R. Randolph "Randy" Brinson, MD

An associate of Alabama Governor Bob Riley threatened a Christian Coalition leader over gambling issues, according to a lawsuit filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court in May 2007.

Dr. Randy Brinson, chairman of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, states in the lawsuit that he supported a bill in the Alabama House of Representatives that would tax and regulate gambling and help fund Medicaid. Brinson’s support for the bill, sponsored by Rep. Marcel Black (D-Tuscumbia), drew heavy fire from Riley allies.

The most alarming fire came from Dax Swatek, who was Riley’s campaign manager in 2006. The lawsuit says Swatek had become a lobbyist for Jones Group LLC, a Montgomery-based public affairs consultant registered to lobby on behalf of Greenetrack Inc., an Alabama gaming facility, among others.

Swatek apparently was more than happy to take money from gambling interests. But he must not have liked the bill that Brinson supported. The lawsuit states:

Not only have negative comments been made about Brinson and the Coalition in the news media, Brinson recently received a personal threat from Dax Swatek during a phone conversation after the April 10, 2007, press conference held by Rep. Marcel Black concerning HB 527. In the conversation Swatek told Brinson he’d “better back off,” and said it in a threatening manner sufficient to alarm Brinson. As Swatek represents a powerful gambling interest with an enormous interest in controlling the state’s gambling laws, Brinson has taken Swatek’s threat seriously.

Brinson and the Christian Coalition filed the lawsuit against Swatek, John Giles, and a number of other parties, claiming the defendants unlawfully seized the organization’s Web site and member lists and interfered with its business relations.

Giles was chairman of the Christian Coalition of Alabama for about eight years until he was forced to resign in August 2006. Swinson became the new chairman, and Giles went on to form a group called Christian Action Alabama.

Under Giles’ leadership, the Christian Coalition of Alabama was steadfastly opposed to gambling. But the lawsuit notes that a 2005 Boston Globe article quotes conservative leader Grover Norquist saying that his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, gave $850,000 to the Alabama Christian Coalition, and the money came from an Indian casino in Mississippi.

The lawsuit goes on to note Bob Riley’s connections to gambling interests in Las Vegas and Mississippi–and to the money laundering operation of GOP felon Jack Abramoff.

The two sides evidently reached a quick settlement, and the lawsuit was dismissed roughly one month after it was filed. But the 20-page document offers a fascinating look at the seamy intersection between Republican Party politics, religion-based organizations, big-money gaming interests, and criminal enterprises.

We will be examining the lawsuit closely because it speaks volumes about the political climate in Alabama and other conservative strongholds.

Regular readers know that Dax Swatek is a major player in my personal story, largely because his father, Pelham attorney William E. Swatek, filed the bogus lawsuit that started my legal headaches. Evidence strongly suggests that the Swateks, or someone else with close ties to Riley, played a major role in my unlawful termination at UAB. And evidence also suggests they might have played a role in my wife’s unlawful termination at Infinity Property & Casualty.

A number of sources have told me that the Riley crowd is famous for such skulduggery. You can rest assured that will be a major line of inquiry when my wife and I file lawsuits against the entities and individuals who cheated us out of our jobs.

Here is one of many posts I’ve written that says a lot about the Swateks longstanding connections to sleaze. And we have addressed before the Riley crowd’s tendency to threaten those they see as opponents.

Consider this from a post I wrote last November:

I’ve called the GOP tactics financial terrorism. And I’ve experienced them personally. I’ve received more threatening anonymous comments on my blog than I can count. And they have not been idle threats.

After a February 2008 post about connections between U.S. Attorney Alice Martin and Alabama GOP political consultant Dax Swatek, we received an anonymous comment: “Nut case, yours is comong (sic).”

After an April 2008 post, we received an anonymous comment claiming that I was blogging at work, and my employer, UAB, needed to be notified. On the date in question, I was taking a vacation day, so I was not blogging at work–then or any other time.

Roughly a month later, I was fired at UAB, after 19 years on the job, amid vague allegations that I was blogging at work. For the record, UAB’s own IT expert testified at my grievance hearing that those allegations were not true. But did someone with GOP political ties get in the ears of UAB leaders and pressure them to unlawfully fire me? Sure looks that way. And evidence suggests it was all because I was writing a blog that was critical of the Bush Justice Department and it’s handling of various political prosecutions, including the Siegelman case.

Isn’t it interesting to learn now that Dax Swatek resorted to issuing threats against Randy Brinson and the Christian Coalition? And how do people like Dax Swatek and Bob Riley reconcile such threats with their efforts to garner the support of Christian voters.

“You’d better back off”? That sounds like mighty fine Christian language doesn’t it. But that’s how Bob Riley’s henchmen talk–and that’s how they act.

The Brinson lawsuit is perhaps the most insightful document we’ve seen about the Republican Party’s depravity during the eight-year reign of terror under George W. Bush. And GOP immorality continues to reign, partly because the Obama Department of Justice refuses to expose it.

Legal Schnauzer, however, is not afraid to expose it. We will be publishing the entire lawsuit and examining its contents closely.

This story was originally published on Mr. Shuler’s blog, Legal Schnauzer.

Roger Shuler, a regular contributor to The Public Record, resides in Birmingham, Alabama. A 1978 graduate of the University of Missouri, Shuler worked 11 years as a reporter and editor for the Birmingham Post-Herald before working 19 years in several editorial positions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He blogs at Legal Schnauzer.

Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Young appeared in the popular Christian reality series "Travel the Road." He was recently promoted to the rank of full colonel.

“The President of the United States has reposed special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity, and abilities of the following officers,” says the order promoting Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Young to the rank of full colonel.

Now, the president can’t be expected to personally vet every military officer who is up for promotion, and, for all but those in the highest ranks, would obviously just rely on the recommendations of the superiors of officers on the promotions lists, but I have to wonder how President Obama would feel about having rubber stamped the promotion of an officer who said that blacks were better off as slaves.

Before getting to Col. Young’s slavery comment, I need to back up and explain how the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the civil rights organization I work for, first became aware of this officer. Back in December, I wrote a piece about the Army allowing two Christian reality TV show missionaries, whose mission was to proselytize Afghan Muslims, to be embedded with the troops in Afghanistan as journalists.

In that piece, I included a video clip from the program, Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Travel the Road, showing these missionaries giving Dari language Bibles to Afghan locals near the base where they were embedded. Just what was in this video clip, found on YouTube, was enough to see that serious violations of the regulations governing embedded journalists and the military regulations prohibiting proselytizing had been committed.

In February, I wrote a follow-up piece. By that time, ABC News Nightline had attempted to obtain the records of the embedding of the Travel the Road missionaries, only to be told that the Army had lost all records of this embedding. By the time I wrote my follow-up piece, I had also bought the DVD box set of the season of Travel the Road containing the three episodes covering the missionaries’ time in Afghanistan. In the third of the three episodes, Tim Scott, one of the Travel the Road missionaries, was shown interviewing Col. Young.

Here’s what I wrote about Col. Young in February, followed by the video:

The final clip in the video below is from the last of the three Travel the Road Afghanistan episodes, filmed in Kandahar. In this clip, Tim Scott interviews LTC Robert G. Young, the commander of the 325th Forward Support Battalion. LTC Young, a committed Christian who lists his interests in his Military.com profile as “Jesus, Wife, Kids, PT,” and belongs to a group called “Rangers 4 Christ,” told Scott that the biggest problem in Kandahar was drought, and that this drought coincidentally began as soon as the Taliban took over the country. He went on to say that we’ve got to “overcome evil with good,” and, literally thumping a Bible, quoted two of its verses in one sentence, saying, “Our weapons aren’t carnal” (Corinthians 10:4) “and no weapon formed against us shall prosper.” (Isaiah 54:17) He said he told an Afghan general that he would ask the American people to pray that God would send rain to Kandahar, and ended by saying that when the people of Kandahar see the rain “they’ll know that our god answers prayers.”

Shortly after I wrote this piece, MRFF began to receive emails telling us that the problems with Col. Young went beyond the typical disregard of regulations prohibiting the promotion of religion and proselytizing by evangelical military officers. We were informed that, among other things, the opinions espoused by Young included a comment to a subordinate officer that blacks were better off as slaves because at least then they knew Christ, and that complaints about his comments had led to him being relieved of his command.

MRFF passed these allegations on to journalist Jeff Sharlet, who was in the process of writing his article “Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military,” the cover story in the May 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Sharlet called Col. Young to get his side of the story. Young not only confirmed that what was emailed to MRFF was true, but, as the following excerpts from Sharlet’s article clearly show, still doesn’t see any problem with his slavery comment.

I found Lieutenant Colonel Bob Young after MRFF reported on an evangelical reality program, shown on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, that included tape of Colonel Young telling two wandering missionaries about his plan to pray for rain in Afghanistan. I reached him at home in Georgia late one evening. He said he was going to sit on his porch and look at the moon. In the background, I heard dogs barking. He talked for three hours, much of it about what he’d seen in the combat hospital under his command at Kandahar Air Base.

“Kids getting burned,” he recalled. “Bad guys floating in on helicopters. You wouldn’t know who they were.” The base hospital treated 7,000 Afghans that year, and Young, commander of the Army’s 325th Forward Support Battalion, lingered there, watching the bodies. “I want to tell you this. Triage area, guy strapped into gurney, Afghan guy. No shirt, skinny as a rail, sinewy muscle. Restraints on his ankles, his feet, dude is strapped into a wheelchair. He’s got a plastic shield in front of his face because he’s spitting.” A doctor wants to sedate him. “I say, ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with him. The guy has demons.’” Young decides to pray over him. “Couple minutes later the general’s son-in-law — the Afghan general’s son-in-law, our translator — comes in. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ He says, ‘How do you say in English? He has spirits.’ I say, ‘Doc, there’s your second opinion!’”

