Christian soldiers 30 May 2009 When George Bush Shrubbery announced the invasion of Iraq, he called it a “crusade”, to the chagrin and horror of Muslims inside the US and out. The White House quickly backed down, but it now looks very like that is exactly how the US military has been pursuing the war. A horrifying article in Harper’s Magazine details how the US military is being run by effectively conservative, and often fundamentalist, Christians, contrary to policy and constitutional law, and how they have behaved in Muslim Iraq. Some excerpts: As dusk fell, the men prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles for a “run and gun” to draw fire away from the compound. Humphrey headed down from the roof to get a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley’s armor, in giant red Arabic script. “What’s it mean?” asked Humphrey. “Jesus killed Mohammed,” one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night. The Bradley, a tracked “tank killer” armed with a cannon and missiles—to most eyes, indistinguishable from a tank itself—rolled out. The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. The sun was setting. Humphrey heard the keen of the call to prayer, then the crackle of the bullhorn with the interpreter answering—in Arabic, then in English for the troops, insulting the prophet. Humphrey’s men loved it. “They were young guys, you know?” says Humphrey. “They were scared.” A Special Forces officer stood next to the interpreter—“a big, tall, blond, grinning type,” says Humphrey. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared. and A spokeswoman for the Pentagon says the military has dealt with fewer than fifty reports of religion-related problems during the period since Mikey founded MRFF. But an abundance of evidence suggests that the Pentagon is ignoring the problem. I spoke to dozens of Mikey’s clients: soldiers, sailors, and airmen who spoke of forced Christian prayer in Iraq and at home; combat deaths made occasions for evangelical sermons by senior officers; Christian apocalypse video games distributed to the troops; mandatory briefings on the correlation of the war to the Book of Revelation; exorcisms designed to drive out “unclean spirits” from military property; beatings of atheist troops that are winked at by the chain of command. Politics Race and politics Religion
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The section that struck me is that Obama is not pursuing any avenues to straighten this out, and it may be that he is trying to walk a delicate balance of political expediency in a time of war; but it is also disappointing that he is soft-touching DADT and the growing evangelical nature of the American Military. It didn’t start with Shrub, this Fundamentalist takeover, but he surely gave them a great deal of breathing room by encouraging these military groups to flourish.
Scary isn’t it? I spoke up about this in April 2008. http://evolvingwithdarwin.blogspot.com/2008/04/george-bush-was-right.html
It’s one of the unintended consequences of an all-volunteer military. Recruiters do really, really well among the fundamentalists. The chaplains corps is leaning heavily fundy, too, because those denominations encourage pastors to serve the military whereas the ones less inclined toward active proselytization (e.g., Episcopalians) have a pastor shortage in the civilian world so are less inclined to encourage their ministers to become military chaplains. Every so often an article will pop up in the MSM highlighting problems involving Bible thumpers in the US military, like a soldier in Afghanistan who decided to “minister” to the Afghans (IIRC he was trying to pass out Bibles printed in Pashto)but there hasn’t been a sustained focus on the issue.
This reinforces the scariness of the recent reports about Defense Department briefings for Bush being laced with biblical quotations. Next time a Muslim tells you the US is anti-Islam and wants to convert everyone to Christianity, it will be harder to argue the point. Maybe the war wasn’t about oil after all!
My husband and brother-in-law were brought up Southern Baptist, so they know Christian fundamentalism when they see it. Both were in the U.S. Army (one in the National Guard) in the mid ’80s and went to boot camp in different states. One was eventually stationed in Germany. Things have apparently changed since then, since neither saw anything like what is going on today. The fellow who was in Germany says one of the chaplains would sometimes ask if he could go out socializing with the guys, and they were not going bowling. Both are dismayed about the Christianizing and religious coercion happening now.