First up from the God machine this week is the latest disconcerting evidence that the intersection of religion and the U.S. military is growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Since his last combat deployment in Iraq, Jeremy Hall has had a rough time, getting shoved and threatened by his fellow soldiers. The trouble started there when he would not pray in the mess hall.”A senior ranking staff sergeant told me to leave and sit somewhere else because I refused to pray,” Hall, a 23-year-old US army specialist, told AFP.
Later, Hall was confronted by a major for holding an authorized meeting of “atheists and freethinkers” on his base. The officer threatened to discipline him and block his re-enlistment.
“He said: ‘You guys are being a problem and problems can be removed,'” Hall said. “He was yelling at us and stuff and at the very end he says, ‘I really love you guys, I want you to see the light.'”
Now Hall is suing the major and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, accusing them of breaching his constitutional rights. A campaign group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is waiting for the Pentagon to respond to a lawsuit filed in a Kansas federal court on Hall’s behalf.
It alleges a “pernicious pattern and practice” of infringement of religious liberties in the military.
Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer who created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has documented 6,800 incidents like these.
It’s probably worth pausing to note the irony. There’s a broader counter-terrorism campaign underway, in which our principal enemy tries to force religion on people. For far too many people in our military, the apparent response to force their religion on people.
Also from the God Machine this week:
For a long while, the goal of some religious activists was to receive official government support for Nativity scenes. More recently, religious activists wanted the government to promote Ten Commandments displays. Now, the landscape includes a burgeoning fight over the country’s second national motto.
The way Jacquie Sullivan sees it, the motto “In God We Trust” is more about patriotism than religion.
So when the Bakersfield councilwoman, 68, heard on a Christian radio station in 2001 that protesters on the East Coast were trying to remove the phrase from public buildings, she considered it her civic duty to reverse the trend.
“I just shook my head in amazement when I heard,” she said. “I thought, if they’re working to take it down, I’ll start working to put it up.”
Sullivan launched a nonprofit group, In God We Trust — America, and began e-mailing informational packets to city clerks, with the help of a dozen volunteers and a tiny budget.
As a legal matter, this one creates a trickier church-state fight. When activists seek state sponsorship of Nativity scenes, it’s easy to argue that it’s government promotion of religion, which is unconstitutional. When they seek official Ten Commandments displays, it’s the same thing.
But in 1956, as a symbolic Cold War statement, Congress really did make “In God We Trust” the national motto. (It’s always been unclear if this replaced the original national motto, coined by Ben Franklin — “E Pluribus Unum” — or if we now have two mottos.) It makes it much tougher to go to court arguing that the displays violate the First Amendment.
That said, isn’t it a little sad that some of the faithful are so desperate for big government to endorse religion that they’ll launch these mini-crusades, no matter how bland and generic?
And finally, an unfortunate religious controversy has apparently forced the College of William & Mary to let its president, Gene Nichol, seek other endeavors.
The most noteworthy was his 2006 decision to remove a cross from permanent display in the public college’s Wren Chapel. In addition to being a nondenominational place of worship, the chapel is also regularly used for mandatory campus events. Permanently displaying the Christian religious symbol, Nichol believed, sent “a message that the Chapel belongs more fully to some of us than to others. That there are, at the College, insiders and outsiders.”
Nichol said in his statement that he acted not only to help “religious minorities feel more meaningfully included” in the community, but also because he believes any reasonable understanding of church-state separation required the cross’s removal.
“We are charged, as state actors, to respect and accommodate all religions, and to endorse none. The decision did no more,” he said. […]
Backlash from alumni, politicians and pundits was swift and fierce. Wealthy alumni of the prestigious university refused to donate unless the Wren cross was permanently restored or Nichol was removed. One alumna went so far as to cut W&M out of her will.
Nichol and his family were victims of what he described as “a committed, relentless, frequently untruthful and vicious campaign” waged in the media.
“Those same voices,” he said “will no doubt claim victory today.”
Given that Thomas Jefferson graduated from the college, it’s a shame to see how far we haven’t come.