IF ALL THE people involved were civilians, there would be nothing especially controversial about a popular website, PLUS, which invites American Christians to “pray at lunchtime for the United States”. But the site’s main author, John Teichert, describes himself as an “active duty brigadier-general who has served in the United States Air Force” since 1994.

For critics like Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which campaigns for church-state separation in the armed forces, this sort of thing epitomises an ever-escalating trend. In the era of Donald Trump, they allege, fundamentalist Christians in uniform have felt freer than ever to test the boundaries set by the constitution and take advantage of their rank when disseminating their own reading of their faith and of American history. The MRFF is not alone in this complaint: last year, at least two other secularist groups formally protested to the Pentagon over the fact that service personnel were being bamboozled into attending religious ceremonies, compromising their own religious freedom.

In several ways, the PLUS website is carefully crafted. It offers the disclaimer that “the views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defence or its components.” The reference to lunch suggests that people are not being asked to give up professional time. The author’s surname is not given, although it is an open secret. The Pentagon has defended the website as a legitimate use of spare time by the officer. On the other hand, as commander of fighter-aircraft testing at Edwards Air Force Base, a giant facility in California, the brigadier-general enjoys huge personal authority and charisma. The MRFF says it is continuing to complain about his site, despite repeated rebuffs from the Pentagon, at the urging of at least 40 service personnel, including believing Christians who say they feel intimidated by the knowledge that one of their commanders is propagating one particular version of the faith.

Mr Weinstein describes this version as “dominionist” Christianity, the idea that earthly institutions should be harnessed to spread the Christian cause. This often goes hand in hand with a particular interpretation of America’s earliest years, which insists that the founding fathers planned to establish a Christian nation, not a religiously neutral one. (Secularist historians disagree.) The PLUS website urges followers to pray for America "to return to its biblical foundation". It also advocates prayers for "Bible-preaching churches, pastors and missionaries", in language often used by non-conformist Christians to differentiate themselves from, say, Catholics who stress the authority of the church as opposed to the Bible alone. Further supplications are proposed for the unborn and for Israel.

In years past, Mr Weinstein says, this way of thinking was especially prevalent in the Air Force, but now he says he observes it in all branches of the American services. He finds it widespread in elite special-forces units, such as the Navy Seals. “The closer you get to the tip of the spear, the more dominionist thinking there is.”

As he uses the term, dominionist Christians should be distinguished carefully from evangelicals, although the two categories do overlap. Many evangelical Christians fully respect the principle of church-state separation and correspondingly keep their faith and its propagation within boundaries that are designed to respect the freedom of others. Among the 60,000 or so supporters of the MRFF, there are many evangelicals, according to Mr Weinstein. Some turn to the MRFF because they feel bullied over religious matters by commanders or chaplains.

About 3,000 chaplains serve the American forces. The overwhelming majority are Protestant, and only a handful cater to minority faiths such as Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. Within the Protestant contingent, a vocal subset make no secret of the fact that they regard chaplaincy as an opportunity for missionary work, rather than for catering to those who already profess their faith.

As in many areas of American life, managing religious affairs in the armed forces will always involve a careful equilibrium between two principles enshrined in the constitution’s First Amendment: the free exercise of faith, and a bar on the state establishment of any particular religion. In that spirit, an official instruction to Air Force officers tells them to:

…balance constitutional protections, for their own free exercise of religion, including individual expressions of religious beliefs, and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion…They must ensure their words and actions cannot reasonably be construed to be official endorsing or disapproving of, or extending preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief.

This seems to imply that officers should never use their professional time, their work e-mail accounts or the authority of their rank to spread one particular idea about religion. But in practice this principle is widely violated, complains Mr Weinstein, himself a retired Air Force officer.

As one example he offers, a recent legal determination by the Pentagon, winkled out by the MRFF, lays down what officers can say at change-of-command ceremonies or personal promotion celebrations. In rather surreal language, it says that in the former kind of ritual, commanders may “briefly thank a Supreme Being (either generally, such as Providence, that Almighty Being, our Lord, or the Supreme Author of All Good; or specifically, such as Allah, Brahman, Christ, Ganesh, God, Yahweh, or even Beelzebub)”. A celebrant may also be invited to offer a prayer to one of these beings.

Mr Weinstein and his supporters believe that these concessions to expressions of faith by commanders are mistaken. The promotion ceremony, while regarded as an individual milestone, is nonetheless conducted in uniform, he observes.

Still, whatever the successes chalked up by the perceived dominionists, there are some countervailing trends in the armed forces. One is the increasing acceptance of LGBT service personnel and same-sex relationships.

In 2015 it was announced that the armed forces' equal-opportunity policies applied to gays and lesbians. Two years ago a married lesbian woman, Kristin Goodwin, was named as commandant of cadets at the US Air Force Academy. Religious conservatives grumbled that to have got so far, she could not have been honest about her sexual orientation during her early career. (In fact, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which military authorities applied in relation to sexuality between 1994 and 2011, would have spared her any difficult questions.)

Last month it was announced that Brigadier-General Goodwin had been removed from her post, pending the investigation of a complaint about which no details have been disclosed. There is no suggestion whatever that her sexual orientation was the basis of that complaint, but her removal was announced prominently on religious conservative websites.

As America prepares for Memorial Day commemorations of its war dead on May 27th, it is fair to say that battles over religion and culture are raging deep inside the armed forces, as in so many other arenas. And for what it may be worth, Brigadier-General Teichert has added Mr Weinstein to the list of people in need of those lunch-time prayers.