Randy Forbes and Military Chaplains -- More Crap From H. Res. 888
So, did Mr. Forbes deliberately omit the context of these quotes, or is he just oblivious to the fact that that they're related to a 150 year old dispute over government paid chaplains? I would say it's the latter -- he just doesn't know where the quotes came from. Why? Because he got them from pseudo-historian David Barton's Original Intent, a book that doesn't bother to mention their context either. How can I be so certain that Mr. Forbes relied upon the work of Barton rather than drawing his historical "facts" from original documents? Well, in this case, it's his footnotes that give him away. These are the footnotes from H. Res. 888 for the above "Whereases," footnotes which are identical to those in Barton's book: "36 The Reports of Committees of the Senate of the United States for the Second Session of the Thirty-Second Congress, 1852-53 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, 1853), pp. 1-4. " Now, why shouldn't Mr. Forbes's and David Barton's footnotes be identical if they were quoting the same documents? How is this evidence that Mr. Forbes was copying Barton? Well, one telltale sign is the page numbers. For the first "Whereas," Mr. Forbes's footnote cites pages 1-4 of a report, and for the second, pages 1, 6, and 8-9. Obviously, the short quotes in these "Whereases" wouldn't span multiple, let alone nonconsecutive, pages. Barton, however, in Original Intent, quoted much longer passages from these reports, so the excerpts that he assembled for his book did contain sentences from all the various pages listed in his footnote. But, if Mr. Forbes had been looking at the actual reports, he would have known that the parts of these quotes that he was copying appear on page 4 of the first report, and page 8 of the second, and would not have listed all the other pages cited by Barton. If that isn't enough to convince anyone that Mr. Forbes was just copying Barton's footnotes, there is also the fact that neither cite the report numbers. The pages in these volumes of reports are not numbered like most books. Each report they contain is individually page numbered. In other words, page 2 of any given report is numbered page 2, no matter where it falls in the book. The table of contents lists the reports by report number. Mr. Forbes's first footnote, for example, should say Report No. 376, page 4, but, since he was just copying Barton, their identical footnotes both omit the same information. Further evidence that Mr. Forbes had no idea what he was quoting in the two above examples is the fact that for a completely separate "Whereas" he quotes from one of the very same reports, this time to mention congressional chaplains. "Whereas in 1853 Congress declared that congressional chaplains have a 'duty . . . to conduct religious services weekly in the Hall of the House of Representatives';" While I cant find this one in David Barton's Original Intent, the formatting of the footnote is identical to the other two, with the same omission of a report number, so I'd say it's a safe bet that it comes from another of Barton's many publications. Now, back to what these reports have to do with the military chaplaincy, a subject so near and dear to Mr. Forbes that it's the only issue listed on the Legislative Issues page of his Congressional Prayer Caucus website. One of the three documents on this page is a Military Chaplain Timeline, a timeline that skips the entire nineteenth century and virtually all of the twentieth century, jumping from the first item -- the recognition of chaplains in 1775 -- right to a 1999 Air Force Policy Directive. To get up to the time of the reports quoted in H. Res. 888 without going into too much detail, it needs to be understood that there really wasn't much of a military chaplaincy during the War of 1812 or up through the time of the Mexican-American War. Naval commanders had been authorized to appoint chaplains, but many of these were not ordained ministers, and their purpose was as much to be instructors in everything from reading and writing to navigational skills as it as to be preachers. Some officers even saw their authority to appoint a chaplain as a way to get a personal secretary, and chose them for their ability to perform that job, with little regard for their religious qualifications. During the War of 1812, there was one army chaplain for as many as 8,000 men, and, with the exception of the 1818 appointment of a chaplain at West Point, who doubled as a professor of history, geography, and ethics, there were no new army chaplains until 1838, with the authorization of a small number of post chaplains. These army chaplains, like their counterparts in the navy, were hired mainly as teachers, and also served as everything from librarians to mess officers to defense counsel during courts-martial. Only twenty of the army's seventy posts were authorized to hire a chaplain. Post chaplains were civilians hired by the post's council of administration. They were not assigned to the military unit that they served, but to the post itself, so when the Mexican-American War