Upon being commissioned or reenlisting in the United States military, all officers, including military chaplains, take the following oath:

‘I , _____ , do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.’

Now, you would think that particularly to a chaplain, swearing an oath to God would make that oath inviolable, right? Not so in the case of Captain Sonny Hernandez, an Air Force Reserve chaplain for the 445th Airlift Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, who, in complete defiance of the oath that he swore to God to defend and bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution, has now publicly proclaimed that being loyal to the Constitution “serves Satan.”

In a September 12 article on barbwire.com titled “Christian Service Members: Avoid Supporting or Accommodating Evil!,” Chaplain Hernandez, a self-proclaimed “Bible-believing” Christian who considers any Christians who do not subscribe to his hardcore fundamentalist beliefs to be a “counterfeit Christians,” and has referred to other Christian chaplains as “false prophets,” crossed a line that seems inconceivable that even he would cross — he has flat out and very publicly instructed members of the U.S. military to disregard and disobey the Constitution.

I’ve written in the past about Chaplain Hernandez’s misogynistic statements about the military having female chaplains, expressing his opinion that “women are not called to be pastors, and since a chaplain is supposed to be a pastor in uniform — it exposes their rebellion,” and more recently about his outrageous proclamation that “There is no such thing as transgenderism,” but even these things, as egregious and appalling as they are, almost pale in comparison to his telling service members that merely supporting the constitutional right of their fellow service members to practice the religion of their choice means that they have been deceived and serve Satan, and as his headline says, are supporting evil.

I urge everyone to please read Chaplain Hernandez’s entire article, a taste of which is found in the following excerpts (emphasis added):

Counterfeit Christians in the Armed forces will appeal to the Constitution, and not Christ, and they have no local church home — which means they have no accountability for their souls (Heb. 13:17). This is why so many professing Christian service members will say: ‘We ‘support everyone’s right’ to practice their faith regardless if they worship a god different from ours because the Constitution protects this right.’

Christian service members who openly profess and support the rights of Muslims, Buddhists, and all other anti-Christian worldviews to practice their religions — because the language in the Constitution permits — are grossly in error, and deceived.

Also, is it wrong for a professing Christian service member to say, ‘I support the rights of all Americans to practice their faith since the Constitution protects their rights?’ Absolutely!

“There is no exegetical support, and no moral justification for any Christian service member to openly profess or support the alleged rights of anti-Christians. Christian service members must share the Gospel with unbelievers so they can be saved, not support unbelievers to worship their false gods that will lead them to hell.”

No, Chaplain Hernandez, the right to religious freedom is not just an “alleged” right, nor is this right something that the Constitution merely “permits.” It is a right that the Constitution mandates!

Chaplain Hernandez concludes his article by instructing his fellow Bible-believing chaplains on how to use semantics to evade their duty to provide for the religious needs of all service members, so that they don’t have to “support or accommodate evil,” telling them to turn the tables on anyone who criticizes them for not accommodating all service members by using the following nearly unintelligible script, or, in other words, baffling them with bullsh*t:

Therefore, if military chaplains are criticized by individuals for not accommodating all service members, and are told to resign from the military since they cannot care for all, just ask them this question: ‘Does the free exercise of religion apply to ‘all’ service members or only service members whose beliefs concur with yours?’ If the response is: ‘Military chaplains must provide for all or they are not fit to serve,’ they are now guilty of violating their own criteria of providing for all, since they are establishing a religion that requires every service member to accommodate evil even if their sincerely held convictions prohibit them from doing so. However, if they respond to the question by saying that the free exercise of religion is for ‘all,’ simply tell them: Thank you very much.

Is Chaplain Hernandez just some lone, rogue chaplain whose outlandish statements against the Constitution should be dismissed as the ravings of an isolated zealot? Not by a long shot. There are many, many more “Bible-believing” chaplains in our military just like him, as I’ve previously written. Chaplain Hernandez is just the most brazen and prolific writer among these hardcore fundamentalist Bible-believing chaplains, but he is far from alone in the anti-constitutional Christian supremacist opinions that spew forth from his keyboard.

Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the organization for which I work, had this to say after reading Chaplain Hernandez’s most recent article:

MRFF has received many complaints from Air Force personnel over the last few years about Chaplain Hernandez. In response to these complaints, MRFF filed an official request for a Department of Defense Inspector General’s (DoD/IG) investigation in April of this year. Since that time, MRFF has filed several additional charges against Hernandez, and has been advised by the DoD/IG that the investigation presently remains in open and ongoing investigatory status. With Hernandez’s latest article so blatantly and indisputably advocating the subordinating of the U.S. Constitution to his personal Christian ideology, MRFF has directed its legal counsel in this matter to prepare a comprehensive legal analysis addressing MRFF’s opinion that by his public publishing of his advice and advocacy contained in this article, Hernandez violated his Oath of Office as a commissioned officer, as well as Title 18, U.S. Code § 2387′s criminal prohibitions against counseling or urging insubordination, disloyalty, or ‘refusal of duty’ to other military members. That analysis will be furnished to the DoD/IG’s Office shortly.

As heinous as Hernandez’s fundamentalist Christian bigotry and unconstitutional behavior have been, and in spite of numerous official complaints lodged against him by MRFF over the course of nearly two and half years, the Air Force has yet to discipline him in any way. On the contrary, he has been lauded and received awards, such as being named the ‘Company Grade Officer of the Year’ for his unit at Wright Patterson AFB. The utter travesty of actually honoring such a deplorable and repulsive example of an Air Force officer with official accolades is beyond comprehension.′