US ARMY: RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

No, for Christ’s sake!

Interpreting the war on terror as a crusade has led to a simmering religous extremism in the US military, which needs to be curbed

When the US ex-President George W. Bush tagged his War on terrorism as a new Crusade, little did he know that his words were being taken too literally by audiences in his own nation as well as across the world. On September 16, 2001 at South Lawn of the White House, Bush said during a press conference, “This is a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.” 

This statement of his obviously stoked a huge controversy, since it was taken in the religious context, and did not go well with Islamic countries across the world. Franklin Graham (American Christian evangelist and president and CEO of international Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse) took it further, as he made an anti-Islamic comment (just after 9/11) and referred to Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion”. Further, on April 18, 2003, he made an statement that true Islam cannot be practiced in the US as the country criminalizes beating your wife, killing your children, committing adultery, et al. Recently a video obtained by al Jazeera (and advocated by the Huffingtonpost) revealed how military officials at Bagram were urging US soldiers to evangelize in the Muslim country. The video also exposed how US military forces in Afghanistan were asked by top chaplain to “hunt people for Jesus” and spread Christianity in Afghanistan. Evidences also reveal that the soldiers stationed at Afghanistan were given bibles translated into Pashto and Dari – the dominant languages of Afghanistan. Even air force cadets in the US were taught to proselytize.

When it comes to religious diplomacy, nothing can beat the Boykin saga. Lieutenant General William G. Boykin – retired Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and a key person during military operations in Grenada, Somalia and Iraq, openly framed the War on Terror in religious terms (obviously anti-Islamic) during a show on NBC News on October 15, 2003. The heights of audacity got breached when it was found that The Soldier’s Bible contained the words of Lt. Gen. William Boykin (in inspirational words from military leaders), where he said of his battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” 

A scan through media reports over the past few years provides disturbing evidences of unethical behaviour by the US army towards non-Christian soldiers. Among many incidents that came to light about harassment of non-Christians, army specialist Zachari Klawonn’s experience is a case in point. He recently filed a lawsuit alleging that that the Army has not followed through on its promises to address problems even after filing more than 20 complaints of harassment for being Muslim. A media report carried out by the Washington Post (November 12, 2005) wrote about the role of private missionary groups who where training cadets to evangelize their peers. In September 2007, a military watchdog organization, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) joined decorated medic Justin Chalker in filing a lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; charging the Pentagon of forcing the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity. Neither the Pentagon nor the country’s defence official raised any interjection against scriptures found on US weapons. It was only recently that, after an international outcry, a Michigan-based arms company stopped embossing references to New Testament Scriptures on rifle sights that it sells the military. The Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington referred to biblical references in the weapon as violation of the nation’s values and feared that the blaze of religious extremism may creep into the US military. 

With a half Muslim and half Christian president at the helm, things were expected to change to a large extent. On one hand, President Obama is holding meetings and soft peddling with Islamic countries in an attempt to undo the Bush administration’s legacy of anti-Islamic rhetoric that had antagonized many Arab and Asian nations with substantial Muslim populations. But on the other hand, he seems to be quite neutral and indifferent on matters of evangelical military culture which aims to Christianize the US army. Experts fear that this indifferent attitude would give space to these extremists to sow seeds of religious extremism among army men. If the US is really keen on tacking religious extremism in south Asia then it can’t afford to ignore a similar simmering sentiment back home. This is that kind of war where using the same weapons as your enemy would prove counter-productive. For the more friends the US has, the better it is. That conversion makes far more sense than the religious one.

Religio - Politics

In the name of the holy spirit...

