MILITARY and RELIGION: Chaplains who refuse "to preach pluralism come under attack.

SHEATHED IN LILAC CHIFFON, the barefoot bride padded across the grass carpet of a small tropical garden. Her groom, dressed in U.S. Navy crackerjacks, waited near a towering coconut palm, the masts of a dozen yachts reaching for the sky in the harbor behind him. Wedding guests in attendance at the private ceremony behind the Island Palms Hotel in San Diego then listened as Navy Chaplain Patrick Sturm joined the couple in marriage.

"Have Christ as the center of your love," Mr. Sturm told the bride and groom. Later in the ceremony, he explained that God had shown humans how to love by sending His son Jesus Christ as a sacrifice.

It was just the kind of "Jesus talk" that may have cost Mr. Sturm a successful career as a Navy chaplain.

Mr. Sturm is the plaintiff in Sturm vs. Danzig, a lawsuit that pits the bespectacled, mild-mannered pastor against the United States government. He is one of about three dozen chaplains suing the Navy in at least six separate civil-rights actions. The suits allege religious discrimination against evangelical (the Navy calls them "nonliturgical," although some evangelicals come from the liturgical camp) chaplains in hiring, job assignments, promotions, and the free exercise of religion. Specific allegations include:

The existence within the Navy chaplaincy of a religious patronage system that promotes Roman Catholic and liturgical (or mainline) Protestant chaplains over Baptist, Pentecostal, Nazarene, and other evangelical chaplains.

Systematic discrimination and, sometimes, open hostility by some Roman Catholic and liturgical chaplains against those who conduct nonliturgical or "praise and worship"Ðstyle services.

Chaplain "accession," or hiring, practices that violate the First Amendment by employing denominational quotas.

Career-damaging retaliation by senior mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic chaplains against evangelical chaplains who insist on their right to practice and teach the tenets of their own religions.

Plaintiffs also allege systematic exclusion of evangelical chaplains from positions of Navy-wide influence, and a promotion system that unfairly advances mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic chaplains while passing over evangelicals, ultimately forcing their early retirement.

The Navy, for its part, says none of that is true. In Mr. Sturm's case, military lawyers argued that the Navy does not favor certain religious groups, and that the composition of the chaplain corps, even if unbalanced toward Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant clerics, isn't really at issue; chaplains' services should be spiritually generic, they said.

Last month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling against Mr. Sturm. Although he was advanced to the rank of lieutenant commander after filing suit in 1999 for discrimination in military promotions, he had also sought relief from what he alleges are continuing violations of his free-exercise rights. The 9th Circuit ruled that Mr. Sturm's promotion was all the relief he is entitled to.

While Mr. Sturm considers an appeal, a class-action suit involving similar issues is gaining momentum. This summer, a U.S. district judge allowed expansion of Adair vs. Johnson, which now includes at least 1,400 chaplains who served since 1977.

"What's really behind these cases, in my opinion, is the same thing that's going on in the broader culture," said Mr. Sturm's attorney Dean Broyles. The suits are not denominational battles, he said. "Rather they are a battle between theological liberals and conservatives. Liberal chaplains seem to believe they can minister to service members more effectively because they consider themselves less 'narrow' and 'dogmatic' than conservative chaplains."

The case of former Chaplain Phillip Veitch may prove his point. Mr. Veitch is from the Reformed Episcopal Church, a denomination that is both biblically conservative and subscribes to a liturgical worship style. In 1997, he reported for duty to Naples, Italy. According to a legal complaint filed in 2000, his Catholic supervisor, Captain Ronald Buchmiller, immediately limited Mr. Veitch's duties and began criticizing his teaching of such Reformed Protestant doctrines as "sola scriptura" and the priesthood of believers. In response, Mr. Veitch in 1998 filed what the military calls an "equal opportunity" (EO) complaint, alleging religious discrimination.

But the EO investigator, who later admitted he was unaware of a Navy regulation that states chaplains may practice and teach according to their own faith traditions, found Mr. Veitch guilty of failure to "preach pluralism among religions." Subsequently, the base commander removed Mr. Veitch from preaching. The chaplain was later subjected to disciplinary proceedings, and ultimately resigned from the Navy.

