Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Modder is about to lose his job, and if you believe him, it’s because he’s a Christian.

Modder’s Navy commanders just sent him a “detachment for cause” letter. There’s debate over what precisely the cause is; to Modder, it’s because he simply shared his faith. To the Navy, it’s because he provided “inappropriate counseling” to sailors.That’s a vague term, but The Military Times provides details from the Navy’s letter that illustrate how the chaplain’s commanders define it. According to sailors who’d seen him for counseling, Modder regularly inserted fundamentalist dogma into sessions.

A few of his greatest hits: He told a woman that she had “shamed herself in the eyes of God” for having premarital sex and “berated” another for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. He wasn’t fond of LGBT people, either; he told one sailor that homosexuality was sinful because “the penis was meant for the vagina and not for the anus.” He also insisted that he had a special ability to “save” LGBT people from their sins.

“Commanders felt that allowing vulnerable sailors to be counseled by Modder is ‘a recipe for tragedy,’ according to the letter,” the Times reports.

It’s easy to see why. And Modder, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps before attending seminary and becoming a chaplain for the Navy, surely understood that his behavior violated regulations. The soon-to-be-former chaplain doesn’t actually deny this in public statements; he just insists that he should be able to violate them anyway.

“The military now wants a 2.0 chaplain instead of a legacy chaplain,” he told Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “They want a chaplain to accommodate policy that contradicts Scripture.”He added, “This new generation is very secular and very open sexually. The values that the military once held – just like the Boy Scouts of America – are changing. The culture wants this. Culture is colliding with truth. That’s at the heart of this.”

Modder isn’t actually wrong that America’s cultural values have shifted. They have – many of us would say for the better, especially when it comes to LGBT rights. That’s what cultural values do. And its very nature dictates that the military must shift right along with them – at a glacial pace, some critics say, but shift nonetheless. Its ranks are comprised of individuals from all beliefs and backgrounds. They aren’t united by one faith, and indeed they never were. They are united by purpose and that purpose is an entirely secular one: the defense of the United States.

If Modder’s purpose is at odds with the military’s, that’s on him. He can hardly claim ignorance as a defense.

Despite this, he has retained the Liberty Institute to fight his dismissal. “Chaplain Modder is a military hero who has put his life on the line to serve our nation. No chaplain should ever be punished for ministering to others according to their faith. That is the chaplain's job; it's exactly what they are supposed to do,” the group’s president, Kelly Shackleford, said in a public statement.

On its surface, that statement isn’t exactly wrong. The trouble lies in how an individual chaplain interprets the ministry function of their position. To Modder, it meant proselytization, and that conflicted with the Navy’s intentions for his office.

The military has an obvious interest in protecting the mental well-being of its sailors, which is precisely why it retains chaplains. The intent is to provide sailors with a safe space to receive counseling from a co-religionist. But the military chaplaincy isn’t intended to function as a vehicle for fundamentalist evangelism. The Navy isn’t a mission field.Modder isn’t being fired for his beliefs. He’s being fired because he didn’t do his job. And if the Religious Right really wants to respect our troops, they’ll stop treating the military like it’s just another pawn in the culture wars.