empty by the Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and others who were regularly failing to meet their allocations. In what Loveland terms a “quota juggling act,” the NAE and others aggressively lobbied to fill chaplaincies left vacant by other denominations, resulting in a marked shift in the selection process weighted more and more to religious demographics within the military itself, where evangelical numbers continued to swell. This consolidation of power would result, by the late eighties, in the NAE Chaplains Commission’s acting as the endorsing agent not only for established denominations but for hundreds of nonaligned individual churches. […]
It was inevitable, considering the concerted effort by evangelicals to penetrate every echelon of the service, from the lowliest barracks to the loftiest policy-making aerie, that there would eventually emerge a cadre of Christian officers emboldened to openly profess their faith and use the full influence of their rank to bolster the cause. […]
It is a convergence that would, in turn, reach its apotheosis in You the Warrior Leader, a gung ho handbook for “applying military strategy in victorious spiritual leadership,” published at the same time Weinstein was beginning to gird himself for a different kind of battle. Written by former Green Beret and current Southern Baptist Convention president Bobby Welch, You the Warrior Leader is as unequivocal a statement of evangelical militarism as could be imagined, an unabashed tactical manual on storming the barricades of unbelief with rousing rhetoric that evokes a kind of holy bloodlust for the trophies of triumphalism. […]
In the chapter “Attack! Attack! Attack!” Welch asks, “Remember the Warrior Leader’s Mission-Vision?” as he hammers home with steely-eyed determination his grand strategy for winning souls: “To develop victorious spiritual-war fighters who form a force-multiplying army that accomplishes the Great Commission.”
And yes, Sharon Angle and other fundamentalist Christian Republican candidates for National office do approve a Christian takeover of the Country:
When Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a Christian news interviewer this year that “entitlement programs (are) built to make government our God,” she voiced a central tenet of Christian Reconstructionism, according to academics who study the movement. […]
Many of Angle’s religious and political beliefs appear to align with the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism. She’s supported eliminating Social Security and Medicare, is a home schooling champion, sees the separation of church and state as an unconstitutional doctrine that was never meant to protect the state from religious belief, and believes public policy should support the traditional family structure as defined in the Bible.
She also helped resurrect the Nevada affiliate of a national party founded by a prominent Christian Reconstructionist and has raised campaign money from reconstructionists.
But Ingersoll said Angle’s comments on government as a false idol come directly from the movement’s founder, R.J. Rushdoony, an orthodox Presbyterian minister.
Do we really want politicians who will support the continued Fundamentalist Christianization of our government and especially our military? Do we really want people with the most powerful weapons on earth trained to believe that only the Christian faith is truly American? That their duty to a Christian God supersedes their duty to the Constitution? I think you know the answer to that.
We need to eradicate this infestation of religious intolerance and infiltration before it leads our country down a dark path in which our armed forces become a pawn of religious zealots determined to make our country as “free” religiously as Iran or Saudi Arabia are today.
