Christian Soldiers

In the news today, we've got two more examples of inappropriate behavior conducted by Evangelical Christians in the military. Both of the stories are very scary, for different reasons.

The first story comes courtesy of Ed Brayton. He reports that a handful of junior enlisted soldiers attempted to hold a meeting of atheist and freethinker soldiers on a forward operating base (FOB) in Iraq. Although they took the appropriate steps required to obtain official permission to hold the meeting, things did not go smoothly. First, vandals kept ripping down their flyers, then their meeting was disrupted by a fundamentalist major. This major apparently acted extraordinarily inappropriately, if not criminally. He ordered the junior enlisted soldiers to stand at attention while he yelled at them, and threatened them with punishment.

The soldier who did the work to hold the initial meeting says that he's going to keep going. I hope he does. I also hope that MAJ C. Soldier is tracked down and firmly disciplined - preferably with some sort of punishment that will bring his career to the abrupt end that it so richly deserves. At a bare minimum, he should be made to write out the First Amendment 1,000,000 or so times.

The second case has been much more widely publicized. It involves a number of military officers who saw fit to participate, in uniform, in a video that was used for fundraising by a Christian Evangelical organization. Four of the officers were generals - two Air Force, two Army. In this video (available here) the officers all talk about how much Christian Embassy helps them in their work. One of them, USAF Major General Jack Catton, explained his approach to religion in the workplace:

I found a wonderful opportunity as a Director on the Joint Staff, as I met the people that come into my directorate, and I tell them right up front who Jack Catton is, and I start with the fact that I'm an old-fashioned American, and my first priority is my faith in God, then my family, and then country. I share my faith because it describes who I am. I would say Christian Embassy in my interaction with my fellow Flag officers has helped inspire some of that. You know, we talk about that kind of stuff, and I think it's a huge impact because you have many men and women who are seeking God's counsel and wisdom as we advise the Chairman and the Secretary of Defense.

Hallelujah!

Yes, he really did say Hallelujah.

Making a promotional video for a religious group in uniform during the duty day is bad, but it's not as bad as their excuse for their behavior. It seems that many of these officers thought that it was OK to do this video, because they thought that this Christian group had been around the Pentagon for so long that it must be a federally-sanctioned agency.

BG [Brigadier General] Brooks asserted that he believed Christian Embassy to be sanctioned or endorsed by DoD due to numerous factors, to include Christian Embassy's long-standing Pentagon presence...

...Col X disagreed with our tentative conclusions, and stated that she understood that Christian Embassy had been invited by the Chaplain's office to conduct operations in the Pentagon; that the organization was there with DoD's knowledge and authorization, and that its employees held Pentagon access badges.

Maj Gen Catton asserted that Christian Embassy was treated as an instrumentality of the Pentagon Chaplain's office for over 25 years, and had effectively become a "quasi-Federal entity."

Apparently, it didn't occur to any of these senior officers that if Christian Embassy was actually federally sanctioned, that would itself be a bad thing. It did not occur to any of them to wonder how it would be possible for an organization dedicated to the advancement of one specific form of religion to become "federally sanctioned" or "quasi-Federal." All of these officers have sworn to uphold the Constitution, but based on their excuses, one is forced to wonder if any of them has actually read the document.

The "here so long I thought they was official" argument is stupid, of course. The author of the Pentagon IG report does a very good job of crushing that particular weak excuse for their behavior:

We note that at no point did Christian Embassy become a Federal entity. Further, the length of time an organization operates in the Pentagon does not confer Federal status to that organization or provide express or implied approval to engage in activities to support that organization that are specifically prohibited by regulation. For example, Taco Bell provides certain food preparation services to individuals in the Pentagon. Its presence in the Pentagon for any length of time does not imply DoD sanction or confer Federal status to Taco Bell. Maj Gen Catton's endorsement of Taco Bell under circumstances similar to those of the present video would be similarly improper. The fact that Christian Embassy was a non-profit or religious organization, as opposed to a purely commercial one, did not make Christian Embassy less of a non-Federal entity.

(It seems like there's someone at the Pentagon IG office who has a wonderful gift for injecting a touch of gentle sarcasm into official reports.)

There's one more thing that's frightening about these two incidents. After being exposed to the military on a daily basis for the last decade, none of it surprised me. I was much more outraged about the injection of God into the Texas pledge than I am by these uniformed idiots. I've seen so many Evangelicals in uniform who are unable to recognize the inappropriateness of trying to evangelize their subordinates that I've started to become desensitized to it. Even conduct as outrageous as that displayed by the major who decided to scream at and threaten junior enlisted atheists has become entirely unsurprising. The military as a whole is in dire need of a wake-up call when it comes to religion. There are a few folks who are working to make that happen. I really hope they succeed.