World politics and religion are as intertwined as Barack Obama to his advertent (?) omissions; a brief phenomonological debate

Religious-political lobbying is not a new phenomenon, be it from the time of the crusaders, holy wars, World Wars or the latest war on terrorism; every time the world took momentous political decisions, lobbyists were actively present to influence governments in the name of their fathers, the sons and all the holy spirits available. Closer in time, if the current US President, Barack Obama, in his most historical inaugural address talked about secularism and specifically orated, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers,” it will take an extremely blind (or forgiving) phenomenologist to ignore the deliberate skipping by Obama of Buddhists (listed by CIA as being more in the US – 0.7% of US population – than Muslims, 0.6%), Unitarian Universalists (listed by US Census as being almost equal to the number of Hindus; 0.3% versus 0.4% respectively) and of many other registered religions. On the side of Martin Heidegger’s caution, if Obama’s considerate renunciation of all ‘other’ religions to the ‘non-believer’ category is only to be considered an expansive mistake, one believes it was quite a deliberately appropriate time to make it, given the global audience that was lapping it all up.

Freedom of religion in the US is considered to go hand in hand with Thomas Jefferson’s concept of separation of church and the State, which he enshrined in The First Amendment, which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and that neither can it prohibit the practise of any religion. But the honeymoon of religion and politics seems to never get over as many of America’s leaders have almost conspiratorially nurtured the same completely against The First Amendment.

The question is, if Jefferson’s clear ‘Wall’ between the State and the church was supposed to have been maintained very clearly and publicly, then where does one draw the line when US leaders naughtily flirt around with paradoxical religio-political issues? The previous President George W Bush, in his State of the Union address, not only renewed a call for Congress to materialise his “faith-based proposals” that would allow religious organisations to compete for more government contracts without strict conditions, but also attended a papal funeral. What’s so strange in that? In US history, he was the first sitting US president to do so (for example, even Pope John Paul I’s funeral was attended by Carter’s mother, not James Carter). Bush even met John Paul II to insist the Pope persuade US bishops to criticise Kerry’s policies on various Catholic-sensitive social issues.

Critically, even US electoral behaviour is influenced by a candidate’s stance on religion. Because of his neutral stand on Catholicism, Democratic presidential candidate and non-Catholic Al Smith suffered electorally; while at the same time, John F. Kennedy was elected president because of huge Catholic votes. Anything out of the ordinary? JFK was the first Catholic US President.

But why blame Obama  or other US presidents when the world smells of the same ‘fragrance’. The North Korean government has disseminated Juche quite strongly as the nationalist doctrine is against the spread of Christianity. China dramatically has officially even banned the Roman Catholic religion. In Iran, Ahmadinejad devices Iran’s foreign policy focussing on relations with the Muslim world. Iran doesn’t recognise the nation’s largest non-Muslim religion, the Bahá’í Faith, and persecutes them (Iran also punishes apostasy by a Muslim by death). Germany, Italy and Sweden have seen strong influence of Christian political parties for decades. Even African politics observes a very high religious influence. Take for instance, Sudan where the Umma party’s election manifesto was titled Nahj al-Sahwa, or manifesto of Islamic reawakening. In EU, there are 60 religious missions ‘influencing’ their ‘behind-door’ policies (the ‘non-Christian’ Turkey’s non-inclusion into the EU a crying example). In 2006, due to pressure from Catholic churches, Tony Blair’s government withdrew its proposal to introduce a mandatory requirement of reservation of 25% seats for pupils from non-religious backgrounds in faith-schools.

Jefferson be damned, the reality is that religious congregations have influenced US policy making on various issues too strongly, be it the Catholic church’s view on abortion or the black churches on US assistance for Africa or Southern Baptists’ on gay rights or Lutheran’s on physician-assisted suicide. Iran’s Ahmadinejad, in an open letter to ex-President George Bush, had written, “Whether we like it or not... the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty... the will of God will prevail over all things.” Poor man’s barking up the wrong tree. Gallup shows in its amazing 2008 US survey that since 2000 till 2008, the overall belief in God has dropped from 86% to 78% (in fact, close to 40% living in the western part of the US now do not believe in God). Chauvinistically, wine, women, wealth were the traditional destroyers of mankind. Religion is the newest addition. And Obama, well, he’s worried only about four of them, and yes, about non-believers too...