Message to U.S. Airmen: "Accelerate Your Christian Journey"
Chris Rodda printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Tue Aug 31, 2010 at 05:50:32 PM EST
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) receives a constant stream of photographs from service members and DoD employees around the globe showing overt promotions of Christianity in the form of signs, banners, posters, and flyers -- all strategically placed in locations that are impossible for military personnel to avoid in their day to day activities.

Are these photos coming from a handful of atheistic troublemakers? Not by a long shot. The overwhelming majority come from Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, who are disgusted with the military's blatant disregard of regulations regarding religious neutrality and promotion of a particular religion, and, more specifically, a particular view of that religion to which they, even as Christians themselves, do not subscribe.

The latest example comes from fifty-three airmen and DoD employees at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, forty-one of whom are either Protestant or Catholic, who have come to MRFF to get a large, unavoidable banner removed from the side of one of the base chapels. Why did they come to MRFF? Because they're afraid of the possible repercussions of complaining to the chapel or the command.

Because of the chapel's location, the banner at Wright-Patterson, promoting the base's "Fuel" ministry with the slogan "Accelerate Your Christian Journey," cannot be avoided by any airman or employee who wants to go to the commissary, base exchange, credit union, bowling alley, or pharmacy, and is an inescapable daily message to the enlisted airmen because of its proximity to their barracks and chow hall.

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How long do you think a similar banner saying "Accelerate Your Islamic Journey" or "Accelerate Your Atheistic Journey" would be allowed to stay up on a military base for all to see? But banners and signs promoting Christian ministries and programs are everywhere, and not just on chapel buildings. They're in chow halls, briefing rooms, recreation facilities, and all sorts of other completely inappropriate, and often unavoidable, places.

Remember those soldiers at Fort Eustis who were punished for not attending a Christian concert? Well one of them also sent MRFF photos of their briefing room, where a large "Take the NEXT Step with Christ" banner from ChapelNext, one of the most heavily promoted Christian ministries in the military, hangs side by side with an "Army Strong" banner.

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I was going to continue by adding a few more examples from the hundreds of other similar photos that I could choose from, but as I was sitting here writing this post, a new email came in from a soldier who just arrived at Fort Eustis to be greeted by a Bible waiting for him in his barracks room, so I think I'll just end here with a the first few lines of that soldier's email.

"I've just arrived for a military school at Ft. Eustis. As I was settling into my room in the barracks I found a Bible 'placed by the Gideons.' I know these are found in just about every civilian hotel room, but this is not a civilian hotel. ..."




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Or would the fliers mysteriously vanish? Would the Chaplins display ads for Quoran study groups? What about Torah?

I think what might bother people is the whole peer pressure thing in a place where it can be hard to escape. Christianity isn't the only way to go. The sign on the chapel annoys me but I could ignore it, the sign in the computer room? NOT as cool.

Why does it all have to be so much in your face anyway??

by Autumn on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 02:05:45 PM EST

between 31 and 28 years ago, I was specifically "encouraged" to "vanish" flyers from hated groups like Wiccans, GLBT people, and so on (including "worldly" entertainments that were preached against- like movies and parties and anything remotely sexual in nature).  I did so regularly... and always replaced them with flyers supporting Pentecostal/Dominionist/Fundamentalist causes.

Now I'm ashamed of the wrong I did- but the point is- you're right.  Your fliers would vanish if a dominionist came around (and they thought they'd get away with it- we WERE usually careful, because we had heard how those 'evil' "people in the world" would "misuse the legal system against Christians").

Funny isn't it, how they think that they have rights, but they don't extend those same rights to anyone else???


by ArchaeoBob on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 02:18:38 PM EST
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http://www.chick.com/default.asp

I do see some humor in this.

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 02:27:53 PM EST
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Church-sponsored stuff mainly, promoting church functions.  Sometimes anti-GLBT fliers (yep, including some pretty raw hate language and lies on them too).  I halfway stripped a couple of bulletin boards a few times (on campus), and then papered the entire thing with church-stuff-related fliers.

One day someone from the GLBT group on campus caught me in the act... and I turned to him and told him that "If you knew Jesus, you wouldn't be talking".  I am REALLY ashamed of that now... and I wish I could find the guy and apologize.  I think I scared him (which if it kept him away from dominionism, might actually have been a good thing).

I rarely dealt with Chick tracts, except a couple of times when the "pastor" picked up a bunch of them, and we all went around stuffing them everywhere we thought they might get read.

by ArchaeoBob on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 02:45:27 PM EST
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I thought we were talking about military bases.

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 03:01:01 PM EST
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But my experiences that I'm talking about were on a university.  It's still wrong, irregardless of the location.

I've never been in the military (thank God).

by ArchaeoBob on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 03:36:42 PM EST
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I agree it.  It is wrong to tear down signs, but irregardless is not standard academic English.  I wouldn't use that in a paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless

I had a blast in the military at least the first 20 years.

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:03:04 PM EST
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So, now you are tearing down signs for the other side instead of for the dominionists you worked for in the 80s.

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:05:18 PM EST
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I'm opposed to government sponsorship of religion, which is exactly what those signs represent.

I think I'm wasting my time with you.


by ArchaeoBob on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:13:03 PM EST
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you are because I've shown why those signs okay and why it's wrong to remove them.  You are the one going over old ground

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:29:49 PM EST
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hard to not mention the irony

btw, if you'd like to see me at war with the dominionists, check out www.conservative21.net and www.notconformedthoughts.com.  Over there, I go by "c."

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:09:21 PM EST
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...those notice boards with locked glass covers.

by NancyP on Thu Sep 02, 2010 at 10:57:06 PM EST
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Those who destroy fliers are subject to UCMJ just like everyone else.  I don't think misbehavior justifies limiting signage for base services.

