Evangelists Infiltrate USAF Academy To Develop Right

That is what the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been training its cadets to do – move to the right – politically and religiously. Religion has become the always-sounding trumpet.

Which means the transformation of young men and women from high school graduates to cadets to Air Force officers is flawed. Horribly, perversely misshapen.

Religion should not and must not be part of Air Force cadet training.

Oh it’s a fine and laudable part of life for any person, individually, no mistake there. But it must not be part of the training for military officers in a democracy. Or rather historically it is never supposed to be an integral part of military training.

Cadets naturally do get some ancillary religious training. Some is to acclimate them if ever they are in a situation where people of other races and faiths are gathered and need to be handled properly. Really, that is social skill training, not religious instruction.

And of course each branch of the American military provides facilities for virtually all major religious denominations, together with clergy, in order to serve the various faiths of the servicemen and women.

But unfortunately there is a new religious instruction that has been added at the US Air Force Academy, instruction that is far more insidious and disturbing.

This begins with President George W. Bush and goes all the way down to the individual cadet. How can it begin with the president? He was, himself, a pilot. But that is not the reason. He is, himself, a born-again Christian evangelist, and that is the starting point.

Members of this faith are proselytizing religious people, they preach and spread their faith. According to this faith, the faith of Mr. Bush, anyone who has been touched – physically, emotionally, perhaps intellectually, somehow touched – by God can go to heaven. Anyone who has not been touched by God cannot go to heaven.

That belief is clearly an item of such faith, and Mr. Bush stringently proclaims himself an adherent of it; all born-again Christians, therefore, consider it their duty to evangelize so that others may become believers and somehow be touched. Born-again Christians are, in their view, saving people, and it is not hard to see how when people fervently believe that they hold the key to the door of salvation, it can be quickly perceived as an obligation to spread the word, an obligation that supersedes all else, including traditional conventions, such as whether or not a lie matters if it further the overall goal, or whether accepted policies or even laws should be followed or obeyed if they do not directly further the ideological effort.

Such beliefs easily become entrenched as doctrine, whereby what is seen as religious obligations to others sanctifies all actions, as though the end does justify the means, no matter what is said or done, or what regulations, policies or laws are broken or discarded.

Often Mr. Bush’s self-proclaimed evangelism gets in the way of his duties as president. This is one of those places.

He need not go out to Colorado Springs and preach evangelical Christianity to every cadet. All he needs to do is let evangelicals gain a foothold and wait for so-called born-again Christianity to take its course: Administrators, staff, upper classmen and cadets all get the message and they get it with abundant clarity – if you are going to be an upstanding United States Air Force officer, well you had better be an upstanding evangelical Christian, or else. If evangelical Christianity exists in the USAF Academy, and clearly it does, this is its mission.

Bush knows this and the Air Force hierarchy knows Bush’s wishes, even if Bush never passed them along directly or specifically.

It is nonetheless reasonable to ask why this particular strain of religious practice suddenly gained hold at the Air Force academy – coincidence? Unlikely. It’s much more likely that no one tried to stop this because the top guy liked this brand of preaching.

So Bush had culpable connections.

By the time the Pentagon got its investigation going, this religious fervor had already passed through all traditional bounds.

Interestingly, along with its usual quiet tone and understated reporting of what might have gone astray, the Pentagon was – this time, by contrast – quite open about the subject itself. The military investigators reported: "The [Air Force] team found a religious climate that does not involve overt religious discrimination, but a failure to fully accommodate all members’ needs and a lack of awareness where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expression of beliefs."

So the air force discounts overt religious discrimination, which understandably is a pragmatic approach that avoids a much larger scandal, but is willing to admit that some teachers, administrators and upper classmen failed to discern "where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expressions of belief." In other words, some in authority arrogantly proselytized subordinates with their right-wing, evangelical Christian beliefs. Who brought this religious belligerence about? And how is this not discrimination when it is made obvious that the subordinate is expected to cast aside their personal beliefs and family histories and accept a new faith?

Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, atheists and even some other Protestant worshipers did not enter the Air Force Academy to be discriminated against.

But they were.

They were discriminated against because some administrative USAF Academy staff and some upper classmen protégés tried to preach evangelical Christianity to them, and whenever they failed to win over the given cadets, those young men and women were then treated differently, as though they were utterly without military worth; this was pure religious discrimination, as ugly as it gets.

Perhaps not surprisingly, but still unfortunately, the ever-protective Pentagon had both gloved hands held to its official mouth; but this was not a little misunderstanding. This evangelical proselytizing pulled the fabric of the military way out of warp.