On the phone, Young laughed, a harsh “Ha!” Then his voice broke. “I’m telling you, it’s real. Evil is real.”

In the Christian reality show, Young extended that thought to the weather. “Interestingly,” he says, “the drought has been in effect since the Taliban took over.” Young has a high mouth and a low brow, his features concentrated between big ears. “People of America,” he tells the camera, “pray that God sends the rain to Kandahar, and they’ll know that our God answers prayers.”

I asked Young if he wanted to contextualize these remarks, since they seemed, on the surface, to radically transcend his mission as a soldier. “Okay!” he said. “Are you ready?” I said I was.

He told me to Google Kandahar, rain, January 2005. The result he was looking for was an article in Stars and Stripes entitled “Rainfall May Signal Beginning of the End to Three-Year Drought in Afghanistan.” Three and a quarter inches in just two days.

“That’s some real rain,” I admitted.

“That’s what I’m saying, brother!”

I asked him about an allegation made to MRFF by a captain who served under Young: that Young had made remarks that led him to be relieved of his command. It was true that he had been relieved of command, he admitted, but he had appealed and won. And the remarks? “All that was, I was speaking in reference to inner-city problems and whatnot. I said that the irony is that it would be better for a black to be a slave in America — I’m thinking now historically — and know Christ, than to be free now and not know Christ.”

With that cleared up, I then asked Young about another of the captain’s allegations: that he had given a presentation on Christianity to some Afghan warlords. Absolutely not, he said. It was a PowerPoint about America. He emailed it to me as we spoke, and then asked me to open it so he could share with me the same presentation he had given “Gulalli” and “Shirzai.” Since it had been President’s Day, Young had begun with a picture of George Washington, who, he explained, had been protected by God; his evidence was that, following a battle in the French and Indian War, when thirty-two bullet holes were found in Washington’s cloak, the general himself escaped unscathed. Young wanted to show the Afghans that nation-building was a long and difficult journey. “I did stress the fact that in America we believe our rights come from God, not from government. Truth is truth, and there’s no benefit in lying about it.”

There were slides about the Wright brothers, the moon landing, and NASCAR — Jeff Gordon, “a Christian, by the way,” had just won the Daytona 500. And then, the culmination of American history: the twin towers, blooming orange the morning of September 11, 2001. Embedded in the slide show was a video Young titled “Forgiveness,” a collage of stills, people running and bodies falling. Swelling behind the images was Celine Dion’s hit ballad from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On.” Following the video was a slide of the Bush family, beneath the words: “I believe that God has inspired in every heart the desire for freedom.” …

… The tension between war and faith does not disturb him. “We are to live with anticipation and expectation of His imminent return,” he told me. Look at the signs, said Young: nuclear Iran, economic collapse, President Obama’s decision to “unleash science” upon helpless embryos. He seemed to feel that the military was now the only safe place to be. “In the military, homosexuality is illegal. I don’t want to get into all the particulars of ‘Don’t ask,’ but you can’t act on homosexual feelings. And adultery is illegal. Really, arguably, the military is the last American institution that tries to uphold Christian values. It’s the easiest place in America to be a Christian.”

Nobody reading the article about Col. Young’s promotion on the official Army website would have any idea why his promotion to full colonel was delayed. According to the article, Young merely hit a “speed bump” due to an “adverse officer efficiency report,” which he successfully appealed — a demonstration of this fine officer’s “determination and drive to succeed.” According to the article, “Being promoted to colonel confirmed [Young's] sense that the Army is a good institution and that ultimately, the right things happen.”

Well, Col. Young is right about one thing. The military is “the easiest place in America to be a Christian.” Unfortunately, as the thousands of service members who have contacted MRFF about officers like Col. Young have made abundantly clear, it’s just not so easy a place to be for anyone else.

Chris Rodda is the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and the author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.

One of the regular features in the monthly newsletter of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is a section containing a “Violation on Video,” in which we show a video clip of a military regulation being violated by a service member or at a military event, and “Captured on Camera,” a photo of a violation being committed. The video and photo that we planned to feature in our August newsletter are typical — a video of a Marine officer appearing on a Christian television show in uniform, and a photo of an Army officer giving a briefing while standing in front of a Christian flag. What’s not typical about this month’s video and photo is how I happened to come across them. So, rather than just presenting this video and photo in our newsletter in the usual format, I decided to write about the bigger story that led me to find them.

About a month ago, as the John Ensign and Mark Sanford sex scandals were introducing America to the Family’s “C Street House,” Jeff Sharlet, who had infiltrated and extensively researched the Family for his 2008 book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, began to be besieged with media requests as the one person who could explain this shadowy religious cult to a suddenly interested audience. Jeff quickly saw that as more was being revealed about C Street, more new questions were arising, some of which involved military connections. Jeff had just spent well over a year researching religious fundamentalism in the military for his May 2009 Harper’s Magazine cover story “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military,” and during the process had become extremely well acquainted with MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein, myself, and the work of MRFF. So, Jeff called Mikey and asked if he could “borrow” me for a few days to work on the C Street investigation.

Well, those few days have now turned into a month, and it’s become increasingly clear that we’ve still only hit the tip of the iceberg, as Jeff explains:

“Mikey Weinstein, Chris Rodda, and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have been indispensable allies during the past month as I’ve worked to bring the story behind the ‘C Street House’ at the heart of this summer’s political sex scandals to the public. I knew I’d need help, and I’d need it from people who understand that political fundamentalism — ‘weaponized Christianity,’ in Mikey’s words — is a real threat to everybody’s First Amendment freedoms. Working together, we’ve uncovered a new front in the fight for open democracy: the convergence of the elite fundamentalism behind the C Street House and the populist fundamentalist activism that’s seeking to turn the military into a force for ’spiritual war.’ MRFF understands this better than anyone. Mikey is the constitutional conscience of the military, and his research director, Chris Rodda, brings investigative brilliance to the battle. Hats off to both of them and all their colleagues in MRFF.”

Making the connections between the Family and the military is, as Jeff put it, “a new front” — a front that is leading MRFF to new revelations about some of our old discoveries. For example, the participants in the Campus Crusade for Christ Christian Embassy Video — a video that led MRFF to demand an investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General in which seven officers were found guilty of ethics violations — also included, in addition to the military officers, many other government officials and politicians. Four of these other participants were members of Congress, and two of these members of Congress have been confirmed to be members of the Family. MRFF’s focus at the time of the IG investigation was, of course, on the violations committed by the military officers who appeared in the video, not the members of Congress. Similarly, when Jeff was researching the Family for his book, his focus was primarily on the political figures involved, and not the military connections that he came across. Now both of us, in addition to new research, are reviewing our respective prior research through different lenses.

Knowing that the Family’s agenda involves a worldwide strategy, one of the first things I looked at when Jeff brought me in on the C Street investigation was the travel records of the congressmen and senators known to be associated with the group. Members of Congress are required to disclose any travel paid for by private companies or organizations. What I immediately found were eighteen trips to foreign countries, taken by two senators and six congressmen, that had been paid for by the International Foundation, which is just another name for the Family. The senators taking these trips were John Ensign and Tom Coburn; the current congressmen were Robert Aderholt (R-AL), John Carter (R-TX), Mike Doyle (D-PA), Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Joseph Pitts (R-PA), and Frank Wolf (R-VA).

In addition to his five foreign trips for the Family, Wolf also took a trip to “meet with government officials” in Kona, Hawaii, paid for by the International Foundation and the University of the Nations. What’s the University of the Nations? Well, it’s the Kona, Hawaii headquarters of the worldwide organization Youth With A Mission, the organization listed on the property records as owning the C Street House. Wolf was accompanied on this trip by former Ohio congressman Tony Hall. Neither Wolf nor Hall specified on their disclosure forms the country or countries of the government officials they met with.

Then there was the travel of Sen. James Inhofe, which did not show up in a search of the disclosures of foreign travel funded by the Family. That’s because Inhofe’s numerous trips to Africa were taken at the expense of the taxpayers, although there is no question that Inhofe was on a mission for the Family. Inhofe himself admitted this in a video, clips of which were shown by Rachel Maddow during one of Jeff Sharlet’s recent appearances on her show. In this segment, Jeff explained why the Family has been sending all these senators and congressman to foreign countries.

Appearing in the full video of Inhofe is a man named Mark Powers, an Assemblies of God missionary hired by Inhofe to be on his staff as his part-time African advisor, while continuing to work for his church. Powers has regularly accompanied Inhofe on his trips to Africa, as have Inhofe’s military liaisons, which brings us to a video I found when I was doing a bit of checking into the military personnel who have traveled with Family members.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, MRFF’s monthly newsletter features a “Violation on Video,” which is often a video of service member doing something in uniform that military regulations prohibit them from doing in uniform. This month’s video stars Marine Lt. Col. Sam Mundy, one of the military liaisons who has accompanied Sen. Inhofe on his travels to Africa. In violation of military regulations, Lt. Col. Mundy appeared in full uniform on the Christian television program Total Victory Today.

LTC Mundy’s appearance on this program in uniform isn’t just an example of a violation of military regulations. It’s also an good example of what those of us who research fundamentalist groups frequently run into — the multiple connections between the groups we’re looking at. In this case, it starts with the program’s producer, Total Victory Ministries, Inc., being affiliated with Student Venture, the high school and junior high ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. Campus Crusade, of course, is also the parent organization of Christian Embassy, whose promotional video included two congressmen who are members of the Family.

