Air Force Academy Facilitated Religious Conversions

This month, the role of military chaplains has come under increased scrutiny, thanks to a lawsuit that uncovered documents linking officials at the Air Force Academy with efforts to target non-religious Air Force personnel for religious converstion.

Until blocked by a lawsuit just a few weeks ago, a document telling chaplains that they “retain the right to evangelize those who are not affiliated” was being circulated by the leadership at the Air Force Chaplain School at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Brig. General Cecil R. Richardson, the deputy chief of chaplains for the Air Force, said on July 12 that when it comes to Air Force chaplains, “we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched.”

The Air Force’s evangelical Crusade to push its members into religious worship is being supported by the radical right wing theocratic organization Focus on the Family. Thomas Minnery, the vice president for public policy at Focus on the Family, is leading an effort to keep Christian evangelism active within the Air Force, and the rest of America’s military. Minnery explains that the religious right believes that, “it is the job of an evangelical Christian chaplain to evangelize.”

For those of us Americans who are watching the Republicans in government making radical cuts to health care, education, and basic infrastructure, it seems cynical for the government to continue pouring money into programs like the Air Force Chaplain School, which seem designed for nothing else than pressuring non-religious members of the military into joining Christian churches.

The military has no business training its chaplains how to inflict evangelism on the captive audience of military personnel. The chaplains of the Air Force ought to be ashamed to be caught teaming up with an extremist group like Focus on the Family. For the Bush Administration to ask taxpayers to fund such training is a violation of the core liberties that the President has sworn an oath to defend.

The presence of chaplains in the military isn’t helping anyone except for religious groups that are hungry for new recruits. They use twisted religious teachings to encourage soldiers’ blind obediance to military authority. They sap our nation’s budget. They hurt our country’s reputation with scandalous abuses of their authority, and they subvert the Bill of Rights. If the time for budget cuts has really arrived, then government support for military chaplains ought to be the first target for elimination.