KtB Radio
I’ll be a guest on two Air America programs this week — The Rachel Maddow Show, with guest host Jack Rice, at 8:45 am eastern Thursday, and State of Belief, with the Rev. Welton Gaddy, Saturday at 10 am and Sunday at 7 pm eastern — discussing a new feature I’ve just published in Harper’s, “Jesus Killed Mohammed.”
Sounds a lot nastier than killing the Buddha, doesn’t it? It is. Based on a year of research at West Point, the Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and more than a hundred interviews with military personnel here and abroad — from privates to generals — I report on a fast-growing fundamentalist front in the U.S. armed forces and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, dedicated to fighting back. Thanks to the First Amendment, every soldier, sailor, marine or airman (yes, that’s the official term for members of the Air Force, including women) is entitled to his or her beliefs, fundamentalist or otherwise. But problems arises when the officers in charge forget the most basic principles of the Constitution they’re sworn to uphold.
Harper’s doesn’t post online — if you’re interested and you can afford it, support the nonprofit magazine by buying a copy — but KtB will post a short excerpt soon. In the meantime, here’s an outtake, some material I couldn’t fit in that illustrates the First Amendment problem:
If the fundamentalist front were to have a seminary, it’d be the U.S. Air Force Academy, a campus of steel and white marble wedged into the right angle between the Great Plains and the Rockies. In 2005, the academy became the subject of scandal for its culture of Christian proselytization. Today, the Air Force touts the academy as a model of reform. But last year, after the school brought in as speakers for a mandatory assembly an evangelical team who proclaimed that the only solution to terrorism was to “kill Islam,” I decided to see what had changed. Not much, several Christian cadets told me. “Now,” one man said, “we’re underground.” Then he winked. The first thing the academy’s chief PR man, a grey-skinned and irritable retired colonel named Johnny Whitaker, said when I arrived was, “we reflect society. About eighty percent Protestant, Catholics are the next largest group.” In fact, Protestants only make up about 51% of American society. “We have a small Jewish population.” Whitaker continued. “At least, who claim to be Jews.”
Whitaker was a holdover from the academy’s old regime. I wanted to speak to the new guard, Lt. General John F. Regni, a three star many believe was brought in to clean up the academy’s religion problem. Regni is a big man, spit and polished with a chrome dome of hair streaked black and silver, the very picture of an officer, calm and in command. I began our conversation with what I thought was a softball, an opportunity for the general to wax constitutional about First Amendment freedoms. “How do you see the balance between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause?”
There was a long pause. Civilians might reasonably plead ignorance, but not a general who’s sworn on his life to defend these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
“I have to write those things down,” Regni finally answered. “What did you say those constitutional things were again?”
“The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.”
“ ‘Establishment’?” There was another pause. Then: “I’m deferring to some of my folks here.” He turned to his top chaplain at the academy, an active-duty colonel, and Whitaker. The colonels huddled, but they couldn’t offer the general a lifeline. “Um,” said Regni, “would you be a little more specific?”
I read the First Amendment to him. Regni pondered. “Uh, ok,” he said. He decided to pass.
Take that kind of ignorance, add a lot of guns, send it to Iraq or Afghanistan, and you’re in for kind of trouble one unit in Iraq encountered when their lieutenant cruised into battle in a Bradley fighting vehicle emblazoned with the words “Jesus Killed Mohammed.”
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