began, they did not accompany the troops. In 1847, Congress passed a law transferring the control over post chaplains from the post councils to the Secretary of War, giving the Secretary of War the authority to require a chaplain to accompany their post's troops into the field whenever a majority of the troops were deployed. Those chaplains who refused to go were fired. This law caused a bit of a problem because it didn't actually give anyone the authority to appoint chaplains for the army. In fact, when President Polk appointed two Catholic "chaplains" in an effort to stop the propaganda that the war was an attack upon the Mexicans' religion, he made these as political appointments rather than chaplain appointments, saying that there was no law authorizing army chaplains. The total number of army chaplains during the Mexican-American War was fifteen, including these two Catholic priests who weren't actually chaplains. By the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, opposition to government paid chaplains was already brewing. Contrary to the assertion by the Christian nationalist history revisionists that church/state battles were unknown before 1947, protests against religious legislation have been going on since the early 1800s. The mid-1800s fight to abolish both the military and congressional chaplaincies, which went on for well over a decade, doesn't seem to have been sparked by any one single issue or event, but by a combination of factors. A large part of the general public objected to these establishments on constitutional grounds, religious organizations objected to them on both religious and constitutional grounds, and military personnel, including chaplains, objected to them for a variety of reasons, including complaints of religious coercion and discrimination uncannily similar to those heard today. Does the following sound familiar to anyone? "Mr. Hamlin presented the memorial of Joseph Stockbridge, a chaplain in the navy, praying the enactment of a law to protect chaplains in the performance of divine service on shipboard, according to the practices and customs of the churches of which they may be members, which was referred to the Committee on Naval Affairs."(1) Well, this is from 1858...not 2005! The memorial of Chaplain Stockbridge, and a number of petitions from Baptist and Presbyterian organizations and other groups, make it pretty clear that there was not only a problem with naval officers requiring non-Episcopalian chaplains to perform Episcopalian services, but also an unfair preference for Episcopalians in the appointment of chaplains. In response to these complaints, Congress investigated the matter, requesting reports like that described in the following House resolution. "Resolved, That the Secretary of the Navy, during the present session, be requested to communicate to this House the number of chaplains appointed in any branch of the navy service since 1813; the religious denomination to which each person so appointed was attached, so far as it can be ascertained; whether chaplains, by any navy regulation, or any act of commanders of vessels or stations, are required to use a particular uniform or clerical dress, including a gown, or to read prayers, or to comply with any particular forms or ceremonies of Divine service; and whether there is any evidence on file in the department tending to show that non-Episcopal ministers are required by officers of the navy to use the Episcopal liturgy."(2) The report of the Secretary of the Navy in answer to this House resolution left the denominations of most of the chaplains blank, but a similar report provided by the army a few years earlier revealed a clear domination by Episcopalians. That report showed that of the eighty army chaplains appointed between 1813 and 1856, over half had been Episcopalian, outnumbering Presbyterians four to one, Baptists over eight to one, Methodists by nearly fifteen to one, etc. In An Act to increase and regulate the Pay of the Navy of the United States, passed on June 1, 1860, Congress addressed one of the complaints, with the following provision. "Every chaplain shall be permitted to conduct public worship according to the manner and forms of the church of which he may be a member."(3) But, then, rather than addressing the inequality among the various denominations, they put the following in An Act providing for better Organization of the Military Establishment, passed on August 3, 1861. "Sec. 7. And be it further enacted, That one chaplain shall be allowed to each regiment of the army, to be selected and appointed as the President may direct: Provided, That none but regularly ordained ministers of some Christian denomination shall be eligible to selection or appointment."(4) A similar provision to that in the act for the regular army also appeared in the July 22, 1861 act authorizing the president to raise a volunteer force, which stated that a chaplain "must be a regular ordained minister of a Christian denomination."