The born-again Christian evangelicals, with their reactionary, absolutist political philosophies, and the right-wing politicians currently in power who either agree with them or bow to them for the sake of their own political goals, had to understand what it would mean to introduce a semi-official religion into the USAF Academy. One doesn’t have to look further than WWII and Imperial Japan’s Shinto religious absolutism to see the perils involved when state sponsored religiosity is encouraged in the military.

Hitler’s Nazi war machine was powerful and ruthless, but the Nazi’s had little use for religion. Not so the Japanese. They revered the Emperor as a God on earth. And that largely accounted for why they would usually not surrender but would fight to the last man even when the situation was hopeless, and occasionally in defiance of orders. Not so the Germans. Even the feared SS, dedicated to Hitler above all else, would usually give up when it was obvious there was no other choice.

So what could be the overall, long-term goal of those who want to evangelize the American military, and who so recently gained a foothold at the USAF Academy? Is it a desire to create a cadre of military officers who will man the fighter jets and the nuclear silos and take whatever orders are provided by a born-again president?

We may not get an answer to this question. Yet.

And the Pentagon investigation may have nipped the problem, if it really does pursue the wrongdoing.

But the gobbledygook the Pentagon feeds the American people is terribly feeble. This investigation is supposed to be on the behalf of the Pentagon, the military masters of the Air Force, and all it is saying – publicly – is that the Air Force is taking action.

Academy administrators are supposed to clarify policies on religious expression so that religious minorities do not feel discriminated against or pressured to alter their beliefs.

Of course the discriminators are – themselves – religious minorities. Evangelical Christians are not the majority faith anywhere. Apparently there is, says the Pentagon, a perception of intolerance among some USAF staff and cadets.

Blame for this must end up directly at the feet of the Air Force Academy general officers and their staffs. Where else would it go?

There has apparently been no oversight, or worse, there has been tacit acceptance of evangelical proselytizing. However it took place, the officers in charge allowed religious discrimination inside the cadet corps of one of America’s great military academies. That this blind-eye policy allowed a clear attempt to recruit young military officers into a cult-like obedience to evangelical beliefs cannot be denied; evangelical biases are so deep as to be stronger than military rule.

If this is not deadly serious, then nothing is of any account.

If this sort of thing is allowed, America will be tacitly telling, or allowing, its military people, specifically the ones that fly hydrogen bombs over the world, that their primary duty is to a specific view of God, first and foremost, even before their country or any administrative orders from superiors that might conflict with such viewpoints.

Any officers or hired instructors who mould the youthful, impressionistic beginner cadets in such a fashion are ideologues who do not belong in any military service.

Attempting to train American military officers is such a manner is treasonous first of all, and it is also non-military, arrogant, biased and un-American.

Perhaps the Pentagon is working behind the curtains to make certain the staffers and administrators at the USAF Academy teach by order of the Air Force rather than the religious Right. But they will have to bring the process out in the open so all Americans can see it and judge it for what it is, otherwise it can never be certain that this problem has not just been more cleverly hidden from public view and scrutiny.

All Americans have now seen the potential threat; Americans now need to see it has been thoroughly corrected.

Lieutenant General Roger Brady, who is deputy chief of staff for personnel, claims he has found seven instances of impropriety. These seven instances involved the following: Religious slurs and disparaging remarks among cadets, similar remarks from USAF staffers and faculty with strong religious viewpoints that were common expressed and which cadets found offensive

Brady said, "There is a lack of awareness on the part of some faculty and staff, and perhaps some senior cadets as to what constitutes appropriate expressions of faith." A remarkably bland comment when contrasted with the magnitude of the issue involved.

But nonetheless, at least the general heading up the investigation can see there is a religious problem, a huge one, among the people who run the American Air Force Academy.

Mr. Bush has an opportunity to show that he does not support undermining the American military through religious doctrine. His chance is simply to directly stop this practice.

If he has nothing to say about it, he will be presumed to agree with the evangelical Christians who have, in effect, infiltrated the USAF at its very heart, the Air Force Academy.

Pilot John Magee, who was also a poet, was killed in his Spitfire as he flew for the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II, flying out of England against the Germans.

Later, while honoring Americans who died in the Challenger space shuttle, President Ronald Reagan quoted part of Magee’s sonnet, "High Flight," saying they had "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Some evangelical Christians take that sonnet literally. They really feel they and God have physically touched.

But God never discriminated against anyone. To truly believe in God is to also believe that every human being is God’s creation; given such reality, how truly arrogant it is for any organized religion or individual ‘believers,’ from Christian sects to Muslim and Jewish fanatics, et al, to believe that they alone have God’s blessing, that they alone are righteously doing God’s work.

Such arrogance does not belong and must not be allowed to gain a foothold in any American military organization.

July 7, 2005