The Pentagon Wages War On Christians

The United States Department of Defense is waging another war, but not against another country.  Their target?  Christians in our own military.

Obama appointees at the Pentagon have jumped into bed with Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religions Freedom Foundation, who will be a consultant in developing new policies on religious tolerance in the military.  The new policies will include a court-martial for military chaplains who share the Gospel during spiritual counseling of American servicemen and women.

Weinstein wrote an angry column for the Huffington Post in which he said, “Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

Weinstein has also compared sharing the Gospel to rape and said, “It is a version of being spiritually raped and you are being spiritually raped by fundamentalist Christian religious predators.” He told the Washington Post that proselytizing is a “national security threat.”

The Pentagon would not confirm or deny that anyone has been prosecuted for sharing their faith, but did confirm that soldiers could be prosecuted under military regulations for doing so.

In his column Weinstein endorsed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has labeled Christian groups supporting traditional marriage as “hate groups.”  The SPLC is the group which supplied the training material presented to a Pennsylvania Army Reserve unit which said that Evangelical Christians are the number one extremist threat to America.  Not the Muslim Brotherhood.  Not Al Qaeda. Not Hamas. Not the Ku Klux Klan.  Evangelical Christians are at the top of their list.

Congressman Randy Forbes (R-VA) has been monitoring religious discrimination complaints in the military and he told Fox News that it’s getting worse.  He said, “It’s been a steady attack on faith and religious freedom that we’ve seen in our military like we’ve never seen before.  We are getting a lot of calls from soldiers saying ‘we’re afraid of going to church, we’re afraid to be seen praying, we’re afraid that would hurt our careers, our promotions.'”

Forbes asked Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel about the religious liberty issues and listed specific examples:

• Commanders barred from disclosing any programs that are tied to the Chaplaincy or any programs involving religions.
• The Air Force banned the word ‘God’ from an Air Force patch logo even though the reference had no religious connotation.
• A Navy directive that banned Bibles at Walter Reed Hospital.
• The Pennsylvania Army Reserve training listing Christians as the number one extremist threat.
• An Army email that listed prominent Christian ministries such as Family Research Council and American Family Association as “domestic hate groups.”

Secretary Hagel said he had no idea what Forbes was talking about.
 
Forbes said, “I just can’t understand why the department is issuing orders prohibiting people in the chain of command from talking about chaplain’s programs, supporting faith, but they’re not prohibiting people in the chain of command from making anti-faith statements and doing anti-faith training.  I think there has been a huge move on the Department of Defense to respond to a very small but very vocal group of people who hate God and religion.  They have been very successful of getting the ear of the people at the Pentagon. They have done everything they have asked them to do.”

The animosity shown Christians by our own military leadership comes as no surprise to me.  With the Obama administration being openly helpful and sympathetic to Muslims and Islamic causes it follows that appointees by the administration would be hostile to Christianity and create policy which attacks it. 

Conservative historian David Barton has labeled Obama “America’s most Biblically-hostile U.S. President.”  Barton has compiled a list of “acts of hostility” toward people of Biblical faith.  It’s an incredibly long list.  You can read that list here. 

Barton also has a list of acts of hostility just for the military.  Here are just a few examples from a very long list:

• June 2011 – The Department of Veterans Affairs forbids references to God and Jesus during burial ceremonies at Houston National Cemetery.
• February 2012 – The Army orders Catholic chaplains not to read a letter to parishioners that their archbishop asked them to read.
• May 2012 – The Obama administration opposes legislation to protect the rights of conscience for military chaplains who do not wish to perform same-sex marriages in violation of their strongly-held religious beliefs.
• June 2012 – Bibles for the American military have been printed in every conflict since the American Revolution, but the Obama Administration revokes the long-standing U. S. policy of allowing military service emblems to be placed on those military Bibles.
• April 2013 – The U.S. Army directs troops to scratch off and paint over tiny Scripture verse references that for decades had been forged into weapon scopes.

Clearly, things have changed in our military.  Open hostility to Christians runs rampant and it seems to be getting worse.  How long before Christians are just completely barred from joining the military?  Pictures like the one below may someday be relegated to the history books.