The Family’s C Street House is owned by Youth With A Mission (YWAM), whose founder, Loren Cunningham, has often told the story of how Campus Crusade’s founder, Bill Bright, was instrumental in the founding of YWAM and its strategy to take over the world — the “7 Mountains” strategy, in which the “mountain of business” must be controlled in order to take over all other “mountains of culture” and achieve dominion around the globe.

Campus Crusade also runs Military Ministry, which is already firmly entrenched at all of our military’s largest basic training installations, the service academies, and ROTC campuses, and whose strategy for “transforming the nation” includes transforming the military, which “excercise[s] … the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens,” into a force of “government-paid missionaries for Christ.”

Like the Family, Campus Crusade’s Christian Embassy has been sending members of Congress on missions to foreign countries. Two of these congressmen, Robert Aderholt and John Carter, who are also Family members, talked about these trips in the Christian Embassy promotional video. But, although Adeholt and Carter were clearly talking about traveling to Africa for Christian Embassy, we can find no record of these trips in their privately funded travel disclosures. In fact, the only Christian Embassy funded trip reported by any member of Congress was one trip taken by Aderholt to meet with the president of Paraguay.

In addition to the travel records of Family members, we’ve been looking at the earmarks these members of Congress have requested, and one of the first things to jump out were the earmarks for large chapel complexes on our military bases. Jeff Sharlet got into this subject a bit on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Among the most expensive and extravagant of these mega-church military chapel projects are two of those requested by members of the Family. One, requested by John Carter for Fort Hood, already received $17,500,000 in last year’s Defense Authorization Act, and this year’s House bill adds an $8,500,000 addition to the project, for a total of $26,000,000. The other is a $14,400,000 mega-church for Fort Campbell, already approved in both the House and Senate versions of this year’s bill.

Requesting this earmark for Fort Campbell were the representatives of the two congressional districts in which Fort Campbell lies, which is who would normally be requesting an earmark for the base. But, also requesting this earmark was Family member Zach Wamp (R-TN), whose district is nowhere near Fort Campbell. Why is Wamp involved in this project? Well, a private group, the Citizens for Fort Campbell (CFFC), lobbied for it and Wamp pledged to help them get the funding for it. Wamp is on the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee for Military Construction, as is John Carter. In fact, three of the four republicans on this subcommittee are members of the Family. The third is Ander Crenshaw (R-FL).

Who didn’t get any help from Wamp and his fellow subcommittee Family members? Dover Air Force Base. Dover has a legitimate need to build a new chapel. This is the base where the military’s mortuary is, and where the bodies of fallen service members arrive. One of the base’s two chapels had to be demolished in January 2009. Then, in March, when the military began to allow the press to cover the “dignified transfer” process, as it’s officially called, they also began paying the travel expenses for the families of the fallen service members to be there for the process. Because it only has one chapel, Dover has no chapel to accommodate the influx of grieving families or the facilities for the chaplains to provide counseling for the families. So, Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware requested an earmark for a chapel to be built at Dover.

The $7,500,000 needed for a chapel to accommodate grieving families at Dover AFB did not make it into the House bill, but Carter’s additional $8,500,000 to expand his $17,500,000 Fort Hood mega-church did. There’s something very wrong with this, but there is still an opportunity to correct this demonstration of backwards priorities. The House bill has already passed, but the senators from Delaware also requested the funding for Dover, and the Senate has put the Dover chapel in their version of the bill. We’ll just have to wait for the conference report on the bill to see which base gets the funding.

Looking further into the expansion of Carter’s Fort Hood mega-church project, it appears to be even more unnecessary than it first appeared to be. What we discovered is that the $8,500,000 in additional funding to build what is being called a “Family Life Center” will actually give the base something that it already has. Just last month, Fort Hood opened its new “Spiritual Fitness Center,” a facility created by extensively renovating one of the base’s existing eleven chapels.

While the military insists that this new “Spiritual Fitness Center” is not religious, but spiritual, the renovations of the existing chapel resulted in a building that is indistinguishable from a chapel, and, going beyond its general physical appearance, is set up to hold worship services, and had, as one of its kick-off events, a Christian rock concert. And, this brings us to the “Caught on Camera” photo we had chosen for MRFF’s August newsletter. Giving a briefing last year on this new “not religious” facility was none other than Maj. Gen. Vince Brooks, one of the officers found guilty of ethics violations for his appearance in the Campus Crusade Christian Embassy video. In the photo accompanying an article about the facility, Brooks, the third of the Christian Embassy officers to be promoted rather than punished, is shown giving his briefing on this non-religious facility while standing in front of a Christian flag.

As we’ve been discovering, the web of individuals and organizations connecting the Family and the military, which includes many that I haven’t even mentioned here, is far more extensive than we initially realized, and the joint investigation being undertaken by Jeff Sharlet and MRFF is far from over.

Chris Rodda is the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and the author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.

Klingenschmitt, who now runs a Colorado Spings-based nonprofit, “The Pray in Jesus Name Project,” is also fond of boasting to his right-wing extremist followers that he demanded his own court martial because his superior officers prohibited him from praying in the name of Jesus.

But those claims are flat-out lies.

He was actually charged with disobeying an order and kicked out of the Navy for attending a political rally in front of the White House in March 2006 dressed in his Navy uniform, a violation of military regulations. Dozens of media reports over the years have since debunked Klingenschmitt’s dishonest statements  about the nature of his court-martial.

Furthermore, what makes Klingenschmitt’s claims of religious persecution so unbelievable is the fact that there have been dozens of examples where controversial, apocalyptic “End Times” evangelists like Klingenschmitt have force-fed their brand of fundamentalist Christianity down the throats of thousands of active-duty military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq–in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution–and the Department of Defense has turned a blind eye to the offenses, despite a mountain of complaints from the battlefield.

Perhaps the tallest tale Klingenschmitt has told his rabid right-wing following is the one in which he claims to have sacrificed a seven-figure pension in the name of Jesus.

That assertion is contradicted by an e-mail he sent in October 2006 to the Vice Adm. John Harvey, Jr., Chief of Naval Personnel stating that he would offer his “voluntary resignation or retirement,

Please click on this image to read the contents of Gordon Klingenchmitt's e-mail

and drop all complaints of reprisal/harassment, and waive all rights to future legal complaints against the Navy, if I were offered adequate compensation for my many years of service to our nation.”

His e-mail, obtained by The Public Record, made other veiled threats in an effort to get the Navy to pay him off in exchange for his silence.

For example, Klingenschmitt, who refused to comment for this story, threatened to turn over “documents,” supposedly backing his claims that he was being persecuted for praying in Jesus’ name, to Congress if his case was “unresolved.”

“Perhaps you’ve also noticed, both the Senate and House have scheduled hearings in January on this chaplain issue, and as their key whistleblower I’m sure they’ll be interested in my attached documents, should my complaint of new reprisals by [Chief of Naval Personnel] remain unresolved. Sir, I look forward to meeting you on Capitol Hill.”

In June of 2006, Klingenschmitt submitted a whistleblower complaint with members of Congress in which he accused naval officials of constitutional violations for prohibiting  him from praying in the name of Jesus, which an 18-month investigation conducted by Navy officials concluded was “without merit.”

The “documents” Klingenschmitt cited in his e-mail to Vice Adm. Harvey were two newspaper articles, one from the Washington Post and the other from the Washington Times. It’s difficult to understand how Klingenschmitt would have believed these articles supported his cause.

The Washington Post report, published in September 2006, was headlined: “Navy Chaplain Guilty of Disobeying an Order.” The Washington Times article appears to be one written by an Associated Press reporter the newspaper carried on Sept. 12, 2006, headlined: “Navy chaplain faces court-martial for wearing uniform at protest.”

Other documents Klingenschmitt threatened to turn over to Congress included a petition, or something similar, that supposedly showed he was supported by “30 million evangelicals” and a “conference report ordering the [Secretary of the Navy] to rescind [non-sectarian prayer] policy.”

The Navy declined to settle with Klingenschmitt in exchange for his offer to drop his complaint.

Klingenschmitt’s e-mail was written less than a month after a Navy court found him guilty of disobeying an direct order not to wear his Navy uniform to a March 30, 2006 political rally in front of the White House. He was also issued a letter of reprimand.

Klingenschmitt appeared at the White House rally alongside former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, another right-wing religious zealot, who waged an unsuccessful campaign to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments at the state courthouse.

Kligenschmitt, who was an Air Force officer for 11 years prior to becoming a Navy chaplain in 2002, had also worked closely with Rep. Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., and other members of Congress, in lobbying the Bush administration to sign an executive order authorizing military chaplains to pray “in the name of Jesus.” That effort also proved to be futile.

In closing arguments of Klingenschmitt’s court-martial, where Moore testified on Klingenschmitt’s behalf, Cmdr. Rex A. Guinn told jurors that the case was not about praying in Jesus’ name, rather it was “about an experienced military officer receiving a clear order to not do something.”

Klingenschmitt’s attempts to appeal the guilty verdict were denied.

Further undercutting Klingenschmitt’s claim that he sacrificed his naval career in the name of Jesus is an e-mail Vice Adm. Harvey sent to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Mullen urging him to approve Klingenschmitt’s “involuntary release” from the Navy due to Klingenschmitt’s “lack of career potential.”

The e-mail was sent to Mullen a week before Klingenschmitt’s appearance at the rally. It noted that Klingenschmitt was insubordinate in his campaign to overturn longstanding military religious policies.

“This officer is the individual who conducted a hunger strike in front of the White House several months ago and has engaged in other actions concerning [Defense Department] and Navy Religious Ministry policies,” the e-mail said.

