Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Or, do those headlights coming straight at me mean that Heaven Can Wait?
The View From The Virgin Islands
By John McCarthy
TMV Columnist
Should the United States be supporting faith speech through its employment of military chaplains in branches of the American armed services?
The Constitution is clear on the subject of the Separation of Church and State – it expressly forbids it – in the First Amendment.
So why do we then employ 2,900 of them? And what faiths are they? The Joint Chiefs of Staff won’t give a breakdown.
Especially when some of the “Christian” churches represented in the D.O.D. profess that the Pope is “the Antichrist” and that an “Armageddon” is coming soon.
No firm figures are available from the Department of Defense – who said they are actively researching the answer to my question and gave me reference # 140213-000064.
I think it’s safe to say that the U.S. government does not employ any Scientologist chaplains, but without a firm answer from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey – who’s to say for sure?
The U.S. government’s own military statistics suggest that it discourages “charismatic” evangelistic religions such as Baptists, Pentecostals, from obtaining the rank of “chaplain” because they don’t always tow the party line of steering a course towards a religious universalism or pluralism that favors no particular religion over any other.
Two Baptist ministers, Lt. Commander Dan Klender, a Navy chaplain, and Maj. Steven Firtko, a retired Army chaplain, say they were “openly ridiculed and harassed” during the D.O.D.’s Clinical Pastoral Education Center Program in San Diego.
So now their church, the Conservative Baptist Association of America, is suing Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs Eric Shinseki – because they say they were denied the right to “quote the Bible” and “pray in the name of Jesus.”
For their part, Nancy Dietsch of the Department of Veterans Affairs says Lt. Commander Klender and Maj. Firtko were “bullying other classmates and refusing to honor other faith groups.”
Which brings us back to the point of: why is the United States military in the business of dispensing religion in the first place? The old expression is: there are no atheists in foxholes. But there are also no atheists – as chaplains – on aircraft carriers or anywhere else in the military – because the D.O.D. forbids it. So why favor a watered-down version of humanism dispensed by mostly Christian chaplains?
It’s a question that the military is not likely to want to answer any time soon. So the question again becomes why do it at all? The late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens summed it up this way:
“I don’t think that we should be paying for chaplains … I don’t think that the U.S. government should be employing any … [President] James Madison, co-author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment was very adamant on the point, and very clear. There shouldn’t be … it’s flat-out unconstitutional to pay or employ a chaplain … to be in the Armed Forces.”
If seventy percent of all Americans are Christians, does that mean that 70 percent of military chaplains should be Christian? And if so, do we then determine the exact breakdown of Christian churches nationwide and then “aim high” to get that number in the military to correspond exactly to it – in the interests of fairness? Or do we determine the faiths of the armed forces troops when they enlist – and then set the bar there in order to be most fair?
At a recent meeting of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) said that allowing non-believers to become military counselors “would make a mockery of the chaplaincy.”
“The last thing in the world we would want to see was a young soldier who may be dying and they’re at a field hospital and the chaplain is standing over that person saying to them: ‘If you die here, there is no hope for you in the future.’”
In another scenario, a fallen soldier – let’s say he’s a Muslim-Jew-Hindi-Buddhist –lies dying in a dusty oil field in Fallujah – and the U.S. military chaplain leans over to him and asks him if he has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior?
Which is worse? It just depends on whom you’re asking. If you’re a Nihilist, you not only don’t believe in anything, you don’t even believe in Nihilism itself.
“They don’t believe in anything,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) said in the same fact-finding hearing. “I can’t imagine an atheist accompanying a notification team as they go into some family’s home to let them have the worst news of their life and this guy says: ‘You know, that’s it – your son’s just worms, I mean worm food.’”
Not a very likely scenario, and I wouldn’t say Mr. Conoway’s high up on the food chain by saying so.
But if the military forbids its chaplains from praying the name of Jesus or quoting from the Bible – it’s hard to see how a born humanist wouldn’t deliver the message of consolation more convincingly – it’s what they’re used to doing – as human beings.
Apparently, as it stands now, U.S. military chaplains can preach a non-denominational message, but cannot proselytize. But if Klender and Firtko win their case against Secretary Shinseki, the question then becomes how does the military determine if a chaplain has gone too far in spreading the good word?
No religion preaches that it is second best – they all firmly profess that they are the one, the truth and the only – so the military is asking them to stand down from what they firmly believe.
In a military that cannot fairly discriminate between one religion or another – standing up to the two Baptist ministers fighting for the right to Speak The Word might one day make the office of military chaplain – for all faiths – obsolete.
There is one faith that believes that ALL world religions are legitimate – they are called Baha’i’s – Sting is a member of that group. Maybe the military top brass should pay more of THEM to be chaplains – that is if they have even one to begin with?
As Peter Tosh sang: “Stand firm, or you’re gonna feed worm.” By the way, the D.O.D. did respond to my question – you can click on it –
(https://kb.defense.gov/app/account/questions/detail.i_id/260538) but it’s a dead link.
They suggest that if I like I can ask it again another way.
© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House
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Publisher of the Virgin Islands Free Press at http://vifreepress.com