Let me also add this - the budgets of these organizations have increased considerably over the last few years and their efforts have sped up considerably. In other words, as the political influence and clout of the Christian right has ebbed somewhat recently, fundamentalist influence in the military appears to be growing. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is the only organization devoted to fighting abuses of religious liberty in the US military. Of the roughly 6,000 complaints MRFF has received from US military members, approximately 90% have been from Christians.

Here is a PDF of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's most recent lawsuit, filed in mid September 2007, that alleges a widespread pattern of religious abuses in the military.

An earlier MRFF lawsuit with similar allegations and centering around the "Christian Embassy" video (see below). That lawsuit was dismissed for "lack of standing" but many of MRFF's charges were later vindicated in a Pentagon Inspector General Report(link to PDF of report)

Great Atomic Power: The Louvin Brothers [1952] Refrain: Are you (are you) ready

For the great atomic power?

Will you rise and meet your Savior in the air?

Will you shout or will you cry

When the fire rains from on high?

Are you ready for the great atomic power? Do you fear this man's invention

That they call atomic power

Are we all in great confusion

Do we know the time or hour

When a terrible explosion

May rain down upon our land

Meting horrible destruction

Blotting out the works of man Refrain There is one way to escape it

Be prepared to meet the lord

Give your heart and soul to Jesus

He will be your shielding sword

He will surely stay beside you

And you'll never taste of death

For your soul will fly to safety

And eternal peace and rest Refrain There's an army who can conquer

All the enemy's great band

It's the regiment of Christians

Guided by the Savior's hand

When the mushrooms of destruction

Fall in all it's fury great

God will surely save His children

From that awful awful fate Refrain The Louvin Brothers [1952]

Great Atomic Power

(Ira Louvin-Charles Louvin-Buddy Bain)

MGM 11 277

image, right: click on picture to see short promotional video from Military Ministry, which is one of the several ministries from Campus Crusade For Christ that target the US military and whose Christian Embassy ministry evangelizes in the US Pentagon. Another Campus Crusade ministry, Officers Christian Fellowship, has roughly 15,000 members in the US military officer corps. Campus Crusade is only one of many fundamentalist, evangelical, and typically apocalyptic religious organizations that target the US military for recruitment, and the operating budgets of many of these organizations have greatly increased in the last several years.

Raising Up A 'Godly Military'

The Officer's Christian Fellowship motto is: Christian officers exercising Biblical leadership to raise up a godly military. The OCF has roughly 15,000 members in the officer corps of the US military, on around 200 US bases worldwide. Christian Embassy evangelizes in the Pentagon, on Capital Hill, and among foreign diplomats. One top Pentagon official claims that there are more than 350 Christian Embassy affiliated Bible study classes, using Christian Embassy Bible study curriculum, held regularly among the 25 to 30 thousand members of the Pentagon. Military Ministries targets enlisted members of the military. The three ministries are subsidiaries of the Campus Crusade For Christ, which promotes fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christianity and whose founder, Bill Bright, promoted the formation of "cell groups" (originally a communist tactic) and said in the 1970's that Campus Crusade was a "conspiracy to overthrow the world" . Campus Crusade For Christ ministries are not the only fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christian ministries evangelizing in the United States military, and the yearly operating budgets of these nonprofit ministries may range, in aggregate, up to 100 million dollars or more. Some of these ministries also receive US government contracts and target the children of military families. "Christian Embassy" For a quick overview, "Christian Embassy" is a fundamentalist group that evangelizes in the Pentagon, and at any given point there are as many as twenty or so high level Pentagon military officers and civilians leading regular "Christian Embassy" Bible study lessons. Christian Embassy lesson plans use terms such as "spiritual warfare", call faith a "force multiplier", have titles such as "Warfare in Christ", and include lessons on "wifely submission". Christian Embassy's website has featured a description of "grace" rendered in the tale of an adult belt-whipping a child. The image, below, links to the "Christian Embassy" video. In the Pentagon Inspector General report summarizing the ensuing investigation about the fact that top Pentagon officials had appeared, in uniform and filmed within the Pentagon, to endorse a partisan, fundamentalist Christian group that targets the Pentagon for it evangelizing efforts, one of the Pentagon officials appearing in the video said he thought Christian Embassy was a "quasi federal" entity because it had been given, for decades, access to the Pentagon. (click on image to watch video)



Most, if not all, of the Pentagon officials who appeared in the Christian Embassy video have since received career promotions. For example, Pete Geren is now Secretary of The United States Army, and Bob Caslen is Commandant of Cadets at West Point