In February 2007, following his court-martial, Klingenschmitt sent a lengthy screed to Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter in which he came across as highly unstable and unwilling to accept the fact that he was denied his pension–hardly the voluntary gesture of a chaplain who said he sacrificed his livelihood for Jesus. His letter accused Navy officials of “raping” him because he filed a whistleblower complaint alleging his civil rights were violated.

Mikey Weinstein, the president and founder of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), said the disgraced chaplain’s Oct. 6, 2006 e-mail to Vice Adm. Harvey requesting a cash settlement in exchange for dropping his complaints shows that Klingenschmitt is nothing more than a modern day “Judas Iscariot.”

“In my opinion, the shocking revelation of this blatantly extortionate demand letter for payoff money from Klingenschmitt to senior U.S. Navy leadership paints a crystal clear picture for all the world to see,” Weinstein said in an e-mail message. “That shamefully irrefutable picture is none other than one of a morbidly hypocritical, 21st Century, Judas Iscariot lustfully eager to betray his boundlessly self-professed piety, proselytizing ministry and missionary zeal for Jesus ‘for the right price’ to be paid to him by the United States Navy.

“However, whereas the original Judas allegedly managed to get paid his 30 pieces of blood money silver for the betrayal of Jesus, the U.S. Navy apparently made it unquestionably clear to Iscariot’s 21st Century clone, Klingenschmitt, that they would NOT pay him and he could in the alternative, essentially, simply go to hell. Indeed, any remaining molecules of good faith credibility Klingenschmitt may have had would now seem to be as extinct as the dinosaurs.”

In April, MRFF and Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) sent a letter to naval officials calling for an investigation into Klingenschmitt for continuing to represent himself as an active-duty Navy chaplain.

On his website, Klingenschmitt, who was trying to raise funds for his new endeavor when MRFF and AU lodged their complaint, posted a photograph of himself dressed in his Navy uniform and referred to himself as “Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt.” Federal law prohibits the misuse of military uniforms.

Klingenschmitt then posted a lengthy disclaimer and referred to Weinstein and Americans United executive director Rev. Barry Lynn as “boneheads.”

“The views of former Navy Chaplain Klingenschmitt do not represent the views of the U.S. Navy. The picture of Chaplain Klingenschmitt in uniform is a picture of his former self, taken while he was serving on active duty, therefore he was not impersonating an officer, he actually WAS an officer when the photo was taken (Duh).”

In May, Klingenschmitt urged his followers to pray for the death of Weinstein and Lynn.

“Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who issued press releases this week attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround us and tell lies about us. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Since he was kicked out of the Navy, Klingenschmitt has made a career out of twisting the true facts of his story and has cast himself as a martyr in the process. His followers have overlooked his long list of lies and half-truths. But former colleagues have routinely called him out.

As reported by AU, Norm Holcomb, a retired Navy chaplain who was Klingenschmitt’s boss, sent an e-mail in March 2007 to Kentucky state officials after he discovered the House of Representatives passed a resolution lauding the disgraced Navy chaplain for “service to God, country and the Commonwealth of Kentucky” and invited him to lead a prayer session.

“I was the dishonored ex-chaplain’s supervisor for the past 2 years,” Holcomb wrote in his message. “I found him to be totally untruthful, unethical and insubordinate. He was and is contemptuous of all authority. He was not court-martialed for praying in Jesus’ name. I sent him out in uniform every week to pray at various ceremonies and functions. He always prayed in uniform and in Jesus’ name.

“He was never told that he could not pray in Jesus’ name. In fact, the issue of prayer had nothing at all to do with his dismissal from the Navy. He disobeyed the lawful order of a senior officer. I am sure that you understand that Navy Regulations forbid any of us, regardless of rank or position, to appear in uniform in support of any political or partisan event.

“We have been relatively quiet regarding our ex-chaplain’s untruthfulness and lack of honor because we are embarrassed that one of our own could display such behavior in the name of our Lord. We wanted to spare all concerned the embarrassment associated with his dishonesty. However, it now seems that it would be wrong for those of us who know the truth to remain silent. I served with him and supervised him (as best as it was possible to supervise a person who refused to submit to lawful authority) and I know about his daily dishonesty and ‘spin’ of the truth.”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council has joined other nonprofit organizations in urging Obama to follow up on his commitment to work with Muslim Americans to revise charitable giving rules.

In a letter to the president, the organizations said, “We are seeking a meeting with you and the appropriate representatives of your administration to provide background information on how current national security rules create problems for all U.S. charities and to provide recommendations for change.”

It outlined a set of principles for new rules governing charitable giving and operations, and said government policy “must address systemic problems.”

The government, it said, should “provide clear standards for permissible charitable and development activity that are consistent with long-standing norms for humanitarian operations,” such as the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief.

It must provide a fair opportunity for charities accused of supporting terrorism to defend themselves; protect charitable assets from indefinite freezing and allow these resources to further the charitable mission donors intended to support; and withdraw the Treasury Department’s Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines: Voluntary Best Practices for U.S.-based Charities.”

For Muslims, charitable giving is a religiously-mandated obligation known as “zakat.”

The “war on terror” has dealt a harsh blow to Muslim charities and interfered with their donors’ religious freedom, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The report says statutes that it describes as overly broad and enforced in a discriminatory manner, coupled with a lack of due process, have starved Islamic charities of money and impeded Muslims’ ability to fulfill their religious requirement to make charitable donations.

Entitled “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity,” the report is based on interviews with more than 100 Muslim community leaders as well as experts on antiterrorism laws and regulations. Though it gives no estimate of the decline in donations to Muslim groups, it says a total of nine Islamic charities have closed as a result of government action against them since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

That action ranges, it says, from declaring a group to be under investigation to designating it a terrorist organization and freezing its assets.

Georgetown Law Center’s David Cole, a widely respected Constitutional scholar, sees a correlation between the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s and the government’s current policies. He told us, “With our return to a ‘preventive paradigm’ of preemptively weeding out threats to national security, guilt by association has been resurrected from the McCarthy era. While it was illegal in the 1950s to be a member of the Communist Party, it is now a crime to support an individual or organization on a terror watch list, although the government can designate and freeze assets without a showing of actual ties to terrorism or illegal acts.”

“While the House Un-American Activities Committee once relied on the private sector to mete out punishment through the destruction of reputations and careers, today measures such as the Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines have turned funders into the new enforcers. In this light, he said the nonprofit sector has an obligation to resist such a partnership with government.”

Last November, five members of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted in federal court in Dallas of funneling money to the Palestinian militant group Hamas and sentenced to prison. The defendants said they only gave much-needed aid to a volatile region.

Two other high-profile terrorism-financing trials, in Chicago and Florida, ended without convictions on the major counts.

Two current court cases may test the limits of the Obama administration’s executive authority as well as its commitment to transparency. Human rights lawyers are challenging the government’s right to use information obtained through warrantless wiretapping as evidence and to shut down charitable organizations without allowing them to defend themselves.

In one case, the government shut down the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity, in 2004, allegedly using information obtained though illegal wiretaps. In the other, also involving a Muslim-oriented charity, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging the constitutionality of government programs that designate organizations as “terrorists” and close them down without providing these groups a way to contest the decision in court.

In the Al Haramain case, the George W. Bush administration’s Treasury Department charged that the group was funneling money to terrorists in Chechnya and shut it down. But the government inadvertently released a classified document to the group’s lawyers. Now the lawyers contend that this document revealed that the government had been wiretapping both the organization and its lawyers without a warrant.

The organization sued the Bush administration. But when the case came to court, in 2006, the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege,” claiming that the case could not go forward because it would reveal information that would compromise national security.

The judge in that case, Vaughn Walker of the federal district court in San Francisco, rejected the government’s claims. In a first-of-its-kind ruling, the judge said the government had to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which forbids it from obtaining evidence without first obtaining a warrant from the FISA court.

The president, the judge said, could not invoke the state secrets privilege to conceal the evidence and dismiss the case.

And when the Obama administration filed an emergency appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, it hoped for a reversal of the lower court’s ruling. But the appeals court surprised government lawyers – and legal scholars – by rejecting their appeal, thus allowing the lower court decision to stand.

The decision was a significant victory for Al-Haramain’s lawyers, who said they needed the classified documents to represent their clients.

“I did not expect this from the Obama justice department,” Jon Eisenberg, an Oakland, California, lawyer representing Al Haramain, told us. “I anticipated that the Obama Department of Justice would take a more reasonable approach to moving forward with litigating this case in a manner that doesn’t jeopardize national security, which I think can be easily done,” he said.

In the second case, the Treasury Department threatened to name KindHearts, a Muslim charity, as a “specially designated global terrorist” (SDGT) based on classified evidence, without providing it with a reason or meaningful opportunity to defend itself.

The ACLU is asking a federal court to block the government from blacklisting KindHearts without providing it due process, and to lift the freeze on the organization’s assets.

“OFAC’s unlimited authority to seize KindHearts’ property and shut it down without giving the charity notice or an opportunity to defend itself is unconstitutional,” Hina Shamsi, lead ACLU attorney on the case, told us.

“KindHearts has been in limbo for more than two and a half years and is asking for independent judicial scrutiny of what has been, until now, unilateral government action,” she said.

In October 2008, a federal judge granted the ACLU’s request for an emergency order blocking the government from designating KindHearts as an SDGT without further judicial review.

A recent edition of the U.S. Army’s suicide prevention manual advises military chaplains to promote “religiosity,” specifically Christianity, as a way to deter distraught soldiers from committing suicide, which in recent months, according to one veterans advocacy group, has reached epidemic proportions.

The Army Suicide Prevention Manual says “Chaplains… need to openly advocate behavioral health as a resource” to treat suicidal soldiers and instructs behavioral health providers “to openly advocate spirituality and religiosity as resiliency factors.”

