Vanity Fair shows our Chris back in a somewhat muted but far more respectable raging form. Instead of wilted fights with D'Souza, Chris is taking on the corrupted military that previously have done no wrong. Where are we at? The well known conflation of religion and war.
As many sources including Mother Jones, the New Humanist and Ed Brayton have made a point of highlighting, the US army is riddled with proselytizing dingbats of the worst evangelical style. In Iraq they gave out Christian coins, in Afghanistan it's more bloody bibles.
As the New Humanist said a year ago "If you heard it said that America’s military was being taken over by agents of apocalyptic Christianity, you might think it the fiction of some leftwing alarmist. But what if it came from a man who said, “I never thought, coming from a conservative military Republican family filled with [US Air Force] Academy graduates and people that have been in so much combat, that at this point in my life, after being a White House lawyer, a lawyer for a Texas billionaire, a businessman, that I’d suddenly become this political activist”?
These monsters are not afraid to add to the damage American torturers have done; it's all the way with Jeebus and bugger your own beliefs.
Unfortunately some of the main movers of this movement seem quite happy to add abuse of non-believing Americans to their abuse of the constitution.
For once Chris is happy to report that things are not rosy at the front. He describes.. "A screening of Mel Gibson’s incendiary, Jew-baiting homoerotic extravaganza, The Passion of the Christ, had flyers in its favor placed on every seat in the Air Force Academy dining hall. A Pentecostal chaplain warned cadets that they should accept Christ or “burn in hell.” About the latter incident, the air-force investigative panel decided to be lenient, on the perfectly good grounds that such language is “not uncommon” in this denomination. And that, I suspect, is part of the problem to begin with: unexamined extremist Christian conservatism is the cultural norm in many military circles. One Lutheran chaplain at the academy, Captain Melinda Morton, resigned from the service after being transferred for protesting that the evangelical pressure was “systematic.” And, despite the tolerance for Pentecostal hellfire rants, by no means all forms of expression could be indulged; a nonbelieving cadet was forbidden to organize a club for “freethinkers.”
Unfortunately I cant agree with Christopher's happy conclusion about the role of the military.
"Throughout modern American history, the armed forces have been a great engine for assimilation and integration. Segregation of blacks was abolished in the services long before it was done away with in the wider society. Hispanic soldiers who are not yet full citizens have won many awards for bravery in the field. Women—not always approved of by religious fanatics—have risen to occupy serious command posts at all levels. (Discrimination against homosexuals, another religion-based prejudice, remains official, but that is a political decision, not a military one, and even the British services now recruit gay men and women, so change is probably not far off.)"
This is not the experience of many in the military, the military has always been about conformity first and for that reason (among many) proselytizing is very dangerous but even an atheist legion is not an army of light. |
