Kathryn Joyce: Christian Soldiers - The growing controversy over military chaplains using the armed forces to spread the Word

Christian Soldiers: The growing controversy over military chaplains using the armed forces to spread the Word.
By Kathryn Joyce
Newsweek

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In the aftermath of that report, the Pentagon responded that it had confiscated and destroyed the Bibles and said there was no effort to convert Afghans. But while the military dismissed the Bagram Bibles as an isolated incident, a civil-rights watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), says this is not the case. According to the group's president, Mikey Weinstein, a cadre of 40 U.S. chaplains took part in a 2003 project to distribute 2.4 million Arabic-language Bibles in Iraq. This would be a serious violation of U.S. military Central Command's General Order Number One forbidding active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion. A Defense Department spokeswoman, in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, denies any knowledge of this project.

The Bible initiative was handled by former Army chaplain Jim Ammerman, the 83-year-old founder of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches (CFGC), an organization in charge of endorsing 270 chaplains and chaplain candidates for the armed services. Ammerman worked with an evangelical group based in Arkansas, the International Missions Network Center, to distribute the Bibles through the efforts of his 40 active-duty chaplains in Iraq. A 2003 newsletter for the group said of the effort, "The goal is to establish a wedge for the kingdom of God in the Middle East, directly affecting the Islamic world."

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Among the "endorsing agencies" is CFGC, which represents a conglomeration of independent Pentecostal churches outside established denominations. The group was accepted as a chaplain-endorsing agency by the Department of Defense in 1984, two years after it first applied. Since 1984, MRFF charges, Ammerman's agency has violated numerous codes that govern chaplaincies, including a constant denigration of other religions, particularly Islam, Judaism, mainline Protestantism and Catholicism, but also non-Pentecostal evangelical churches. In a 2008 sermon, Ammerman described a CFGC chaplain at Fort Riley, Kans., who demanded the 42 chaplains below him "speak up for Jesus" or leave his outfit. In a video for an organization called the Prophesy Club, CFGC chaplain Maj. James Linzey called mainstream Protestant churches "demonic, dastardly creatures from the pit of hell," that should be "[stomped] out." But the primary target of CFGC's ire is Islam. A 2001 CFGC newsletter asserted that the real enemy of the U.S. wasn't Osama bin Laden, but Allah, whom the newsletter called "Lucifer." A 2006 issue argued that all Muslim-Americans should be treated with suspicion, as they "obviously can't be good Americans." In a 2008 sermon, Ammerman called Islam "a killer religion" and Muslims "the devil."

Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says it's "counterproductive to the interests of our military to have officers or servicepeople proselytizing. It should be addressed at the highest levels of the military." Hooper says that while he can't say whether events such as these constitute a systematic problem in the military, "we've certainly seen enough incidents for it to be a concern."

Weinstein, an Air Force veteran who founded MRFF in 2005 after both he and his sons say they encountered anti-Semitic harassment and proselytizing in the service, has waged legal battles against what he sees as an improper mingling of church and state in the military, including a current lawsuit against the Department of Defense alleging service members' compulsory attendance at military functions that include sectarian Christian prayers and a broader "pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States Army." Weinstein says MRFF hears from 400 to 500 service members monthly—including Jews, atheists and religious minorities, but mostly nonevangelical Christians—who claim religious discrimination in the military, often from chaplains or officers implying that they aren't Christian enough. "The vast majority of chaplains now see the military as a mission field with a lot of low-hanging fruit," says Weinstein.

Art Schulcz, a lawyer representing CFGC in a lawsuit against the Navy, says that evangelicals are the real victims, at least in that branch of the service. (As of 2008, all three chiefs of chaplains were evangelicals.) Numerous evangelical Navy chaplains, Schulcz says, have been discriminated against, denied promotions and subjected to denominational preferences by a Catholic- and mainline Protestant-dominated chaplaincy that is intolerant of how evangelicals worship. Many, he says, have fled to the more evangelical-friendly Army.

"Mikey Weinstein says they're shipping Bibles there," Schulcz says. "I want to say, 'So what?' The Constitution protects that kind of activity." He contends that General Order Number One's prohibition on religion, which has been in effect since 2000, is overly vague and a violation of religious freedom, and that, in any case, chaplains should be exempt since, he argues, they are not military representatives but representatives of their faith groups: "The Constitution prohibits absolutely the government from proselytizing, but it protects the proselytizer to do so, unless they're harming the public good."

Department of Defense policy says that chaplain-endorsing agencies should "express willingness" for their chaplains to cooperate with other religious traditions. But Schulcz claims that Ammerman, who is not a paid government official, and his chaplains, who are, are entitled to say whatever they want unless they're advocating insurrection.

On this point, MRFF charges they come close. Ammerman and chaplain Linzey have espoused conspiracy theories about "Satanic forces" at work in the U.S. government facilitating a military takeover by foreign troops; Ammerman even appears in a video favored by militia groups titled The Imminent Military Takeover of the USA. In 2008, Ammerman implied that four presidential candidates should be "arrested, quickly tried and hanged" for not voting to designate English America's official language, and speculated that Barack Obama would be assassinated as a secret Muslim.

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