“Religious liberty in the military is really a topsy-turvy world right now,” United States Marine veteran and Liberty Institute (LI) lawyer Michael Berry stated at a September 26 Value Voters Summit (VVS) press briefing. Recent Washington, DC, events hosted by VVS and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL) at the Reserve Officers Association examined threats to American military religious liberty.
“Lots of dangerous signs in the military” indicated threatened religious liberty, Georgetown University Professor Thomas Farr stated at a September 29 panel for CARL’s “coming out party,” according to CARL executive director Ron Crews. A “war on Christianity” had also reached America’s military, now become a “social engineering petri dish,” according to Fox News reporter Todd Starnes at VVS. Starnes cited past reporting by him of military documents comparing Catholics and evangelical Christians to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and Hamas. On LI’s September 27 VVS panel “We are Winning! How to Save Religious Liberty,” Berry as well discussed “conservative Christians” and Tea Party sympathizers in the military sharing with LI worries about being considered a “domestic terror threat.”
Recent LI client Philip Monk personally embodied at VVS defending religious liberty in the military. A United States Air Force senior master sergeant newly retired with honors after 20 years, Monk had faced disciplinary action after refusing to endorse his commanding officer’s lesbianism. “It’s now policy” not to object to homosexuality, Monk at the LI press conference recalled her saying. Berry also cited at the press conference an army officer facing disciplinary action for questioning extra leave granted for travel to same-sex “weddings” in recognizing states.
While a new policy of open homosexuality in the American military “should not have any effect” on readiness for professionals following orders according to Berry, they often remained misinformed about their rights to discuss faith. A “chilling effect” had thus “absolutely” resulted for service personnel uninformed that military policy accepting open homosexuality did not deny them individually the right to object religiously to such behaviors. Most military members “just don’t talk about their faith at all” today, concurred Monk.
“I have not deployed to a foreign country to have this happen to me in my country,” Monk said at the LI VVS panel in reference to his Christian beliefs facing attack in the American military. Monk’s situation was not unique, Berry’s LI colleague Jeff Mateer noted on the panel. “A lot of service members have not stood up before,” however, making Monk LI’s first military client.
Monk emphasized faith’s importance to a fighting military. “As a medic I have seen 600 traumas,” he said; “It’s God that I look to, to get me through those.” A “well of courage” in the military comes from precisely the faith now under attack, Congressman Mark Meadows concurred during the VVS panel “America Abroad: Our Role in the Global Quest for Freedom.”
CARL’s panel therefore focused on military chaplains. “They bring God to soldiers and soldiers to God” Crews, a former army chaplain who parachuted with the 82nd Airborne Division, stated in a short film screened at the event. Military personnel wounded on the battlefield cry out for their mothers, their drill instructors, medics, and chaplains, panelist Douglas Carver, retired United States Army Chief of Chaplains, noted. Since the chaplaincy’s July 29, 1775, creation noted by Carver, seven chaplains have received the Medal of Honor, America’s highest military award for bravery, as panel moderator Starnes observed. “To get back to moral character and conduct” in the military for Carver and others worried about America losing its “spiritual and moral bearing,” meanwhile, required the chaplaincy’s historic moral role.
Insisting upon creating a chaplaincy in the Continental Army, George Washington staffed it with diverse clergy from Jewish and Christian denominations, Crews in the film recalled. Continuing chaplaincy diversity means that “no other country comes to the level that America has” in its military chaplain, panelist Douglas Lee, a former army chaplain, stated. People learn to “respect each other with a capital ‘R’” across faiths in this setting. Chaplains, for example, help each other across denominational lines, such as when Christian chaplains facilitate Muslim worship services.
“Some of the most intolerant people in the world” who ironically proclaim tolerance threaten this diverse, vital chaplaincy with secular, sexual agendas, Representative Doug Collins noted in his appearance before the CARL panel. The former navy chaplain Collins described wearing his cross and rank on his uniform, indicating a unity between his Baptist faith in God and duty to country. Yet Collins reports some military personnel today scared to attend even a Bible study.
CARL Torchbearer Award recipient Congressman John Fleming meanwhile dismissed proposals to introduce atheist military “chaplains.” “That’s a social worker…they are not ministers,” Fleming stated. “Nothing” would be the answer given by such atheists to military personnel dying on the battlefield asking about what lies beyond earthly life.
The CARL and VVS events thus showed the American military as one front in a wider war against American religious liberty. While Americans worry about expressing their faith at home, though, religious exercise is not just a human right, but a key morale factor for American warriors protecting freedom. Loss of religious liberty in the American military could therefore endanger faith’s protection at large.
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