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Sunday, September 17th, 2017

Air Force chaplain: Don’t let non-Christian service members practice their faith

Author:     MATTHEW SHEFFIELD
Source:     Salon
Publication Date:     FRIDAY, SEP 15, 2017 03:24 PM PDT
 Link: Air Force chaplain: Don’t let non-Christian service members practice their faith
Stephan:   In the early 1970s when I was part of the small team that transformed the American military from the elitist conscription organization  of the Viet Nam era, to the all volunteer meritocracy of today we anticipated many changes. But two things we did not anticipate, and anyone who tells you we did was not there, and does not know what they are talking about. Those two things have come to dominate the military in bad ways we never even considered. First, we did not expect that by the 2000s the active military would involve less than one half of one per cent -- o.4% -- of all Americans. Taking all generations together about 7.3% of all living Americans have served at some point in their lives, and that percentage is decreasing as old vets die off. Today military service is a cultural experience foreign to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Second, that through the Chaplain corps a Christofascist cult would come to dominate the religious practices within the military, and would be increasingly hateful. Here are some facts.

Credit: U. S. Air Force Academy

Captain Sonny Hernandez, a chaplain at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, has become the subject of a formal complaint after he published an article claiming that Christians who serve in the armed forces should not support the rights of non-Christians to practice their faiths.

“Christian service members who openly profess and support the rights of Muslims, Buddhists, and all other anti-Christian worldviews to practice their religions—because the language in the Constitution permits—are grossly in error, and deceived,” Hernandez wrote in an essay for a Christian nationalist website.

He continued:

“Counterfeit Christians in the Armed forces will appeal to the Constitution, and not Christ. … This is why so many professing Christian service members will say: ‘We “support everyone’s right” to practice their faith regardless if they worship a god different from ours because the Constitution protects this right.’”

Hernandez is a part of a growing movement within some fundamentalist armed forces chaplains to openly defy military policies governing political activity and sectarian worship while in uniform.

According to Newsweek, the Military […]

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