Onward, De-Christianized Soldiers

The liberationist philosophy underpinning Obama’s co-ed, gay-friendly military holds, on the one hand, that sexuality is inherently fixed and thus beyond the control of individuals, and on the other that sexuality is subject to re-shaping “through changes in culture.” The social engineers of the military promised that age-old problems between men and women thrown together in close quarters would suddenly vanish under enlightened training.

It hasn’t happened. Out of the military’s confused culture of loose moral philosophy, strict feminism, and combustible masculinity has come an endless stream of reports on sexual misconduct in the ranks. This week Congress mulled over the Pentagon’s admission that sexual assault cases have spiked 35 percent in the last two years.

“The Pentagon, using anonymous surveys and sampling research, estimated that 26,000 active-duty personnel  experienced ‘unwanted sexual  contact’ last year, up from about 19,300 in 2010, according to an ongoing Defense Department study,” reported the Washington Post.

How strange, then, that a military reeling from an epidemic of coarseness and immorality would continue to marginalize Christianity in its ranks.  It is hardly suffering from an outbreak of Christian virtue and witness.

Defense Department materials classifying Catholics and Evangelicals as extremists on par with jihadists came to light recently. The Pentagon pooh-poohed these materials, which were used for a U.S. Army Reserve presentation, as a random incident. But it wasn’t. Christians are routinely treated as extremists by Obama’s politically correct generals.

In 2010, Admiral Michael Mullen informed a Christian chaplain who opposed the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that “if you cannot get in line, resign your commission.” That same year Lieutenant General Thomas Bostick told “bigoted” soldiers to “get with the program” or “get out.”  In 2011, the Army, until a backlash prevented the change, planned on tweaking its visiting guidelines at Walter Reed Medical Center to read: “No religious items (i.e. Bibles, reading materials and/or facts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.” In 2012, officials at the Air Force erased the Latin word for God, Dei, from the logo of the Rapid Capabilities Office. The logo had said in Latin “Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money.” It was changed to: “Doing Miracles with Other People’s Money.”

The same Air Force that this week admitted to a “cancer” of sexual assault among its members evidently finds too much Christianity worrisome. In 2011, it cancelled a course on Just War theory that had been taught for 20 years on the grounds that it made use of the writings of St. Augustine and other theistic thinkers. Mikey Weinstein, president of an aggressively secularist group misnamed the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, led the lobbying for that change by the Air Force. Soldiers, he bragged, will no longer be exposed to the “Jesus loves nukes speech.”

Last month it came out that Weinstein is helping the Pentagon brainstorm about the possibility of court-martialing Christians. According to the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, Weinstein met with Pentagon officials on April 23 to discuss cracking down on what he calls a “tidal wave of fundamentalists.”  “[T]here is systematic misogyny, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the military,” he said. Weinstein calls this “spiritual rape.”

Media darling Joe Wilson, the former ambassador who tussled with the Bush administration, also joined Weinstein for this high-level meeting.  Wilson would like to see Christian chaplains who refuse to bend to Obama’s secularism booted from the military. The chaplain’s role, Wilson told Quinn, “is to minister to spiritual needs. You don’t proselytize. It’s a workplace violation.”

This is beyond dark satire. While creating a permissive climate in which physical rape occurs, the Pentagon is fretting over “spiritual rape” with Joe Wilson and Mikey Weinstein, whose influence is real enough to have already forced many changes at the Air Force and other branches of the armed services. Weinstein is to the military what the ACLU is to courts: an agent of atheism that won’t rest until all believing Christians are run out of the public square.

That generals showed up for the meeting with Weinstein is no accident. His secularism is widely held within the Obama administration and was bound to percolate to the top of all government agencies, particularly the military, where the authority of the commander-in-chief is unquestioned.

In the wake of bad publicity, the Pentagon is trying to spin its meeting with Weinstein as insignificant. But it is not. He has the ear of skittish officials. According to Quinn, after “demands from Weinstein, the Air Force published, but has yet to distribute, a 27- page document, which includes a cover sheet that states: ‘COMPLIANCE WITH THIS PUBLICATION IS MANDATORY.’ ‘Leaders at all levels,’  the document says, ‘must avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion.’”

Meanwhile, Congress is baffled at how the culture of the military could permit so much sexual mischief. An exasperated Senator Angus King of Maine said, “Within the Air Force, it has to become unacceptable culturally.” It is a little late for politicians to be lamenting the loss of traditional mores.  The two trends within the military on display in the press recently—rising cases of sexual misconduct , declining Christian presence—are exactly what they should expect.