– April 18, 2014

Selected Article Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — The Army plans to support a National Day of Prayer event closely associated with an evangelical Christian organization despite a protest from a group that wants to crack down on what it calls fundamentalist Christian domination of the U.S. military.

In a letter Thursday to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, demanded the Defense Department withdraw support from a May 1 Capitol Hill prayer event. It is being organized in part by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a non-profit evangelical group chaired by Shirley Dobson, wife of evangelist James Dobson.

Army officials on Friday said there were no plans to back out of the event. The Army still intends to send a chaplain and the Military District Washington will contribute a color guard, a vocalist and a military band.

Weinstein told Hagel he had no issue with the non-sectarian National Day of Prayer itself as established by President Harry Truman, but said the NDP Task Force had taken over the event “to promote their rapaciously exclusivist religion as the quasi-official religion of the nation.”

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