DOJ: No Evidence Anyone 'Affected' By Widespread Proselytizing in Military

By Jason Leopold, The Public Record

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) filed the lawsuit against Gates and the Department of Defense last year, a civil rights watchdog organization that ensures the military upholds its religious neutrality guidelines.

Chalker, who is stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, said that on three occasions beginning in December 2007, he was directed to attend military events, one of which was a barbecue, where an Army battalion chaplain led a Christian prayer ceremony for military personnel. Chalker, who said he is an atheist, asked his superiors for permission to leave the prayer sessions and on each occasion his request to be excused was denied, according to the lawsuit.

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?"