By Larry Jones (December 2, 2007)
Many mainline sensible Christians, a number of whom have signed our Call, don’t like the fact that right wing theocrats have made the term “Christian” a dirty word. So, many writers and bloggers now use the term “Christianist” to refer to the theocratic right (those who think their version of “god’s will” trumps the Constitution).
Some people think the theocrats are on the decline. WRONG!!! They are not only all over the airwaves, both radio and TV, but they are firmly entrenched in the strong arm of U.S. imperialism: the military, from the belly of the Pentagon to the training camps, to the Air Force Academy, to the public schools and the troops in Iraq. And most of this is clearly unconstitutional, but the military brass shuck it off as if this is a new and different kind of world. And it will become an increasingly ugly kind of world unless we, along with the great masses of people who are fed up, take dramatic moves to prevent it.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), are the good guys who are exposing the theocrats who want to convert people in the military to their sick take on religion. In an August article MRFF investigated the “freedom packages” which were being packed for soldiers in Iraq by a fundamentalist group called Operation Straight Up, an official member of the Defense Department’s “America Supports You” program.
The boxes were to contain, not cookies or fruitcake, but Bibles, materials aimed at converting people in both English and Arabic, and the apocalyptic computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” based on the Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Christianist novels about the end of the world and how some will be raptured up in the sky when the end times come. But when MRFF exposed the truth about the “freedom packages,” the Pentagon quickly dropped the program. The Pentagon powers-that-be know this kind of thing is illegal, but if no one screams, and certainly George W. won’t, they keep getting away with it.
Operation Straight Up was also planning an entertainment tour to Iraq called the “Military Crusade.” Finally the Pentagon decision makers remembered that people in the Muslim world have a major distaste for crusades. Muslims” last contact with the Crusades was a 400 year slaughter by Medieval Christians. “Oh yeah,” some bright bureaucrat must have said. “Maybe crusade is not the right word.” Actually many Muslims already believe that the current wars are a battle between Christianity and Islam and the fundamentalist Christianists are only making that perception worse.
Another big brouhaha erupted just a year ago over a video made by the “Christian Embassy” inside the Pentagon. The stated purpose of that organization is to convert military personnel, diplomats, Capitol Hill staffers and political appointees to their strange and militaristic religious views. So when the Pentagon allowed the group to drag a film crew and equipment freely around the Pentagon unattended, it was a huge breach of security. But never mind, it’s all for the glory of their horrible version of a god.
The “Christian Embassy” holds regular prayer meetings in the Pentagon and is so entrenched that Air Force Maj. General John J. Catton, Jr. said he assumed the group was a “quasi-federal entity.” The film they made featured military brass in uniform praising the group and its Christianist work. The resulting video is no longer on their website and the Pentagon’s inspector general has now called for unspecified “corrective action.”
According to MRFF the inspector general’s report noted that “a leading Turkish newspaper, Sabah, published an article on Air Force Maj. General Peter Sutton, who is the U.S. liaison to the Turkish military – and who appeared in the Christian Embassy video. The article described Christian Embassy as a “radical fundamentalist sect,” perhaps irreparably damaging Sutton’s primary job objective of building closer ties to the Turkish General Staff, which has expressed alarm at the influence of fundamental Christian groups inside the U.S. military.” This certainly can’t make General David Patraeus happy. He’s the chief guy trying to run the war in Iraq, and he needs the Turkish government to continue to allow U.S. planes bringing personnel and supplies to use Turkish air space.
But it’s not that Patraeus is opposed to fundamentalists invading the military. He recently endorsed the evangelical musical ministry to the armed forces by a country rocker names Eric Horner. A Mother Jones article recently stated that “evangelist Eric Horner’s pop-rock fundamentalist Christian ministry has been doing a thriving business lately as Horner brings his concert-based ministry to the U.S. military bases and VA hospitals to croon and growl out his goulash of “God, USA, more God, and more USA” ballads and rock numbers””
Here’s Patraeus’s endorsement:
“I appreciate your performances for our soldiers and their families. Your support is enormously important to those who wear the uniform and to their families. Thanks very much”
General David Petraeus
U.S. Commander, Iraq 2007
One can only wonder if the good general also endorses the Christian nationalist T-shirts Horner sells at his military concerts with a cross superimposed over U.S. flags. In one of his songs, “Press On,” he tells the soldiers to press on in the name of Jesus.
In November Horner was asked to sing and play at the President’s speech to graduating Army recruits at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. (See Bruce Wilson on the Talk to Action website http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/11/22/104114/07 Talk to Action is a solid source of reliable information on the religious right.)