The US military, from the Pentagon on down, has become dominated by a particular, sectarian form of Christianity with a religious outlook that is not at all representative of the American public:

It is fundamentalist and apocalyptic, and inherent in the outlook is an expectation of an immanent and catastrophic religious war with Islam. Typically part of the package are also Christian Zionist beliefs, expectations that during the end-time, expected very soon, Israel will devastated during the battle of Armageddon, after which the surviving "remnant" of Jews will convert (or be converted) to Christianity. That is to say that what is coming to be the dominant, institutionalized outlook in the United States military includes an expectation, for Israel's near future, of inevitable and close to genocidal slaughter, in a vision to rival or even exceed public statements on Israel from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On the domestic front, this sectarian form of Christianity tends to evince Creationist, "Young Earth" even, views. Along with the ideological package tends to go, also, Global Warming denialism, fake American history, nearly Medieval views on women's rights and reproductive rights, and a complaint narrative holding that the Unites States, in the mid to late 20th Century, "walked away from God" thus causing, allegedly, widespread moral decay and a prolonged national decline. This, so the story goes, is the fault of "secularists" who have stolen America's true, Christian heritage and chased God from the public sphere.

There is no precedent for this MRFF research project. It is groundbreaking, and there are only a handful of experts on the subject - they all work for, and with MRFF. We know this because collectively we have logged probably, at this point, thousands of hours of research time. So, if anyone else were doing significant research into this subject we'd likely know.

Our research forms a significant part of MRFF's new lawsuit that seeks to demonstrate a pervasive pattern, in the US military, of the abuse of religious liberty rights of military members.

To be honest if anyone had predicted, early last Spring, that in coming months I would demonstrate that the United States Pentagon was riddled with apocalyptic Christian religious belief, or that I'd uncover evidence that the Pentagon might actually be promoting those apocalyptic views to US troops in Iraq I might have quipped "yeah, sure, and monkeys will fly out my butt." Well...

No monkeys yet, but very little these days would surprise me now that I've discovered a 2005 case of an apocalyptic evangelist preaching in the Pentagon courtyard during lunch hours and found the Pentagon promoting, in several different ways, apocalyptic Christianity to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Surveying the scope of efforts to evangelize the military has been an enormous undertaking, and many facets of the enterprise have only come very slowly into focus in my mind. Initially I wouldn't have thought all the Christian "para church" ministries targeting the military were apocalyptic Dispensationalist, but that's proven to be the case. And, I wouldn't have believed the Pentagon could possibly be promoting such views, but lately I've come to the opinion that has become unofficial DoD policy, and the image, above, is only one data point in a growing mosaic I'm building that, as its filled in, seems to depict a US military that has, in the last few decades, changed radically and in ways that must be taken seriously.





image, below: the Lifeway/Army deal described, in text of picture, is not an anomaly. It is part of a pattern that I will soon outline in future posts and writing. We can safely assume that the "Christian materials" in question conform with the "rapture ready" theological stance of Lifeway's parent organization, the Southern Baptist Convention.









The Problem With "Nuts"

It's currently in fashion, among many public voices that address the American Christian right, to describe those lumped into that fuzzy grouping as "nuts".

But here's the problem...

The problem with brushing Christian fundamentalists off as "nuts" is that they have become a dominant force in the most powerful military on Earth. The "nuts" have the Pentagon, they're around nuclear weapons, and they're pushing for a religious war between Christianity and Islam.

The "nuts" appear now to be, based on the research of Chris Rodda and me, largely running America's military. They haven't fully converted the military (yet) to fundamentalist Christianity and their particular, bellicose vision of Jesus but they are aggressively pursuing that end: converting all US military personnel into government funded fundamentalist missionaries for Christ, in uniform.

Calling fundamentalists "nuts" - while they, meanwhile, are busily (and successfully) converting the United States military soldier by soldier, sailor by sailor, USAF cadet by USAF cadet, into a Christian nationalist and apocalyptic engine revving up for Armageddon - is in my opinion indicative of a very deep sort of societal dysfunction.

Yes, I do find efforts, of Christians who try to exorcise demons from their busted cars, to be blackly funny, and evangelists who try to rebut Evolution with bananas or jars of peanut butter are just ridiculous. Actually I've even recently written on the subject myself, in a meditation provoked by a short God-Tube video which promotes the notion that kitchen blenders can become satanic or demon-infested and thus electrocute their owners. So, even though I wouldn't call people who harbor such ideas nuts I can understand why some see those approaches to car repair and kitchen appliances as "nutty" - such beliefs are not substantially different from those of classic cargo cultists. Where does stuff come from ? - secret magic formulas that conjure down planeloads of "cargo". Why do cars break down ? - Demons. Satan

But, labeling people with such beliefs as "nuts" is a convenient way of dismissing them as ineffectual and that can hinder actual, clinical observation of what they're up to.

