Revisiting the “J” Word

A few months back, I wrote about the use of Jesus in chaplain prayers. The LA Times ran an article recently about the same thing entitled, Invoking God’s Blessing – but Whose God?.

“When you begin to pray in a way that shows a clear affinity to a faith group, that could knock out a lot of people who could otherwise feel included in a prayer that refers to God in a way that all can acknowledge,” he explained. “You may wind up doing greater harm in the name of religion than good.”

The distinction between his prayer language at public military events and at voluntary church services on base or in the field follows Navy tradition and recent policy.

But those customs are at the heart of a debate about a chaplain’s liberty to express his own faith in a secular setting and whether phrases such as “praying in Jesus’ name” could offend others and cause divisions in the military ranks.

New regulations have been bounced around in congress and the Armed Services Committee, but nothing has come of it. Evangelical Christian groups have been pushing to change the regulations to explicitly state that chaplains are able use prayers of the chaplain’s denomination at any and all events. They feel that any regulations placed on prayer or religious practice is a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion. They have found a few Republicans in congress to back their argument, but not enough to really make any changes.

Slate’s GI Jesus goes into more detail on the background of the legislation and idiot legislators who are behind all this. The JWV has also voiced its approval of the final decision.

I think this is quite ridiculous. It is just another thinly veiled attempt by fundamentalist Christian organizations to force Christianity down other people’s throats. They love to preach about how they are persecuted by the heathens of the world, but can’t take a step back and realize that they are the ones that are infringing on other’s religious beliefs. The verbiage of the legislation states:

“Each chaplain shall have the prerogative to pray according to the dictates of the chaplain’s own conscience, except as must be limited by military necessity, with any such limitation being imposed in the least restrictive manner feasible.”

Let’s actually apply this regulation to practice. If one of our few imam chaplains were leading an invocation aboard ship and wanted to begin and end his prayer with Allah hu Akbar (God is Great). I can only imagine the uproar from these same evangelical groups that Christian troops were forced to sit through a prayer to a Muslim God. It’s important that we can all pray to God, as long as it’s their God.

The bottom line is that chaplains always have and always will be able to lead prayer services according to their own beliefs. Jewish chaplains will never be restricted from leading a Shabbat service and a Catholic priest will never be restricted from holding Easter mass. The difference is at official occasions where those attending have no choice in the matter. I don’t have a choice to attend a change of command ceremony, and there is a very mixed crowd, so we should be as inclusive as possible.

The only problem with my argument is that when applied to the atheists in uniform, there should be no prayers at any official event. I don’t subscribe to this point of view, but I can see where they are coming from. However, being as inclusive as possible doesn’t mean pleasing every single belief system out there. That ventures outside the realm of practicality.

99% of the chaplains I have worked with have been Christian and the vast majority have been extremely helpful and accommodating to me and any other troops of different faiths. From the sound of this and other articles, the majority of chaplains do not feel there needs to be a change in the regulations. I find it unfortunate that it is often these fringe groups that initiate this kind of legislation, and often aren’t even affected by the laws they fight so hard to pass.

Read the full L.A. Times article here, and the Slate article a href=”http://www.slate.com/id/2150801″ target=”_new”>here.

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