It almost seems that theocratic fundamentalism is found in every aspect of the military. Well, it is, and there’s more. One of the major concentrations of these egregious breaches of the separation of church and state is in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home of James Dobson’s fundamentalist Focus on the Family, which has been very influential in the Bush administration. Colorado Springs is also the locus of a number of Christianist churches, the largest of which is the New Life Church, formerly pastored by The Rev. Ted Haggard, who was kicked out by the church in November of last year after a male prostitute named Mike Jones, revealed that he had had a three year sexual relationship with the nationally known minister.
Haggard admitted he had received a massage from Jones and also admitted he had bought methamphetamine from him. However, Haggard, in an interview with CNN, denied having sex with Mike Jones and said he did not use the drug and threw it away. Yeah, right!! What ever happened to the commandment that you shall not lie?
After the allegations were made public, Haggard resigned as president of the influential National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing more than 45,000 churches with 30 million members and now lives in infamy.
AIR FORCE ACADEMY
But the greatest concentration of fundamentalism in Colorado Springs is within the very bowels of the Air Force Academy where illegal religious activity is rampant. In a great article in Truthdig, which you can read in its entirety at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071107_the_cancer_from_within/ much of this is exposed.
Here are the frightening highlights. The author, David Antoon, a 1965 graduate of the AF Academy, went with his son, who had received an appointment to the academy, to his son’s initial orientation. Through that experience his son became so discouraged over the fact that overt fundamentalist religion pervaded everything that he declined his appointment in disgust. For starters, the kindly chaplains that Antoon had experienced were now replaced by a phalanx of 10 young exclusively evangelical chaplains who stood shoulder to shoulder. No priest, rabbi, or mainline Protestant chaplains were allowed to attend.
The potential cadets were encouraged to attend Bible study held each Monday night in the dormitories. This was followed by hallelujahs and amens by the evangelical clergy.
Antoon later learned that when Dobson’s Focus on the Family campus was completed, the academy skydiving team dramatically delivered the “keys to heaven” to Dobson. He also learned that the Monday night Bible study sessions were taught by members of the town’s evangelical mega-churches. “It seemed that my beloved United States Air Force Academy had morphed into the Rocky Mountain Bible College,” wrote Antoon.
When the cadets who did accept their appointments went on their summer encampment, a lead chaplain “suggested” that cadets return to their tents and tell their tent mates that they would “burn in hell” if they did not accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. That same lead chaplain boasted that when he was in Iraq he baptized young soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s swimming pool. “It’s difficult to think of more inflammatory and Crusader-like behavior in an Arab nation,” said Antoon.
The long standing Air Force code of ethics had said that religion was a matter of choice and that “Professionals, especially commanders, must not take it upon themselves to change or coercively influence the religious views of subordinates.” But then the Secretary of the Air Force, Mike Wynne, rewrote the code of ethics so as to allow evangelical proselytizing.
THE MILITARY AND BLACKWATER
The mercenary army known as Blackwater is being investigated for killing Iraqi civilians with wanton abandon and with apparent impunity. Blackwater is led by Eric Prince, former ambassador Cofer Black and Joseph Schmitz, former inspector general in the Department of Defense who was supposed (but failed) to root out the very kinds of misconduct so widespread at the Air Force Academy.
Antoon writes: “As described by Jeremy Scahill in his book Blackwater, Prince, who attended the U.S. Naval Academy, comes from a wealthy theo-con family, is a “neo-crusader,” and a Christian supremacist. He has been given billions of dollars in federal contracts to create a private army. Blackwater COO [[Chief Operating Officer] Schmitz, another Naval Academy graduate, is a member of the Order of Malta, a Christian supremacist organization dating back to the Crusades, and happens to be married to the sister of Jeb Bush’s wife, Columba. And Cofer Black, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department and former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who was quoted by the BBC as saying “Capture Bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box on dry ice,” brings his own skill set to the Blackwater team as vice chairman..”
So Blackwater is not some rogue contract company, it is joined at the hip and the head to the Bush administration and the religiously oriented military it has created. And that’s why they have gotten away with committing numerous murders of innocents in Iraq.
Antoon refers to all the illegal religious work he writes about as “Christian supremacist fascism.” We agree, as do many of our friends and people we contact through the work of World Can’t Wait. We are grateful for organizations like Michael Weinstein’s Military Religious Freedom Foundation for the exposure they have done and the lawsuits they have brought. But it is up to us and the millions who agree with us to build the kind of mass movement which demands an end to the horrors of an increasingly theocratic government.