Art Schulcz, who is Mr. Veitch's attorney and also lead counsel in the Adair suit, said the overall composition of the chaplain corps is ripe for reform. According to a 2000 Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) report, less than one-third of active-duty sailors and marines who expressed a religious preference said they were from liturgical denominations, including Catholic. But two-thirds of military chaplains are from those backgrounds. Meanwhile, the opposite is true of evangelical chaplains and service members: While two-thirds of active-duty service members who express a religious preference said they are evangelicals, only one in three chaplains is an evangelical.

According to DMDC data, the Navy employs one liturgical or Catholic chaplain for every 150 Catholic or liturgical service members, but only one evangelical chaplain for every 450 evangelical service members. Attorney Dean Broyles said those numbers show that the chaplain corps policies harm evangelical service members—particularly those serving overseas—with a lack of access to ministers from their own faiths.

Meanwhile, evangelical ministers who do remain on active duty may suffer discrimination in military job assignments, or "detailing," according to a 1995 document known as the Ellis Report. In the Navy, detailing figures critically in an officer's ability to achieve higher rank. If a chaplain isn't detailed to diverse jobs with increasing responsibilities, he or she may be at a disadvantage for promotion.

The Ellis Report examined allegations of discrimination against evangelical chaplains in detailing to key assignments between 1971 and 1994. The finding: Of 119 individuals who occupied those key positions, only 14, or 11.8 percent, were clearly nonliturgical.

Slights in detailing can lead to "nonselection," or being "passed over," for higher rank. A 1997 investigation into the nonselection of Chaplain S.M. Aufderheide to the rank of commander found that two separate promotion boards "may have systematically applied a denominational quota system," promoting liturgical chaplains with poor performance records while passing over Mr. Aufderheide, an evangelical.

After a chaplain is passed over twice, he or she may be forced into early retirement. Southern Baptist Chaplain David Wilder just passed 18 years of service, which means that by law he'll be able to stay on another two years. Stationed with the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Mr. Wilder, a lieutenant commander, has been passed over for promotion five times. He currently serves in a position usually reserved for a junior officer—retaliation, he believes, for his appearance last year on Fox News to discuss his legal case against the Navy chaplaincy.

Mr. Wilder's troubles began in Okinawa in 1992. Then pastor of an on-base Protestant congregation, he led a "General Protestant Worship Service" on Sunday mornings. That is, until an incoming senior chaplain, an Episcopalian, insisted that Mr. Wilder make specific changes to his service—changes that would make it more like Episcopal worship. Based on Navy policy and the First Amendment, Mr. Wilder refused.

But one Sunday morning weeks later, the Episcopal chaplain appeared at the chapel door in vestments. Swinging an incense burner from a chain, a rite of "purification," the senior chaplain proceeded up the aisle to the pulpit, ordered Mr. Wilder out of the chapel, and told the congregation he would be their new pastor. The congregation would receive new worship bulletins, the priest said, and commence "a proper Christian worship service."

Lawsuit plaintiffs allege many similar incidents, including warnings against giving "altar calls" and ending prayers in Jesus' name. Adair co-plaintiff Michael Belt, a Nazarene chaplain, told WORLD he was reprimanded after preaching a sermon that offended a senior officer who was known to clean up his act mainly on Sundays. Mr. Belt had preached that Christians should live out their faith seven days a week. In another case, Armando Torralva, a chaplain endorsed by the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, was reprimanded in Naples for refusing to support a base-wide program that would have distributed birth control to minors without parental knowledge or consent. Mr. Torralva believed the program violated scriptural teaching on parental authority and abstinence before marriage.

Since the lawsuits began in 1999, conditions have improved for some evangelical chaplains. For example, the Navy has restructured chaplain promotion boards in what may be an effort to make them more impartial. Also, more evangelicals are being promoted to higher ranks, and some also report an increase in religious freedom.