“Spirituality looks outside of oneself for meaning and provides resiliency for failures in life experiences. Religiosity adds the dimension of a supportive community to help one deal with crises. Both embed themselves in a relationship with God, or a higher power, that provides an everlasting relationship. Bottom line, Soldiers should not base their reason for living in another human being!” says a slide included in the Army’s “Suicide Awareness for Soldiers 2008” PowerPoint presentation.

The inclusion of Christianity and spirituality a new addition to the Army’s 2008 suicide prevention manual. A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls for comment.

According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the civil rights organization that sued Gates and the Defense Department over claims of rampant proselytizing in the military, the PowerPoint presentation “is not only an unconstitutional promotion of Christianity for the soldiers who are mandated to attend it, but for the behavioral health providers and non-Christian chaplains who must present it.”

MRFF president and founder Mikey Weinstein said his lawsuit clearly demonstrates “the noxiously unconstitutional pattern and practice of fundamentalist Christian oppression in our U.S. armed forces.”

The U.S. Military is barred from enacting or supporting policies that advance, promote or endorse religion.

During the presentation on combating suicides, a PowerPoint slide advised chaplains that “Soldiers need to take care of each other and rid any thoughts of survival of the fittest. Almost all religions adhere to some form of Christianity’s Golden Rule, or the Categorical Imperative of Immanuel Kant.”

This PowerPoint slide includes an image of a group of silhouetted soldiers with one soldier up in the clouds looking at a large cross. In 2007, during a similar presentation, the same image was used but it did not include the image of the cross.

Slides two through four state: “Connectivity to the Divine is fundamental to developing resiliency that allows one to deal with disappointments,” “Emphasize the importance of spiritual health, connectivity with a faith community, and a relationship with God,” and, for a slide that follows a DVD of former football star Terry Bradshaw talking about his battle with depression, “Terry is very open about his faith in God and his relationship with his church. Spirituality is an invaluable ingredient in his battle with this disease.”

In one of the presentation’s last slides, the presenter is instructed to have the audience adopt a word rooted in Christian scripture as a “motto or mantra.” The talking point for that slide is: “Emphasize the phrase ‘that you persevere, that you stay alive.’ This is derived from the Greek word ‘Hupomeno’ which is used in Christian scriptures, particularly in the Pauline epistles. It is also used by James, the bishop of Jerusalem, as Jerusalem was in devastation and about to be destroyed. He wanted all Christians, despite the persecutions and violent times, to not lose hope, to keep on enduring. Encourage the audience to repeat this word and use it as a motto or mantra when in difficult times.”

Last year, in a stunning admission, top officials at the Veterans Health Administration confirmed that the agency’s own statistics show that an average of 126 veterans per week — 6,552 veterans per year — commit suicide, according to an internal email distributed to several VA officials.

Brig. Gen. Michael J. Kussman, the undersecretary for health at the VA, sent the e-mail, dated Dec. 15, 2007. Kussman had inquired about the accuracy of a news report published that month claiming the suicide rate among veterans was 18 per day.

“McClatchy [Newspapers] alleges that 18 veterans kill themselves everyday and this is confirmed by the VA’s own statistics,” Kussman wrote. “Is that true? Sounds awful but if one is considering 24 million veterans.”

In an e-mail response to Kussman, Ira Katz, the head of mental health at the VA, confirmed the statistics and added “VA’s own data demonstrate 4-5 suicides per day among those who receive care from us.”

Weinstein has tried to reach out to President Obama in hopes of communicating the urgent nature of the matter, but he said administration officials are “unapproachable.”

“Let me make this damn, crystal clear to the currently unapproachable and disinterested Obama administration, the equally supine United States Congress, all Americans and the rest of the world: MRFF’s just amended, landmark Federal lawsuit is NOT trying to say, ‘Houston we have a problem.’ It’s NOT a ‘problem’. It’s NOT an ‘issue’. It’s NOT a ‘concern’. What MRFF’s lawsuit IS primal screaming to the aforementioned parties IS a blaring siren of immediate disaster wrought by nothing short of a wretched, out-of-control, national security threat,” Weinstein said.

“Why? Because the military command and control of our nation’s nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and laser-guided weapons has been unconstitutionally compromised by a tsunami of unbridled fundamentalist Christian exceptionalism, triumphalism and proselytizing. All of the forgoing is massively exacerbated by the fact that we’re currently engaged in two wars with the Islamic fundamentalist mirror versions of these very same American forces of religious supremacy infamy.”

An Obama spokesperson did not return numerous phone calls or e-mails for comment.

Weinstein said he his organization has uncovered other recent cases of the military “illegally” endorsing religion.

For example, Weinstein said the U.S. Air Force was an official sponsor of the Evangelical Christian Motocross Ministry known as “Team Faith,” who says their mission is “to infiltrate professional racing circuits and other Action Sports events all over the US and Canada” and “lead extreme sports athletes to Christ and disciple them so that they will in-turn, lead others involved in or interested in the sport to Christ.”

“Team Faith’s” uniforms contained a logo that was a combination of the U.S. Air Force and Team Faith logos, and the U.S. Air Force logos was also visible on team members motorcycles and on ramps.

As expected, the U.S. military quickly denied that the video released on Sunday by Al Jazeera is evidence that our troops proselytizing Muslims in Afghanistan, claiming that what was shown in the video was an isolated incident, and that the chaplains’ statements were taken out of context.

Here’s the official response from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) to the U.S. military: BULLSHIT!

If you haven’t seen the video yet, here it is:

The video released by Al Jazeera is just one of countless pieces of evidence proving that our military is actively proselytizing Muslims in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been since the so-called war on terror began.

I’ve already written about a number of other instances of these incredible and blatant violations of CENTCOM’s General Order 1-A, so let’s see the military try to explain all this away.

Read in “The ‘Great Commission’ and Iraq” about the chaplain in Ad Dawr, who said:

“I am able to give them tracts on how to be saved, printed in Arabic. I wish I had enough Arabic Bibles to give them as well.”

…and the 101st Airborne warrant officer who, referring to a daily Christian devotional book sporting the official U.S. military branch logos, said:

“the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they’re using it to minister to the local residents,” and that his “division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers.”

 

Then, there were the Christian reality TV show missionaries who were allowed to be embedded with U.S. troops as journalists while proselytizing Afghans — well, the military has lost all records of that.

U.S. Military Now in the Christian Reality TV Business — Putting Muslim Interpreters in Christmas Pageants

U.S. Army Conveniently Loses Records of Embedded Christian-Reality-TV-Show Missionaries

We also have videos, like the one below of a chaplain admitting that Swahili language Bibles are being sent in to Iraq to evangelize the Ugandan workers employed by the U.S. military, newsletters from a plethora of evangelical ministries boasting of the number of Arabic Bibles and other materials they’ve been able to get into Iraq and Afghanistan with the help of our military, photos of these evangelizing materials, and many other videos, photos, and statements from military personnel verifying that what is shown in the Al Jazeera video cannot be explained away as an isolated, out of context incident.

The video below is from Soldiers Bible Ministry, one of the many organizations being tracked by MRFF that illegally ship Bibles in various languages into Iraq and Afghanistan. In the video, Army chaplain Capt. Chris Rusack, boasts about getting the Swahili Bibles into Iraq, in spite of the regulations forbidding this.

“Actually, they’re in Baghdad right now. Somehow the enemy tried to get ‘em hung up there. There was a threat they were gonna get shipped back to the States and all that. We prayed, and they’re gonna be picked up in a couple of days. God raised someone up right there in Baghdad that’s gonna go — a Christian colonel that’s stationed there in Baghdad, and he’s gonna go and get the Bibles…”

The “enemy” here would be a U.S. military member who was doing their job by flagging this shipment of Swahili Bibles — a shipment that violated the postal and customs regulations prohibiting the bulk shipment into Iraq of religious materials contrary to Islam.

As you watch this video, keep in mind that Soldiers Bible Ministry is heartily endorsed by the Army’s Chief of Chaplains, Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver, with this statement on their website: “Thanks so much for your invaluable ministry of the Word to our Soldiers.”

Here’s another of the many examples from MRFF’s stockpile of General Order 1-A violations. The January 2009 newsletter of Worldwide Military Baptist Missions (WMBM) included these images of the English-Arabic proselytizing materials that they’ve been sending to our troops.

This was the caption:

“In 2008, we shipped over 226,000 gospel tracts, 21,000 Bibles, New Testaments and gospels of John (to include English-Arabic ones!) and 404 ‘discipleship kits’ to service members & churches for use in war zones, on ships and near military bases around the world.”

 

As for the military’s claim that the Al Jazeera video was taken out of context, well, Al Jazeera has released the raw footage to prove that it wasn’t.

Chris Rodda is the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and the author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.

The Pentagon was involved in the production of a cable program that featured two so-called “extreme” missionaries embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The popular reality series, “Travel the Road,” aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and featured Will Decker and Tim Scott, two so-called “extreme” missionaries who travel the globe to “preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and encourage the church to be active in the Great Commission.”

The other cable program green-lit by the Pentagon is “God’s Soldier,” which aired in September on the Military Channel, and was filmed at Forward Operating Base McHenry in Hawijah, Iraq. It features an Army chaplain openly promoting fundamentalist Christianity to active-duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a watchdog organization, amended a federal lawsuit it filed against the Department of Defense last year, currently in federal District Court in Kansas City, Kansas to “include these despicable unconstitutional promotions of fundamentalist Christianity in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan,” said MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein.

