At Speicher base in Iraq, US Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.
Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.
On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall’s constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.
The MRFF plans more lawsuits in coming weeks, says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, who founded the military watchdog group in 2005. The aim is “to show there is a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense.”
AND HERE WE GO!!! I spent 10 years active duty 15 years reserves and as my dad used to say, these people are creating a solution where there is no problem. That’s why there is an EEO office etc. I bet you will find many of these “victims” are malcontents.
Interesting. When I served in South Vietnam in 1968-69 with the River Patrol Force, my awareness of my personal mortality and spiritual accoutability started to recover from my college/college-peer induced period of spiritual questioning and agnosticism.
Although I never denied my Chrisitian beliefs, I was caught up in the ‘spirit of the age.’ The ‘spirit’ of that age among most youth was one of disregard of just about anything that inhibited young people from ‘having a good time.’
But my belief in God, the Creator, was always there. I would have thought it insane back then, in a very hazardous battle zone, to deny God, deny Christ.
Jeremy needs our prayers. First our prayers for his soul and for his coming to Christ and accepting Him as his Savior, and then, our prayers that his evil ministry of atheism will not succeeed and that those listening to Jeremy’s atheistic voice will turn from him and turn toward the voice of the Holy Spirit.
There were a lot of people who claimed to be atheists during my 18 month tour however, when the rounds started coming in and mortars started falling, I couldn’t find one.????
I don’t want an orthodox chaplain being coerced into political corectness, but, equally, I don’t appreciate the notion of military authority being deployed to proscribe or prescribe certain forms of belief or non-belief.
Evangelism within the armed forces is fine; but evangelism that is conducted in the context of a chain of command can be fraught with dire consequences. As AnglicanFirst and Darkwing note, most persons serving in hazardous circumstances become very much aware of their need for a personal relationship with their Creator, without any external prompting.
As a minor point. . . Er. What constitutional rights? So far as I’m aware, raising one’s right hand places one under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and constitutional rights take a back seat to them.
[blockquote]So far as I’m aware, raising one’s right hand places one under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and constitutional rights take a back seat to them.[/blockquote]
Umm… no. See, this little thing called the Constitution is the “Supreme Law of the Land”. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is a law, passed by Congress, which is not allowed to pass laws that violate the Constitution.
Our troops being force fed Christianity? Cool. Souls are at stake.
AP+
As a Navy chaplain, who has done a combat tour with Marines, I can say with a high degree of certainty that our service members are not being force fed Christianity. As Chaplains we are free to practice our faith openly and we can indeed evangelize as long as the service member approaches us. I had Christian, Muslims, Atheists, Budhists and even a few Methodists in our battalion. All were allowed to practice their faith and all were given appropriate pastoral care. A chaplain who forces his faith (we have Jewish, Muslim and Budhist chaplains) on his flock will lose credibility in short order.
As someone mentioned above, there are few atheist in combat. We prayed together before many mission and no one walked out on the prayer. One of my “kids” was muslim and he thanked me for the prayers every time.
I did have an NCO who was forcing his faith on Marines is his department. He was disciplined severely for doing so. Yes, it does happen on rare occasions.
This is all part of a bigger goal to shut down the Chaplain Corps and to remove all religious influence in the military. It’s totally ironic, because one of the chaplain’s duties, whether they are Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, and I suppose now there must be some Muslim chaplains as well, is to be the “conscience” of the commander, and one of their responsibilities is to advise a commander when the chaplain believes he or she or those under their command are doing something ethically or morally wrong.
I think you are asking for real problems if you take religious morality out of the military. A totally amoral military with the power that ours has is a scary thing to contemplate.
#8 frreed: I have had some discussions with a senior Air Force chaplain (where my info comes from in my prior response), who’s an ordained minister of my denomination and presently attends our church, that he’s really worried about where all this is going. Like you, he says they are scrupulous about following the rules and he is not aware of any forced proselytization, but the Air Force in particular has taken big hits arising out of the claims against the Air Force Academy.
We keep hearing rumors about doing away with the Chaplain Corps. That is mostly from the radical atheist activists. In my experience chaplains are well received by the command and yes we do serve as advisors to our commanding officers. Ask a Marine Colonel, or General for that matter, and I think you can be assured that chaplains, regardless of faith group, will be around for a long, long time.
I agree, freed, #11. The presence of a chaplaincy corp in the services is essential to the spiritual welfare of the troops. Having watched Ken Burn’s powerful documentary, “The War,” and seeing the utter horror of combat and the effect it has on the soldiers, I can readily imagine how important it was for those men to have a padre nearby. I wouldn’t be surprised if that it were ever to come to the abolition of the corp, which as i said will never happen, the men and women in each unit would identify the most “padre-like” person in their unit and designate him or her for their chaplain.
Most people, even in the military, are not fully aware of the role of the chaplain under the law. By law it becomes the gov’t’s role to substitute for the ‘church’ under the theory that there is no other church around. Therefore, people like the ACLU, Weinstein and the American Jewish Congress have far more limited standing than they may think they have to ‘correct’ what they perceive as too much religion. There is a Jewish temple located within the main chapel at the Air Force Academy. Colorado Springs is the HQ for Focus on the Family and several other Christian organizations.