But attorneys Schulcz and Broyles both note that none of these changes reflects official changes in Navy policy. Mr. Schulcz points out that there is nothing in writing to keep the Navy from returning to its old ways after litigation is complete.

Meanwhile, dozens of chaplains continue to serve while working for change. "I am in very good company as a passed-over chaplain," Mr. Wilder said. "My best friends, and some of the brightest men I have ever met, are in the same boat with me, and we believe that God has brought us together for the cause of bringing reform to the ministry being provided for our military men and women."

"I resented this remark and saw it as further evidence that there is an effort to diminnish the evangelical chaplains in the military. You know, so they can make room for the Wiccans, who now have established footholds in our military, and other such things."

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GITMO GI HELD AS A CYBER SPY

"We Support Our Troops (SPIES) ...When They Shoot Their Officers"
By Ken Hechtman
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 4, 2003

REVISITED: "We Support Our Troops (SPIES) When They Shoot Their Officers (And Spy On Our Country)

If there's one slogan that's come to represent the anti-war movement in its current incarnation, it's one that appeared on a banner in a March 15 demonstration in San Francisco. It bore the message,"We Support Our Troops, When They Shoot Their Officers." This banner has been seen around the world and cited in more than 400 publications.

You can see the creator of the banner in the photograph; he's the one on the right wearing the black ski-mask (being assisted by activist Kevin Keating). He recently spoke with me about the mythology that's grown up around it. As much as "Mike" would have liked to show the human face behind the ski-mask, he couldn't allow his real name or any other personal information to be published because he's going through a background check. (And if he passes, the system is definitely broken.)

Mike places himself on the political spectrum as a "class-war anarchist," and member of a 25-strong Bay Area collective named "Class War." Think of class-war anarchists as Leninists without Lenin; their ideas come more from the printed word than from lived experience and they read the old turn of the century anarchists; Bakunin, Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and the like. They tend to be young, college-age rich kids, with the occasional social worker's or teacher's kid like Mike at the low end.

There's a theory why teacher's kids, psychiatrists' kids and social workers' kids are over-represented: Child professionals think they understand children and can get children to understand them in return, so they explain everything, starting at a very young age. The meta-message is, "All things should make sense to you. If they don't make sense to you, you don't have to accept them."

Unburdened by careers, children and non-political friends, politics is the second generation's full-time pursuit, and there's a psychological effect that comes out of living in a highly-charged bubble. The isolation and mutual reinforcement compounds their ideas. Most of them had the most radical ideas in their high school and freshman classes and loved it. Now in an environment where everyone is radical, they have to be a lot more extreme to stand out. "Mike" is a prime example.

"Lines tend to be drawn by both hawks and mainstream doves that assume everyone within the same national boundaries has the same interests," Mike began in our interview "We say that common interests are defined by class. The rich benefit from war in all countries. The real enemy of a poor American volunteer isn't the poor Iraqi conscript on the other side. It's the people in his own, military and political, who give him his orders."

In the run-up to the war, his group coined a number of other slogans aimed at the antiwar crowd, none of which got the same national play as "We support our troops." "Another War is Possible" was a play on the anti-globalization idealism of "Another World is Possible." "Peace is Patriotic - and that's the Problem" was a direct attack on the liberal wing of the movement. Perhaps aware of the distinction between advocacy and incitement, Mike wouldn't specifically identify a target audience for his best-known aphorism, saying only, "We were trying to push a strong class position, inside and outside the peace movement, inside and outside the army."

Mike became politically active in 1999, at the Seattle anti-WTO riots. He has since followed the course of many of his fellow activists. The anti-trade movement was one of a number of things that went up in smoke on Sept. 11^th and the survivors were quick to file off the serial numbers and re-invent themselves as the anti-capitalist wing of the peace movement, without bothering to reinvent their rhetoric. In their world, the Taliban's (never proven) objection to an oil pipeline, not the smoking crater in lower Manhattan, provided the motivation for attacking Afghanistan. Now that the war has moved off the front pages, they've slowly filed back to anti-trade rallies. The common thread of course, is what they identify as the common source of both globalization and war: the American way of life.