(5) No prior legislation authorizing chaplains had ever mandated that chaplains had to be of a particular religion, or even that they had to be ordained ministers. Apparently, the early congresses were conscious of that pesky "no religious test" clause in the Constitution, applying it even to the office of chaplain. The description in the 1838 law authorizing the councils of administration to hire post chaplains, for example, was simply "such person as they may think proper to officiate as chaplain."(6) After a public outcry and numerous petitions from Jewish organizations, groups of citizens, and even the members of one state legislature, the 1861 provision requiring chaplains to be Christians was repealed. The new qualifications appeared in An Act to define the Pay and Emoluments of certain Officers of the Army, and for other Purposes, passed on July 17, 1862. "That no person shall be appointed a chaplain in the United States army who is not a regularly ordained minister of some religious denomination, and who does not present testimonials of his present good standing as such minister, with a recommendation for his appointment as an army chaplain from some authorized ecclesiastical body, or not less than five accredited ministers belonging to said religious denomination."(7) There was a resolution introduced in the House a in January 1862 that included a provision stating that no more than one-fourth of the chaplains at any given time could belong to the same ecclesiastical body, but nothing appears to have come of this. Now, as I mentioned before getting into these events of 1858 to 1862, the battle over chaplains actually began in the late 1840s, at the time of the Mexican-American War. The requests for oversight and reform in the late 1850s and early 1860s were made only after a massive effort to completely abolish the chaplaincy had failed. The 1853 and 1854 reports quoted by Mr. Forbes in H. Res. 888 are from that battle. Beginning in 1848, countless petitions poured into both houses of Congress calling for an end to the military and congressional chaplaincies. The first of these to be presented in the Senate was from a Baptist association in North Carolina. "Mr. BADGER presented the memorial, petition, and remonstrance of the ministers and delegates representing the churches which compose the Kehukee Primitive Baptist Association, assembled in Conference with the Baptist Church at Great Swamp, Pitt county, North Carolina praying that Congress will abolish all laws or resolutions now in force respecting the establishment of religion, whereby Chaplains to Congress, the army, and navy, are employed and paid to exercise their religious functions. Note the name Mr. Badger here. George Edmund Badger was the senator who, six years later, wrote the report dismissing these petitions that Mr. Forbes quotes in H. Res. 888. Obviously, this was not someone who was going to be objective in considering the many similar petitions he was asked to report on. Senator Badger was not only a devout Episcopalian -- the denomination that had taken over the military chaplaincy -- but had been Secretary of the Navy before becoming a senator. So serious was Badger about his religion that when North Carolina's Bishop, Levi Silliman Ives, was accused of incorporating doctrines and rituals of the "Romish Church" into the Protestant Episcopal Church, the senator wrote An Examination of the Doctrines Declared and Powers Claimed by the Right Reverend Bishop Ives, and published it anonymously as "A Layman of of the Protestant Episcopal Church in North Carolina," helping to force the retirement of the bishop. Congressman James Meacham, who wrote the similar report in the House -- the other report quoted in H. Res. 888 -- was a Congregationalist minister until being elected to the House to fill a vacancy. There had actually been another report prior to those of Meacham and Badger, which were written in 1853 and 1854, but that report, written in 1850 by Congressman James Thompson, while reporting adversely on the petitions that had been presented in the House at that time, did not contain the "Christian nation" rhetoric of the later reports, so it's of no use to today's "Christian nation" crowd. As already mentioned, many of the protests against government chaplains came from religious organizations -- primarily the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. The following was written Rev. William Anderson Scott, one of the most prominent Presbyterian ministers of his day, in his 1859 book The Bible and Politics, a book written in part to refute an an Episcopalian Bishop's pro- Bible in public schools book that, as Rev. Scott put it, was "designed to show that religion is connected with everything American." Rev. Scott makes a number of references to California in this excerpt, due to the fact that this is where he was at the time, having moved there a number of years earlier to establish a Presbyterian church and seminary in the new state. This is from the section of his book rebutting the commonly used argument that "The Continental Congress opened its sessions with prayer, and it is our custom to have chaplains." "I do not take the ground (as some have done in vindicating our government for not providing for the support of