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 02:31:09 PM EST
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Lesh, I was around for the early days of this. My dad served at Clark AFB in the Philippines in the mid 70s, when the Baptists still had to operate off-base. The on-base stuff being documented at this site is more extreme than what the Baptists dared do off-base back then. The thing that offended me from back then was an adult counselor at bible camp ridiculing the Filipinos for baptizing babies. Weren't we guests in the Philippines? But it is all vastly more extreme now, and I've learned so much about what the end game is. The Dominionists don't choose fresh meat randomly. They want America because they want power. Since neo-Victorian economics have let the corporations gut the industrial base and seduce Americans into wiping out their savings (wages have been flat for 30 years while private spending kept growing unaffected), we are locked into the pattern of a rapidly declining empire: the economy becomes obsolete, but the weapons and military skills remain for a dangerous interval. So what the Dominionists want is not the power to impress the world into converting, but the power to hold it at gunpoint. Why take over the Air Force first? See my next post.

by super390 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:12:55 PM EST
(Sorry, but I can't get paragraph breaks to work no matter what I try.) The Navy has plenty of nukes, but by tradition it has a more educated officer class and a more globe-friendly outlook. The Marines are cautious about political entanglements because their mission as America's "other army" has always relied on Congress' good will. The Army, well, you know the Army will put up with anything asked of it by the Commander in Chief................. But then there's the Air Force.................. There's always been something creepy about the USAF, but I couldn't see it until about the time my dad retired. 90 years ago, a small cult of pioneering military aviators around the world built around the ideas of the author Douhet, who argued for terror-bombing of civilians as a way to deter war forever. The cult was derided at first, but the war came that let them cut loose, to the destruction of millions. Unfortunately, the wrong conclusions were drawn from the results of strategic bombing and the public was converted to the belief. People in the colonial world, however, simply changed the mode of war after 1945 and exposed the failure of strategic bombing. While too late to stop the bomber clique from creating an independent USAF that dominated the other services, this new war kept discrediting American military power in practice................ At this same moment, the Christian Right was freaked out about black power and gay power in the streets, reds abroad, and the failure of US power in Vietnam. I argue that they grasped at two straws: (a) Israel's victory in the '67 War as proof that the white man had to take the offensive against the brown horde, (b) Reagan's insistence that nuclear war was not unwinnable.............. I think all of that tied the movement's hopes on USAF. USAF is a metaphor for America's non-empire Empire. Run the most like a corporation of all the services, bland and personally inoffensive, it was seen as proof of America's superior entrepreneur-driven technology converted to a mission of hegemony only America could be allowed to attempt. USAF became the Vatican of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which could have been used for far more than justifiable defense.............. The only real question in this part is why the Christian Right invaded Colorado Springs, which already had the USAF Academy................. But in the larger history of fascist overthrows of democracy, USAF can be seen as having a domestic role as well. No matter how much like Allende's Chile or Republican Spain we become in the future, it will never occur to us that the Air Force might switch sides and deliver an ultimatum to Democratic cities: surrender or be blasted to oblivion. The Army cannot be trusted to carry this out and the Navy/Marines would never dare. But for the USAF, it would be the perfect fusion of the religion of Douhet and the religion of Rushdoony.............. The main question, then, is whether officers are being cultivated to carry out such a crime in the years to come. The fundamentalist movement has taken decades to get where it is, but the decline in the white population and the difficulty of the Right in recruiting Latinos means that time is running out to hold onto the Red States as a safe area for organizing treason. It is plenty of time, though, for mid-level Dominionist sleepers to move up into the top slots of the Command.

by super390 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:49:08 PM EST
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did you try changing post mode under comment prefs within your user preferences to get para. breaks?

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 05:23:40 PM EST
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but, we still have to follow the Constitutional liberties from which SCOTUS upholds the Chaplaincy.

by lesh2000 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:33:57 PM EST
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The Religious Right must remember their history- here is old school Christian doctrine against Dominionism: Charles Spurgeon vs Dominionism http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols25-27/chs1535.pdf Matthew Henry's Commentary vs Dominionism http://www.christnotes.org/commentary.php?b=19&c=149&com= mhc (start with "Christ never intended...") also check out Isaac Backus here: http://classicliberal.tripod.com/radical/churchstate.html and go to Isaac Backus' book

by zowie on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:47:23 PM EST
http://discernment-ministries.org/ChristianImperialism.htm - This article explains why Dominionism is a heresy- and this is according to very evangelical Christians.

by zowie on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 04:50:00 PM EST
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I retired from the Air Force following a rewarding 30-year career.  When I was on active duty I never experienced religious pressure of any kind.  I had been on active duty for 10 years when I elected to become a Roman Catholic.  Ten years later when I left the Catholic Church to become a Unitarian humanist, no one cared as that was my right to do.  Those were the good old days.  Conservative, evangelical Christianity has become a pandemic that ruins everything it touches and the Department of Defense is not immune.  Back in 1935, Sinclair Lewis said "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross."  His statement was prophetic.

by Mike in Wisconsin on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 05:54:58 PM EST
"Taliban II is coming, and this time they carry a cross!"

There are so many comparisons between the Dominionists and the Taliban that you'd almost think they were cut from the same cloth.

by ArchaeoBob on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 06:14:30 PM EST
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No matter how many soldiers complain, this overt proselytizing and ubiquitous christian presence won't stop, I feel. Opposition only emboldens their 'persecution complex'. I appreciate the good fight that this site and the MRFF are engaged in; but the other side has money, congress, and a sizable sub-culture to draw from.

by COinMS on Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 06:14:11 PM EST


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