The Washington Post yesterday had an in-depth article about evangelical chaplains in the U.S. military, and the "competition" they feel for "power" with chaplains from the Catholic church and mainline Protestant denominations. While evangelicals once were rarely in leadership positions, that balance has changed, particularly in the Air Force. ("There are more pluralists" - his word - "in power in the Navy," said one evangelical chaplain interviewed for the article.)
The Rev. MeLinda S. Morton, a Lutheran minister who resigned in June as an Air Force chaplain after criticizing the religious atmosphere at the Air Force Academy, said there has been a palpable rise in evangelical fervor not just among chaplains but also among the officer corps in general since she joined the military in 1982, originally as a launch officer in a nuclear missile silo.
"When we were coneheads -- missile officers -- I would never, ever have engaged in conversations with subordinates aligning my power and position as an officer with my views on faith matters," she said. Today, "I've heard of people being made incredibly uncomfortable by certain wing commanders who engage in sectarian devotions at staff meetings."
Complaints by Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 graduate of the Air Force Academy, led to an investigation that explosed both religious intolerance and a blurry understanding of appropriate use of religious language and influence. He asks:
"Could there possibly be a worse time for this fundamentalist Christianity to be pushed in our military, when we're in a war and the people we are fighting are recruiting their members by saying we're Christian crusaders?"
And of course that is exactly the point, one which is lost on the present administration. What bothers me particularly about this pervasive and extremely troubling trend of polarization between "us" and "them" is not only that policy is being created in THIS country, and war carried out, by zealots convinced they are divinely directed, but that young soldiers, asked to risk their lives in a conflict that has arisen because of two fundamentalist views of the world, are being preyed (yes, pun intended) upon by evangelicals at a time when they are most emotionally vulnerable.
I don't think it's going too far at all to say that a religious agenda is being advanced, not merely "allowed" in the armed services. Making inroads into the miltary is part of the largely-unchecked fundamentalist agenda that has sought greater influence everywhere in our society over the past several decades. And it is one more example of the increased blurring of lines between "church" and "state".
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