a religion, or in defense of our Legislature for not electing chaplains,) that the church and the closet are the only proper places for prayer; for it is no part of the duty of our government to provide a religion either for the people or for their legislators. In the sense of deciding what religion is, or of deciding which is true or which is false -- and which, therefore, is to be sustained and which put down -- the American Government knows no religion. It is not for the government, therefore, to pay any one for offering prayer or reciting a creed. The government allows every one to believe what creed he pleases, and to pray as much as he pleases, and whenever he pleases, provided he does not, on the plea of so doing, commit a trespass or become a nuisance. Every citizen, whether an office-holder or a mere voter, is to enjoy his ewn religion, or do without any, but the government does not undertake to support any citizen's religion; nor do I see how it is possible for a popular government, like ours, to occupy any other platform. We are a multitude of peoples, and of every kind of opinion, and, as citizens, all equal, and the moment any form or creed of religion is preferred by the government, that moment a difference is made, a preference is shown, which is directly contrary to our fundamental laws. The following report of the 1868 General Conference of the Methodist Church shows that even twenty years after the first petitions began flowing into Congress, the issues -- particularly the domination by Episcopalians -- had not yet been resolved. By this time, attempts to entirely abolish the chaplaincy had, for the most part, been abandoned, but the fight for the next best thing -- an equality in the appointment of chaplains -- continued. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON CHAPLAINCIES IN THE ARMY AND NAVY. Another thing protested during this period was a naval regulation enacted during the very religious Adams administration, requiring attendance at religious services aboard ships. Mr. Forbes quotes this regulation in one of his H. Res. 888 "Whereases," but leaves out the aspect of these services being mandatory. "Whereas in 1800, Congress enacted naval regulations requiring that Divine service be performed twice every day aboard 'all ships and vessels in the navy,' with a sermon preached each Sunday;" This was the complete article: "Art. II. The commanders of all ships and vessels in the navy, having chaplains on board, shall take care that divine service be performed in a solemn, orderly, and reverent manner twice a day, and a sermon be preached on Sunday, unless bad weather, or extraordinary accidents prevent it; and that they cause all, or as many of the ship's company as can be spared from duty, to attend at every performance of worship of Almighty God."(11) Thomas Jefferson did change the duties of naval chaplains quite a bit in 1802, but nothing in these changes repealed the regulation enacted in 1800 under the Adams administration, so a commander's authority -- actually their duty -- to force their subordinates to attend religious services remained in force. This clearly unconstitutional regulation also became an issue during the chaplain battle, and was one of the reforms sought after it became apparent that the chaplaincy would not be abolished. In 1858, a memorial was received in the House from officers of the Navy to make attendance at these religious services optional. "By Mr. Kelly: The memorial of officers of the navy of the United States, praying that the act of Congress passed April 23, 1800, compelling commanders of all ships or vessels in the navy, having chaplains on board, to take care that Divine service is performed twice a day, be so amended as to read that the commanders or captains invite all to attend; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary."(12) Since the Christian nationalist history revisionists seem to be so fond of lengthy lists, as is evident in their books and on their websites, as well as in H. Res. 888 with its 75 "Whereases," here's a nice long list of petitions reported in the House, calling for the abolition of the government's chaplain establishments. Countless similar petitions were also received by the Senate, but I think the list below of those received by the House (which is probably not complete) should be more than enough to show just how many Americans, and American religious organizations, viewed both military and congressional chaplains as a violation of the Constitution over a century and a half ago, blowing out of the water any assertion that the constitutional questionability of government paid chaplains is some new notion conjured up by a few modern-day atheists. February 22, 1849 -- By Mr. John R. J. Daniel: The memorial of American citizens, praying for the repeal of all laws or provisions whereby chaplains to Congress for the army and navy, or other public stations, are employed by the government to exercise their religious functions, and whereby religious schools among the Indians are established, and religious teachers employed therein, at the expense of the government. |