He laughs at the idea that the antiwar movement as a whole shares his radical views. "People on the Right are using [my banner] to show that all of the Left is anti-American. If the idea is getting out there, great. I'd be glad if the rest of the movement agreed with it and the class analysis behind it, but right now they don't go as far as we do. On one side, you've got the Stalinist and Maoist crazies walking around with their North Korean flags. Then you have liberals saying things like 'Peace is Patriotic' and 'Let the Sanctions Work' or even worse, 'Regime Change Begins at Home - Vote Democrat.' They're the conscience of capitalism. They're one side of a debate between rich people about what's best for rich people. We want an end to the war, too. But we don't have any illusions that we're fighting for 'the freedom that America really stands for.' We stand in open solidarity with the front lines of resistance across the world."

He ducked the inevitable question of whether he hates the United States. Clearly, he'd been expecting it and had an answer ready. "I'm against the American government. I'm not against the vast majority of working Americans," he explained, leaving aside what the vast majority of working Americans might think of him. "I'm against every government in the world, from Canada to Cuba - they're all capitalist and they all serve their own ruling class." Good old laissez-faire Cuba. "I'm also in favor of Iraqi soldiers shooting their officers, just as American leaflets called on them to do. But the American government is the strongest ruling class in the world. I'm an American citizen and I live in America so I focus on that."

Mike never expected the media frenzy around his banner, and it most likely would have remained but for an incident one week later in Camp Pennsylvania near Kuwait City. Muslim sergeant Asan Akbar killed two officers and wounded 14 others with fragmentation grenades.

"I don't remember if I cheered or not," said Mike. "I know I wanted to find out more about Akbar's motivation. I didn't believe his action was caused directly by the banner I carried, but it shows that the conflict we're talking about does exist inside the military. There are those who give orders and those who take them. Look, if Asan Akbar had died carrying out his captain's order we wouldn't know his name. He'd be a statistic."

"I don't want to speculate too much on that one incident because I don't have all the information," he continued. "In general, if a fragging is done for class reasons I would support it and the movement as a whole should support it. If it was purely religious… Look, I'm an atheist. I'm against Islam and Christianity and all religions. There's another guy I heard of - I can't say too much on the record about this - a soldier in Gulf War I who was ordered to shoot Iraqi civilians and shot his CO instead. He's now living underground and movement people are helping him out." This claim could not be confirmed, and the army's official position is that no such incident occurred between Vietnam and Gulf War II. Despite the story's dubious veracity, the fact is that Mike believes it happened and advocates being an accessory after the fact, should it happen again.

Mike said he was reading up on the history of fragging and mutiny in the army before the March 15 demonstration and that served as his inspiration for the banner. "Peace movements alone can't stop wars. The only way wars stop is when the army refuses to fight," he said. "People think it's far-fetched, but there are hundreds of examples. Everyone knows about Vietnam but it happened in WWI and the Mexican War, as well. The movement needs to understand this. In the 1960s the peace movement wasted six years spitting on soldiers and calling them baby-killers. We can't afford to make that mistake again. What we can do is escalate the class war here at home and bring about a situation in which the government can't fight wars abroad, because they'll be spending all their time and energy trying to keep us under control here at home. It's in periods of intense social struggle that the army's tradition of mutiny comes out. The question for us shouldn't be whether we go to war - we're already at war. The question should be whether we fight back."

Mike is surprisingly sanguine about the media attacks on him and his beliefs. He believes, "The representations in the capitalist press are fair. From their point of view, we are the enemy. We are scary. The kind of people who lead the Republican Party should be afraid - the Democrats, too - because our goal is not just to end the war. Our goal is to destroy capitalist society and that doesn't fit nicely into the rules of the proper, patriotic, political channels. Ultimately, it's a struggle against them as well. You might say we're against capitalist peace just as much as capitalist war." Even if that means advocating a war of their own.

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Navy blues

RELIGION: Are evangelical chaplains who refuse "to preach pluralism among religions" too "narrow" for the Navy?