Part of the second season of “Travel the Road” was filmed on location in Afghanistan and aired in April 2006, where Decker and Scott were embedded with the Army, and shows numerous scenes of the men accompanying U.S. Army soldiers on patrol.  The missionaries are also filmed evangelizing the local Afghans by distributing New Testaments to them in their native Darri language.

In one scene, an Army Chaplain named Capt. Brad Hanna of the Oklahoma National Guard, talks about the possibility of a “revival” in Afghanistan and says he frequently speaks to Afghans about converting to Christianity. Hanna was made a full-time support chaplain for the Oklahoma National Guard after he returned from Afghanistan.

Additionally, Decker and Scott prominently cite SSgt. Sheldon Hoyt, who was stationed in Afghanistan with the Oklahoma National Guard’s 45th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, as playing a hands-on role in helping the missionaries facilitate their proselytizing as opposed to simply being a tour guide of sorts.

In sanctioning Decker and Scott’s work, the Pentagon appears to have committed numerous constitutional violations as well as breached military regulations such as United States Central Command’s General Order 1-A, which strictly prohibits any proselytization in the Middle Eastern theater of operations.

Last year, U.S. military personnel launched a major initiative to convert thousands of Iraqi citizens to Christianity also by distributing Bibles and other fundamentalist Christian literature translated into Arabic to Iraqi Muslims.

An article published on the website of Mission Network News reported that Bible Pathway Ministries, a fundamentalist Christian organization, disclosed that the organization provided thousands of a special military edition of its Daily Devotional Bible study book to members of the 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, currently stationed in Iraq.

The project “came into being when a chaplain in Iraq (who has since finished his tour) requested some books from Bible Pathway Ministries (BPM).”

“The resulting product is a 6″x9″ 496-page illustrated book with embossed cover containing 366 daily devotional commentaries, maps, charts, and additional helpful information,” the Mission Network News report said.

Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne told Mission Network News, “the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they’re using it to minister to the local residents.”

“Our division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers,” Llanos said. “We need to pray for protection for our soldiers as they patrol and pray that God would continue to open doors. The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They’re continuing to spread the Word.”

Karen Hawkins, a BPM official, said military chaplains “were trying to encourage [soldiers] to be in the Word everyday because they’re in a very dangerous situation, and they need that protection.”

The distribution of the Bibles and Christian literature came at the same time that U.S. Marines guarding the entrance to the city of Fallujah handed out “witnessing coins” to Sunni Muslims entering the city that read in Arabic on one side: “Where will you spend eternity?” and “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16″ on the other.

But it’s the military chaplains who have been criticized for allegedly force-feeding soldiers a form of fundamentalist Christianity originating from highly controversial, apocalyptic “End Times” evangelists and their mega-churches. Evangelical Christians have become such a dominating presence in the military’s chaplain corps that the Air Force held a four-day Spiritual Fitness Conference at Hilton Hotel in Colorado Springs in 2005 for chaplains and their families.

The U.S. Constitution says the federal government is prohibited from using the machinery of the state to promote any single religion. But, disturbingly, “God’s Soldier,” produced with the full co-operation of the 2-27 Infantry Battalion “Wolfhounds,” and “Travel the Road” comes off more like an advertisement for fundamentalist Christianity and a promotional tool for the faith.

“God’s Soldier” was co-produced by Jerusalem Productions, a British production company whose “primary aim is to increase understanding and knowledge of the Christian religion and to promote Christian values, via the broadcast media, to as wide an audience as possible.”

Before “God’s Soldier” aired on Sept. 10, the Discovery Channel, which owns the Military Channel, advertised the program by stating that it would feature several Army Chaplains from a wide variety of denominations discussing their work in the military.

“Follow a group of U.S. Army Chaplains from different faiths on a tour of duty in Iraq as they comfort wounded and dying soldiers, reassure panicked and depressed soldiers, as well debriefing those soldiers that return from their tours of duty,” the marketing literature for “God’s Soldier” said.

Instead, “God’s Soldier,” zeroed in on one chaplain, Capt.. Charles Popov, who appears in the first scene of the program in a godlike pose looking down upon the military base and urging soldier to attend Christian Bible study.

“Hey this is God,” Chaplain Popov says. “Come to Bible study tonight at 1900. Purpose Driven Life. You only have 25,000 days in your life, and probably half of it’s gone.”

The author of the book, “Purpose Driven Life,” that Popov referenced is Rick Warren, the leader of a fundamentalist mega-church in Southern California. In a recent interview with Fox News pundit Sean Hannity, Warren said, “the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped…. In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers.”

MRFF’s research has found that “The Purpose Driven Life” is second only to the Bible itself as the most widely promoted religious book to our military.

In another scene from “God’s Soldier,” Popov is featured blessing a group of soldiers about to go out on a patrol.

“I pray that you would give them the ability to exterminate the enemy and to accomplish the task that they’re been sent forth by God and country to do. In Christ’s name I pray. Amen,” Popov says as he leads the group of soldiers in prayer. “Every soldier should know Romans 13, that the government is set up by God, and the magistrate, or the one who wields the sword — you have not swords but 50 cals and [unintelligible] like that — does not yield it in vain because the magistrate has been called, as you, to execute wrath upon those who do evil.”

Popov is studying toward a Brigade Chaplain supervisory position and the rank of Major at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina’s US Army Chaplain School in the Army C-4 class.

Another clip from “God’s Soldier” contains what appears to be a violation of strict regulations governing Army chapels: a large cross-shaped window covering about a third of the height of the door.

“The actions of Army chaplain Popov are abominable beyond measure even when slightly judged by constitutional standards,” said Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. “Look, damn it, let’s call it what it is. [Popov] and his approving Army superiors are the quintessential poster-child for the treason; yes treason, of aiding and abetting our enemies.

“Indeed, they are creating the most prolific recruiting weapon ever imagined for the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists comprising al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the insurrectionists and the Jihadists. Chaplain Popov and his lickspittle Army lapdogs have tragically painted the wretched perception that this conflict is between the righteous armies of Jesus against the evildoers of all Islam. This conflict of religious extermination has happened before. They called it The Crusades.”

Since he launched his watchdog organization four years ago, Weinstein said he and MRFF have been contacted by more than 10,000 active duty and retired members of the U.S. Armed Forces, many of who served or serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who identify themselves as Christians. They told Weinstein that they were “severely” pressured by their military chain of command to convert to Christianity.

Weinstein, the author of “With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military.” and a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), has exposed scores of cases in which the Department of Defense has promoted and sanctioned fundamentalist Christian proselytizing among U.S. soldiers in violation of the U.S. Constitution, established federal case law and military regulations.

The most egregious case of the Pentagon’s close ties with Christian fundamentalist groups was formally investigated by the Pentagon’s inspector general, as a result of a highly publicized complaint lodged by Weinstein’s group, in 2007 in which high-ranking Defense Department officials appeared in a promotional video in uniform promoting the fundamentalist organization Christian Embassy.

In a 45-page inspector general report, Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, Army Brig. Gen. Bob Caslen, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, and a colonel and lieutenant colonel whose names were redacted were found to have “improperly endorsed and participated with a non-Federal entity while in uniform.”

Caslen was formerly the deputy director for political-military affairs for the war on terrorism, directorate for strategic plans and policy, joint staff. He was reassigned to the prestigious position of West Point Command of Cadets overseeing the 4,200 cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. Caslen told DOD investigators he agreed to appear in the video upon learning other senior Pentagon officials had been interviewed for the promotional video.

At least one senior military official defended their actions, according to the inspector general’s report, saying the “Christian Embassy had become a ‘quasi-Federal entity,’ since the DOD had endorsed the organization to General Officers for over 25 years.”

“These unconscionable efforts by the leadership of our American armed forces to portray our United States military as the avenging Army of Jesus must stop here and now,” Weinstein said. “It is directly leading to the emboldening of our enemy which, in turn, is maiming and killing brave American service men and women.

On the heels of the recent story about Army Chief of Chaplains Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver ignorantly issuing a proclamation for a day of fasting for the Army on the first day of Passover, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) began receiving complaints about Maj. Gen. Carver’s endorsement and promotion of an organization called American Defenders of Freedom (ADOF). MRFF receives countless complaints and reports about our military’s senior officers endorsing and facilitating the missions and activities of various para-church groups and evangelical organizations that clearly violate both military regulations and the Constitution these officers took an oath to uphold, but this one is just extra special.

ADOF is an evangelical Christian ministry that evangelizes and proselytizes military personnel by using the military’s chaplain corps to distribute prayer coins by the tens of thousands sporting the official U.S. military branch emblems — three out of the four branch emblems, that is. The Navy coin had to be redesigned last year because then Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter, who stepped down last month after staying on through the Obama transition, denied ADOF permission to use the Navy emblem on this evangelizing tool. According to the ADOF’s January 2008 newsletter, Secretary Winter’s respect for the constitutional and military prohibitions on this government promotion of religion was the work of Satan:

“The Navy Prayer Reminder Coin was completely re-designed (an improvement) because the Secretary of the Navy would not give permission to use the official Navy seal on the Navy Prayer Reminder Coin – Satan is always at work.”

But, ADOF is heartily endorsed and promoted by the Air Force and Army. In fact, Maj. Gen. Carver currently has an ADOF “newsletter insert” download on the Chief of Chaplains Office website’s April 2009 newsletter. According to past ADOF newsletters, the promotion of this ministry to the military chaplaincies has been a regular occurrence each spring by both the Air Force and the Army.

ADOF has depended particularly on the Army and Air Force Chiefs of Chaplains to promote its ministry and materials:

“The demand for Prayer Tracts and Prayer Reminder Coins is high and will soon even be greater as the Army and Air Force are once again planning to publish the ministry in their Newsletters. The Navy and Marine Corps provides our information to the Chaplains in less formal ways.”

