Sunday, November 25, 2007
Campus Crusade and the Military
If these charges are accurate, the US Military leadership and Campus Crusade are undermining religious freedom in all branches of the Services. I'd be interested in a fair hearing of both sides of this.
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7 comments:
Victor,
I read the report. I am not sure what the "charges" are? The lead charge of "government paid missionaries" simply refers to Christian men in the military who are exercising their freedom of religion. They are participating in religious activities with Campus Crusade for Christ and may seek in influence other men around them.
The "shocking" verbage in training materials is only shocking to those who do not consider prosilitizing as an approriate thing for anyone to do.
That's the tricky issue. Freedom of religion seems to imply the freedom to practice one's own religion's version of the Great Commission, if there is one. If you say, "Religion is a private matter, and you shouldn't be permitted to spread it to others," then it seems to me that you have denied religious freedom, not affirmed it.
The question has to be, then, whether or not superiors in the military have used the privileges that go along with superior rank to disadvantage those who differ with them religiously.
Is the government here *giving my money* to do religious proselytizing? I don't know whether they are or not. But *If they are,then at least *I* can reasonably object to this even if I have nothing against proselytizing per se.
This is astonishingly overblown. I don't have time for details here, but everything CCC's Military Ministry is doing has the full legal blessing of the Armed Services, and they are extremely careful to keep it that way.
"The question has to be, then, whether or not superiors in the military have used the privileges that go along with superior rank to disadvantage those who differ with them religiously."
Quite so.
And considering all the over-blown verbiage used to prop-up and flesh-out that single meaningful charge, I rather doubt the whole thing.
Rather, until shown otherwise, I will view this as yet another of the typical atheistic attempts to deny the religious/civil liberties of Christians by their tendentious twisting of the meaning of the Constitution.
I'm a member of the first fundamentalist secular humanist church, and I want your tax money so that I can proselytize in the military. If you won't give it to me, then you shouldn't give it to them
Anonymous is unaware of the limitations the military places on chaplains' proselytizing. They are required to maintain an interfaith stance in many situations. Anonymous should get some better information. (And Campus Crusade absolutely uses no tax money!)
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