Mother Davis traces a pentagram in the air, and then speaks,
If you want to understand the role that religion plays in military life, read an article from yesterday’s Washington Post, For Gods and Country, about a military chaplain who was stripped from service in Iraq because he switched from being a Pentacostal Christian to a Wiccan.
The chaplain, Don Larsen, was removed from his post not because he changed his religion. That’s happened plenty of times, and there are procedures that allow it to take place without any problem. Don Larsen was removed from his post because he changed to the wrong religion, because the military doesn’t approve of the Wiccan religion.
Some in the military say that they wont allow any Wiccan chaplains just because there aren’t enough Wiccans in the military to merit a chaplain. The Washington Post article exposed that justification as an outright falsehood. There are somewhere between two thousand and four thousand Wiccans in the military right now. That’s roughly the same number of Buddhists as there are in the military, and the Buddhists have a chaplain. It’s also about the same number of observant Jews in the military, and the Jews have 22 chaplains. There are only 636 adherents of Christian Science in the military, yet they have 6 chaplains. If the ratio of chaplains to believers were to be followed Christian Science, there would be between 20 and 40 Wiccan chaplains in the military.
Look at the difference between the number of Buddhist chaplains and Jewish chaplains, and you’ll see that there’s another issue involving religion in the military: Religions of violence are better represented by chaplains. Buddhists are supposed to be nonviolent. It beats me what four thousand self-proclaimed Buddhists are doing in the military, but only one Buddhist believes that it is ethically appropriate to be a chaplain to people trained to kill. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are more shifty in general about the ethical value of violence than Buddhism is, with many congregations celebrating war as a holy activity done in order to promote the will of God, whatever that is.
What about Wicca? I certainly don’t support the idea of Wiccans being discriminated against, being denied the equal right to have chaplains in the military just like other religions do, but is it really a good idea for a religion to send its holy people off to war in order to support people sent out to engage in huge campaigns of violence? Do Wiccans really want their religion to join Christianity in such questionable behavior?
That decision ought to be up to the Wiccans, not to generals who are trained in military strategy, not in the culture of religion. Military leaders are not qualified to distinguish between a genuine religion and a religion that isn’t genuine. It is not their place to tell thousands of believers that their religion isn’t real.
Then again, it also shouldn’t be the place of the military to certify and pay religious leaders to go around preaching at soldiers. The nonsense surrounding the case of Don Larsen would be easily avoided if all chaplains were dismissed, and returned to their private duties, visiting soldiers on a voluntary, unpaid basis under their own authority.
Waving her hands in the air to disperse the fog,
Mother Davis