This official promotion of ADOF by the Army’s Chief of Chaplains led one chaplain, quoted in an ADOF newsletter, to think that the ADOF coins were actually coming from the Army Chaplain Corps, not a private ministry:

“My assistant had told me we could get free ‘CHAPLAIN COINS,’ and I told him to order 100. I thought the supply was from the Army Chaplain Corps. Two weeks ago, I found out the real source.”

So, what is so egregiously unconstitutional about the Army and Air Force endorsing and promoting ADOF?

Well, first and foremost, ADOF’s sole mission is to evangelize non-Christians. So serious is ADOF about adhering to this evangelistic mission that chaplains must “Describe how Tracts/Coins will be used for evangelism” on the order form for them. Only if the chaplain’s proposed evangelistic purpose for requesting the coins, each of which is accompanied by a Bible tract, is evangelistic enough for ADOF, can the chaplain get the materials free of charge.

According to ADOF:

“To obtain our materials without charge the Chaplain must describe in his/her order how our materials will be used in an evangelism process to share the Gospel message of Jesus Christ. Chaplains will be required to pay for Prayer Coins used for other than ministry purposes, such as awards, recognitions, remembrances, etc.”

“Prayer Tracts and Prayer Reminder Coins are provided without charge to Chaplains for evangelistic Christian Ministry to troops, sailors, airmen and marines. Coins may also be purchased for special uses other than ministry…”

And, ADOF clearly has very strict guidelines as to what type of evangelistic activities are evangelistic enough to be worth providing free materials for. This is evident in the following statement from one of its newsletters, in which it was reported that the number of back orders would be greatly reduced once they weeded out the unqualified orders:

“44,000 Coins and even more Tracts are currently on back order to the Chaplains. All orders are screened and qualified to insure they are directed toward a ministry of evangelism, this will result in reducing the current back orders to about 35,000.”

To obtain coins and tracts for purposes and events where they will be distributed to those who are already “saved,” the chaplains must pay for them. But, even if a chaplain’s evangelical mission doesn’t meet ADOF’s requirements for free materials, they can still get them — courtesy of the government. All they have to do is use their Government Purchase Card (GPC).

In their April 2008 newsletter, ADOF stated that they were working on making it possible for chaplains to order with their (GPC):

“We have made major changes to accommodate the government purchase card, and are yet to experience a single command that allows Chaplains to purchase ministry materials with government funds. This constraint on Chaplains is like requiring troops to provide their own guns and ammunition or find a benevolent arms supplier.”

The current FAQ page on the ADOF website indicates that it succeeded in this effort to have chaplains use their GPC:

Q6: As a Chaplain, can I use the Government pay card (GPC) to purchase on your website

A: Yes.

The other major issue is the violation of military regulations, U.S. postal regulations, and the laws of Iraq and Afghanistan, which prohibit the shipping of bulk quantities of religious materials contrary to Islam into Iraq and Afghanistan. Only religious materials intended for personal use of the troops are allowed. In other words, you can send a religious tract to an individual soldier, but you can’t ship that soldier a case of that religious tract to hand out. ADOF’s mission is also a clear violation of the CENTCOM’s General Order 1A, a standing order prohibiting proselytizing by military personnel.

There is no question that ADOF’s mission is to evangelize non-Christians, and that the quantities of ADOF materials being shipped into Iraq and Afghanistan for this purpose would qualify as prohibited bulk shipments.

Numerous statements like the following in ADOF’s newsletters indicate the quantity of materials being shipped:

“Our goal remains to reach 180,000 troops a year with the Gospel Message of Christ. The cost of doing this is $2.35 to get a Prayer Tract and Prayer Reminder Coin in the hands of a troop any where in the World. The cost – insignificant – the value of eternity with Christ – priceless.”

“Friday, the last of the 58,000 Prayer Coin inventory was shipped. The impact on so many lives is a blessing!! Angels are rejoicing, Satan is furious and our Eternity populated with more joyous souls.”

The military also appears to be involved in the shipping of the materials, providing “staging bases” for shipping:

“Packages have already been received – Chaplains are thanking us [ADOF] from the Pentagon, our staging bases in the States and overseas and in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.”

Countless testimonies from chaplains in the ADOF newsletters prove that the purpose of their use of ADOF materials is to evangelize ALL of the non-Christians they encounter.

“I want to personally send a thank you for your service to all our Freedom Fighters in America’s military and to thank you for your donation to American Defenders of Freedom Christian Ministry organization. With your gift I will be able to show God’s love and mercy to those who hear the Gospel and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.”

“On behalf of every Soldier’s hand I will shake, leaving an Army Prayer Coin and Tract as a witness for our Lord Jesus Christ – I thank you for the coins and tracts, and particularly your partnership in Gospel ministry. I had been given a handful of coins by an Air Force Chaplain and immediately began giving them out to convoy commanders when we prayed. As a result of your ministry I will now be able to have a much broader witness.”

“James says the Tracts and Coins provide a way to ’share the good news of God’s saving grace’ with every departing convoy.”

“A battalion Chaplain relates how he uses our Tracts and Coins in his training command. He describes that he gives the graduation invocations and benedictions at which time he introduces our Prayer Tracts and Jesus Christ to all the graduates. The Chaplain reminds the graduates that before they deploy they need to search and know God. He stresses to the graduates the urgency of taking care of this business with God and ends his message with a prayer referring to Isaiah 41:10, which is appropriately engraved on the Coin. We provide this Chaplain with Prayer Tracts and are currently in the process of supplying Coins to all who pray to receive Jesus as personal savior. He is one of hundreds of Chaplains using our materials to reach Troops for Christ.”

“Chaplain Gene writes from Kosovo, “I had the opportunity to give a Coin to the Serbian Colonel commanding the Serbian forces on the other side of the border.”

“…the ministry of American Defenders of Freedom touches the far reaches of the World for the cause of Christ because He has trusted the Gospel message to be spread by his faithful Chaplain servants.”

“I am very excited about the arrival of the Prayer Tracts & Prayer Coins. You have gifted us with a powerful, Gospel energized tool to further help spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to men, women, families of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force here in Korea. Your awesome ministry is a spiritual uplifting to our efforts to preach, teach the love of Christ to our Military.”

Statements in the ADOF newsletters from 2007 reveal who ADOF’s founder, Bill D. Hunter, met with to become the quasi-official ministry it has become. These meetings included not only the top military chaplains, but the Chaplain of the Senate and Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

From the April 2007 newsletter:

“The week of 23 April I will be attending the annual Air Force Chaplain’s Conference in Washington. I have also planned multiple office visits while back there. I’ll be staying in the home of Mark and Nancy Petersburg. Mark, for many years was a head of The Christian Embassy and has been a great help in starting this ministry.”

From the May 2007 newsletter:

“Two weeks ago in Washington I met with the Army, Navy/Marine Corps and Air Force Chief Chaplains, Chaplain of the Pentagon, Executive Director of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, Chaplain of the U.S. Senate and had a meeting in Senator Kyl’s office.”

And last, but certainly not least, the ADOF newsletter published five days after the election of Barack Obama contained the following statement:

“Our government seeks to emulate Europe in many ways including independence from God. We witness these anti-God forces attempting to remove, ‘In God We Trust’ from our buildings and currency. Likewise there is pressure to prevent Chaplains from using the name of Jesus in their ministry.”

MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein recently called for the removal and punishment of Maj. Gen. Carver when MRFF’s investigation into his fast day proclamation turned up that he had also, as reported by the Associated Press, endorsed another ministry, one whose mission is to turn U.S. troops into “ambassadors of Christ” and is illegally shipping Bibles in various languages into Iraq, including Swahili Bibles to evangelize the Ugandan workers employed by the U.S. military. Upon the discovery of Carver’s endorsement and promotion of ADOF on the official Army Chief of Chaplain’s website, Weinstein repeats his call for removal and punishment.

“The Military Religious Freedom Foundation now fairly asks what will it EVER take for the U.S. Army to punish ANYone for unconstitutional religious actions of illicit proselytizing and evangelizing? Chaplain (Major General) Carver is a literal poster child of wretched, unconstitutional religious supremacy and fundamentalist Christian promotion. MRFF now demands his immediate removal and trial by General Courts Martial. The chances of Carver receiving any form of even remote admonishment for this shameless betrayal of his oath to the United States Constitution is as likely as the Somali pirates being named to head the New York Port Authority. Army Secretary Geren will more likely nominate Carver for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Travesty upon travesty upon travesty”

Chris Rodda is the senior research director for the nonprofit government watchdog organization The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and author of the book Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History. She can be reached liarsforjesus@aol.com

A U.S. Army soldier who was allegedly forced to attend fundamentalist Christian themed events and sued Secretary of Defense Robert Gates claiming his First Amendment rights were violated should not be permitted to seek relief in federal court because he failed to take his grievances to his superiors, the Justice Department said in court documents filed last week in response to the Army’s soldier’s federal lawsuit.

Moreover, the Justice Department argued that documentary evidence contained in the lawsuit that says the U.S. military engaged in a “pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States Army” should be set aside because the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that anyone was negatively “affected by the alleged” abuses.

Army Spc. Dustin Chalker and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights watchdog organization that ensures the military upholds its religious neutrality guidelines, filed the lawsuit against Gates and the Department of Defense last year.

Despite Chalker’s objections to being subjected to fundamentalist Christian prayer sessions, his Army superiors continuously forced him to attend other military events where the prayer ceremonies continued.

His lawsuit claims that being forced to “attend military functions and formations where sectarian Christian prayers are delivered is evidence of a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States Army.”

Under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, government officials, including military personnel, are prohibited from using the machinery of the state to promote any form of religion.

