Attacks on Christianity in the Air Force; Navy Chaplains
The Washington Post exemplifies the anti-Christian attitude increasingly common in America in its article, “Intolerance Found at Air Force Academy”. The subheadline undercuts this already: “Military Report Criticizes Religious Climate but Does Not Cite Overt Bias”; that is, they couldn’t find any actual intolerance. This story has been little reported, but it is full of ironies. People purporting to support religious freedom actually are engaged in suppressing it– just look at what they say they are doing, which is to stop people from making religious statements. And I suspect what is really going on is a power struggle between the mainline denominations which have traditionally monopolized the armed forces chaplaincies and Christians who are actually believe the stuff rather than mouth pieties and act nice. I’ll quote two stories: one about the Air Force in which mainliners are complaining that evangelicals display their faith, and one about the Navy in which evangelicals complain that mainliners shut them out of chaplaincy jobs. First, the Air Force:
Air Force Lt. Gen. Roger A. Brady announced that his 16-member review team found a “perception of religious bias” in more than 300 interviews with cadets representing all faiths and with faculty members and administrators. Brady also found that there was a failure at the academy “to fully accommodate all members’ needs and a lack of awareness over where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expression of beliefs.”…
Brady’s study found glaring examples of that insensitivity and recommended that seven specific incidents be investigated further.
What are those glaring examples? Well…
Examples of questionable behavior highlighted in the report included the school’s head football coach hanging a “Team Jesus” banner in the locker room in November 2004; the academy’s commandant sending out a schoolwide message on the National Day of Prayer and encouraging cadets to use the “J for Jesus” hand signal; and senior school personnel signing on to a Christian advertisement citing scripture in the base newspaper.
Also detailed in the report was an incident in February 2004, when cadets reported their peers had placed fliers on the more than 4,000 place settings at the cadet dining facility and in other common areas promoting the film “The Passion of the Christ.”
“Cadets felt they were being proselytized and pressured to see the movie,” the report said….
Academic freedom does not allow faculty members or students to express any signs of sympathy with Christianity, it seems, or even to promote Roman Catholic films. And for students to try to convert each other should be forbidden, just as it is forbidden in Moslem countries for Christians to try to convert Moslems.
Former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, chairman of the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors, said ,,,
“Some people thought, apparently, that they were doing the right thing by expressing their faith, but they failed to understand the impact it would have on people with other faiths or with no faith,” Gilmore said. “They understand that now. I think they recognize that some faculty members probably went over the line.”
So now there will be religious freedom, because the chairman of the board of visitors has warned everyone that they had better not express any support for Christianity or they’ll get into trouble. Congressmen have weighed in too, to suppress these intolerant manifestations of religion. If we don’t stop people from being religious, soon we’ll have no religious freedom left at all, will we?
That’s one part of the story. The other part is that this Air Force report apparently was initiated by mainline chaplains who don’t like evangelicals and amateurs muscling in on their turf and acting as if Christianity actually is true. Here are some excerpts from a Navy story of a few years ago, “EVANGELICAL CHAPLAINS COMPLAIN OF NAVY BIAS,” By Tom Bowman, The Baltimore Sun, in Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA) August 22, 1998 Saturday, Pg. B4.
Navy Capt. George W. Linzey, a second-generation evangelical Protestant chaplain, says his father told him long before his career began what he should expect.
“George, there are three chaplain corps: Catholic, high-church Protestant and the rest of us — the low-church Protestants,” said his dad, describing an informal caste system. “That is the pecking order.”
Three decades later, Linzey, 46, an ordained minister in the Pentecostal Church of God and a 23-year veteran of the Navy chaplain corps, and his fellow evangelicals say they are still treated as “second-class citizens.”
Most of the high-profile jobs in the chaplain corps go to “high-church” Christians, which include Catholics and mainline liberal Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians — all united by their emphasis on sacrament and ritual.
But the highest percentage of Navy personnel — nearly half — consider themselves evangelical or “low-church” Protestants, such as Baptists and fundamentalists, who tend to be more conservative in their reading of the Bible and put more stress on preaching in their worship….
Long-simmering resentments over alleged “denominational discrimination” spilled forth this summer during Senate consideration of the nomination of Rear Adm. A. Byron Holderby, a Lutheran minister nominated by President Clinton to be chief of chaplains. After his nomination, Holderby was accused of discrimination by a chaplain from a competing Lutheran sect. He has since been cleared by the Pentagon inspector general and two weeks ago won Senate confirmation. The low-church fundamentalists took advantage of the case to speak broadly about their troubles within the 900-member chaplain corps, which addresses the spiritual needs of the 549,000 men and women in the Navy and Marine Corps….
* Of the 17 most influential jobs in the chaplain corps, eight are held by members of high-church Protestant sects, whose members include 15 percent of Navy personnel, and five by Catholics, who account for 24 percent of the Navy. The remaining four are held by low-church Protestants, who account for 41 percent — by far the largest religious group of Navy personnel, Pentagon statistics show. Most of the remaining 20 percent listed no religious affiliation.
* During the past 30 years, only one low-church Protestant has been chief of chaplains. Six of the past eight have been either Catholic or Lutheran. Lutherans account for about 2 percent of Navy personnel.
* This fiscal year, five Navy captains have been told to retire: Four are low-church Protestant chaplains and one is Catholic. No high-church Protestants have been given a push toward retirement, though each group accounts for a third of the 85 Navy captains in the chaplain corps.
…
Evangelicals say few of them ever get into other top posts, such as Naval Academy chaplain, chairman of the Pacific and Atlantic fleets and director of the Navy chaplain school. Chaplain corps officials counter that those are mostly administrative jobs and that the more important functions are performed by chaplains aboard ship and on Marine bases.
…
Unlike other branches of the Navy, promotions to top posts in the chaplain corps are made by just a handful of officials — the chief of chaplains, the deputy and the chaplain detailer. The chief of chaplains is selected by the secretary of the Navy and the deputy is selected by an admirals’ board, chaired by the incoming chief of chaplains. …
Linzey and other chaplains say the chaplain corps has ignored their complaints, in part because the evangelical churches lack the organization to apply pressure.
…
Yet a federal judge found evidence more than a decade ago, when Wilkins was denied promotion to lieutenant commander, that there was a policy in place at that time to favor Catholics — potentially at the expense of low-church Protestants. As a result, the Navy agreed to scrap two practices: that one of two chaplain corps admirals would always be a Catholic and that Catholics would always make up 40 percent of the promotion board.
Thus, as in so much of America, what is going on is a war between atheists, secular Jews, and mainline Christians on the one hand, and evangelicals on the other. Recall how it was the mainline Christians who fought hardest to keep evangelicals off the airwaves years ago, and how it is they whose budgets are declining because of competition.