Religious Nutjobs on Both Sides, Apparently…
By When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.
Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.
Specialist Hall has since been redeployed from Iraq, in part because of threats from his fellow soldiers. In Kansas he continues to receive threats, but his situation is less precarious.
I really can’t imagine a better case than this for a strictly observed separation between church and state. Religious pluralism in the military forces of the United States in inevitable, and every soldier will have a particular understanding of the interaction between religious responsibility (often none) and patriotic duty. The identification of patriotism and military service with any specific understanding of faith is, for reasons that should be obvious, enormously destructive. The idea of browbeating atheists into compliance is appalling in its own right, but is particularly troubling in the context of the War on Terror, which even the President has stressed is not, primarily, a religious war.
The worst part of this story is the (unsurprising) recurrence of a twisted vision that ties together evangelical Protestantism with American nationalism. Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than the belief that God fights on our side is the belief that God fights on (some of) our side, and therefore that those who question the particular view of God’s providence are, in effect, fighting for the other side. This seems to me to be the inevitable consequence of tight association between a specific religion and military service, and it bears repetition that this perspective not only violates basic American principles, but also promises to undermine the effective use of military force.