Long-Standing Tradition

The Christian right has been successful in spreading its fundamentalist agenda at US military installations around the world for decades. But the movement’s meteoric rise can be traced back to March 2003, the month the U.S. Invaded Iraq.  

Since then, thousands of soldiers on the battlefield have told disturbing stories of being force-fed fundamentalist Christianity by highly controversial, apocalyptic “End Times” evangelists, who have infiltrated US military installations throughout the world with the blessing of high-level officials at the Pentagon.

The Justice Department doesn’t dispute the facts of the lawsuit. Rather, the Justice Department claims that the plaintiffs have no standing to sue the federal government.

Additionally, the government claims chaplain led prayer ceremonies are a tradition that dates back to the founding of the United States and a practice that has been conducted at legislative prayer sessions since the Congress’s first session more than 200 years ago. The legislative prayer prayer sessions were “not . . . an ‘establishment’ of religion,” but “a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.”

That alone requires the case to be dismissed, the government’s response filing says.

MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein, a former White House counsel in the Reagan administration, and general counsel to Texas billionaire and two-time presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, sharply criticized the Justice Department’s legal argument.

“I find the DOJ’s use of the word “tolerable” to be quite transparently disingenuous,” said Weinstein, who graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and has also served as an Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG). “In today’s U.S. military, having to endure such forced nonsecular indoctrination is about as “tolerable” as having an electric cattle prod shoved into one’s body crevices. Shame on the DOJ.”

Weinstein is also the author of the book With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against An Evangelical Coup in America’s Military, which documents the virulent anti-Semitism he was subjected to while he attended the Air Force Academy and the proselytizing that has been rampant at the facility for years.

Revisionist History

Additionally, the Justice Department’s response says that Congress passed legislation in 1799 “providing that the ‘commanders of ships of the United States, having on board chaplains, are to take care, that divine service be performed twice a day, and the sermon preached on Sundays.’”

Moreover, “in 1800, Congress directed, even more pointedly, that naval commanders ’cause all, or as many of the ships company as can be spared from duty, to attend at every performance of the worship of Almighty God.’”

“Thus, as with legislative prayer and inaugural prayer, it is simply inconceivable that the members of the First Congress, who drafted the Establishment Clause, thought it to prohibit chaplain-led prayer at military ceremonies, having passed legislation not only approving that practice, but indeed requiring service members to attend divine services,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in their response.

But according to Chris Rodda, the senior research director at MRFF and the author of the book Liars for Jesus, that’s revisionist history.

“What the DoJ fails to mention is that it, in 1858, these acts were protested by a group of naval officers, who petitioned Congress to amend the act of 1800 to make religious services optional,” Rodda said. “The petition of these naval officers was part of a widespread campaign to completely abolish both the military and congressional chaplaincies.

“Beginning in 1849, and continuing for the next two decades, Congress received hundreds of petitions signed by thousands of Americans, many from churches and religious organizations, calling for the complete abolition of all government chaplaincy establishments. In the military, a particular complaint was the takeover of the chaplaincy by the Episcopalians, and the resulting coercion and mandatory adherence to Episcopalian worship by non-Episcopalian military members and chaplains.”

“This is not an issue of Christians verses non-Christians,” Rodda added. “The overwhelming majority of petitions received by the Congresses of the 1850s and 1860s were written and signed by Christians and Christian religious organizations, just as the majority of complaints received by MRFF – 96 percent of them — are from self-identified Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, who are being coerced and harassed by the fundamentalist Protestants, who don’t consider them to be “real” Christians.”

No Formal Complaints

Although Justice Department attorneys do not dispute Chalker’s claims of being forced to attend fundamentalist Christian themed events, department attorneys argue that the case should not move forward because Chalker failed to first lodge his complaints with the Army’s Equal Opportunity Office. Furthermore, the Justice Department claims, Chalker did not make a formal request to his superiors to be excused from the fundamentalist Christian events.

“Specialist Chalker ignored his best avenue for relief: asking the Army to redress his grievances before asking this Court to intervene,” says the Justice Department’s response to the complaint. “He now seeks judicial review of particular duty orders, review that would interfere with military operations and intrude on command and disciplinary decisions that are committed to military judgment, subject to the oversight of Congress and the Executive Branch, not the courts.

“Moreover, he asks the Court to substitute its judgment for that of the Army with respect to chaplain-led prayer at military ceremonies – a tradition that is deeply embedded in our Nation’s history and, like other tolerable acknowledgments of widely-held religious beliefs, fully consistent with the Establishment Clause.”

But according to the lawsuit, “Chalker has sought relief from mandatory attendance at the subject functions/formations through his chain of command and the equal opportunity process. Neither has yielded satisfactory results.”

The Justice Department’s response also included a declaration from Army Capt. Kenneth R. Jones who said he “did not receive a request for religious accommodation from Specialist Chalker for any of these events.”

However, Chalker and MRFF claim the Army has grossly misstated the facts.

“The facts will incontrovertibly show that Specialist Chalker used his very best efforts to seek every other possible form of relief and redress from the Army prior to having no other reasonable choice but to join MRFF’s lawsuit as our co-plaintiff. The Department of Defense deliberately makes it about as easy to file such personal grievances on unconstitutional religious intolerance grounds, as it is to solve a Rubik’s cube in 10 seconds flat. We have almost countless examples of this terrible travesty.”

Additional Cases of Proselytizing

Claims that senior military officials failed to address complaints from active-duty personnel about proselytizing were also leveled last month when Air Force Master Sgt. Jeffrey L. Thompson said he was blocked from filing a formal complaint by his superior about an e-mail sent out to thousands of airmen in Europe by a colonel which smacked of illegal proselytizing and was “hostile to our commander-in-chief.”

MSgt. Thompson, who said he is a Roman Catholic, was told by an official with the Military Equal Opportunity office (MEO) in January that Col. Kimberly Toney’s e-mail, which directed Air Force personnel to a far-right Catholic website, was not intended to come across as proselytizing and because he did not personally endure any suffering as a result of her e-mail and therefore was prevented from filing a formal complaint.

That’s the same position the Justice Department adopted in addressing the other cases in the lawsuit of widespread proselytizing, which includes the Pentagon’s involvement in the production of two cable programs, one of which featured two so-called “extreme” missionaries embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The lawsuit also claims that the U.S. Air Force was an official sponsor of the Evangelical Christian Motocross Ministry known as “Team Faith,” who says their mission is “to infiltrate professional racing circuits and other Action Sports events all over the US and Canada” and “lead extreme sports athletes to Christ and disciple them so that they will in-turn, lead others involved in or interested in the sport to Christ.”

“Team Faith’s” uniforms contained a logo that was a combination of the U.S. Air Force and Team Faith logos, and the U.S. Air Force logos was also visible on team members motorcycles and on ramps.

Finally, the lawsuit claims another form of illegal proselytizing can be found in the U.S. Army’s suicide prevention manual, which advises military chaplains to promote “religiosity,” specifically Christianity, as a way to deter distraught soldiers from taking their own lives.

The 2008 Army Suicide Prevention Manual says “Chaplains… need to openly advocate behavioral health as a resource” to treat suicidal soldiers and instructs behavioral health providers “to openly advocate spirituality and religiosity as resiliency factors.”

“Spirituality looks outside of oneself for meaning and provides resiliency for failures in life experiences. Religiosity adds the dimension of a supportive community to help one deal with crises. Both embed themselves in a relationship with God, or a higher power, that provides an everlasting relationship,” says a slide included in the Army’s “Suicide Awareness for Soldiers 2008″ PowerPoint presentation.

The lawsuit alleges that the PowerPoint presentation “is not only an unconstitutional promotion of Christianity for the soldiers who are mandated to attend it, but for the behavioral health providers and non-Christian chaplains who must present it.”

‘Vague’ Examples

But the Justice Department maintains these are “vague” examples of alleged unconstitutional proselytizing and there is no evidence that anyone suffered as a result.

“Absent any allegation that the purported practices harm Specialist Chalker in an individualized, concrete way, Plaintiffs are left to assert that they are injured by their mere perception that such practices exist,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in their response. “But this objection, without more, is nothing but a generalized grievance that Defendant’s conduct violates the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has ‘repeatedly held that an asserted right to have the Government act in accordance with law is not sufficient, standing alone, to confer jurisdiction on a federal court.’”

Additionally, “[A] claim that the Government has violated the Establishment Clause does not provide a special license to roam the country in search of governmental wrongdoing and to reveal [such] discoveries in federal court,” the Justice Department argued. “Although Plaintiffs suggest that their vague “pattern and practice” accusations are evidence of constitutional error, they “fail to identify any personal injury suffered by them as a consequence.”   

Weinstein said, despite his best efforts, he has been unsuccessful in trying to get the Obama administration-and other high-ranking administration officials-to address the issue head on.

“The Obama Administration has been shockingly silent on this heinous national security threat of the comprehensive compromising of our nation’s military chain of command by fundamentalist Christianity,” Weinstein said. “If and when the President and his key staff may ever choose to eventually engage on this swift, ticking nuke, the only question left to ponder may have been was it already too late?”

In January, Democratic Sen. Tom Udall wrote a letter to Obama requesting that someone in his new administration schedule a meeting with Weinstein’s group to discuss the issue of widespread proselytizing in the military “and the manner in which the U.S. Department of the Defense intends to proceed in the coming months and years.”

“There are many former and current individual cases of alleged discrimination and infringements within the military which Mr. Weinstein can help bring to your administration’s attention and which we all hope will be addressed with all due expediency,” Udall, who represents Weinstein’s home state of New Mexico, wrote.

To date, neither Obama nor anyone in his administration has responded to Udall’s letter.