Per Sun Tzu (whose work is required reading in many US military officer curricula) it is wise to learn all of can about one's adversary, with the wisest default strategic position being that one's adversary constitutes a deadly threat and is thus worthy of the utmost respect. Thus, unless required for tactical reasons, taunts are generally inadvisable.

Over the course of the last six months I have become one of a tiny handful of experts on the influence of the fundamentalist Christian right in the US military. It was unexpected, and what truly floors me is that no one has previously thought to pay attention and I attribute that, in part, to dismissals of the fundamentalist Christian right as "crazy".

Fundamentalist Christians tend hold beliefs that I disagree with and might characterize as types of magical thinking, but I've come to understand that people who I think harbor localized pockets of insanity (as we all tend to, each in our own way) can nonetheless be astonishingly effective. One way of thinking about this is by way of a figure-ground reversal.

So :

Who is crazier ? The "A's" say the "B's" are crazy because of their religious beliefs... Meanwhile the "B's" are working, quite methodically and with tremendous determination and conviction, to convert all members of the United States military to their religious beliefs and have been strikingly successful, to the extent that they've now enlisted the machinery of the state, in the military, to help out with their evangelism efforts. But the "A's", during the 20 or so years that project has been underway, are almost totally oblivious. The question is - which group is crazier, the "A's" or the "B's" ? One definition of insanity might be "an outlook or set of beliefs that impede either ability to engage with consensus reality ('insanity' vis a vis society) or impede ability to deal with basic survival issues, at a practical level (paying bills, cleaning, etc.) or in simple biological terms (eating, etc.)." In the case above what's notable is that the "A's" have labeled the "B's" and then simply ignored them, perhaps in the belief that the religious beliefs of the "B's" render them ineffectual. Meanwhile, the "B's" - who most certainly have noticed being labeled by the "A's" - proceed to take advantage of their status of quasi-invisibility, for having been been dismissed by the "A's", to methodically take over, in religious and ideological terms, the most powerful military on the planet - which possesses a nuclear weapons capacity to vaporize a good deal of the Earth's surface and maybe even kill of most of it's biological life. The "B's" in fact seem to believe that such catastrophic destruction would be a fine thing. That's built into their religious outlook which was the reason the "A's" dismissed them in the first place. So which group is "nuttier" - the "B's" with "nutty" views who nonetheless concocted a very effective strategy for spreading those views in a manner that might threaten or even define the fate of the Earth, or the "A's" who let that happen ?

The image, right, is from a current Fort Benning chaplains page entitled "Protestant Religious Education".

"Coerced Religious Practice Americans United has received reports from former and current cadets — confirmed by members of the U.S. Air Force Academy’s "Permanent Party" - that Academy faculty, staff, members of the Chaplains’ Office, and upperclass cadets frequently pressure members of the Cadet Wing to attend chapel and undertake religious instruction. ...We have been informed, for example, that, during a Basic Cadet Training session attended by a team of observers fromthe Yale Divinity School, one of the Academy chaplains — Major Warren "Chappy" Watties — led a Protestant worship service in which he encouraged the attending cadets to return to their tents

and proselytize cadets who had not attended the service, with the declared penalty for failure to accept this proselytization being to "burn in the fires of hell." Although literally hundreds of witnesses can attest to the fact that Major Watties ran the service and encouraged attendees to proselytize their non-attending classmates, we are informed that the Academy has downplayed the significance of the incident, reporting to the Air Staff at the Pentagon that the chaplain who conducted that service and encouraged proselytization of cadets was not a member of the Academy’s Permanent Party but instead was merely a visiting Air Force reservist. That report is incorrect: Major Watties is a full-time chaplain at the Academy. Indeed, he enjoys the distinction of having been named as the U.S. Air Force’s current Chaplain of the Year. What is more, the Air Staff has now expressly condoned Major Watties’ actions — at the same time that the Academy is denying that Major Watties ever made the statements reported by the Yale Divinity School team and the other attendees at the service. See Pam Zubeck, Air Force deems chaplain’s call appropriate, G

AZETTE

(Colo. Springs), Apr. 27, 2005." - From Report of Americans United

for Separation of Church and State

on Religious Coercion and Endorsement of Religion at the United States Air Force Academy source :