Have evangelical organisations made the US Air Force Academy a test case for the religious right agenda, asks Conor O'Clery
The class of 2009 arrived recently at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, 80km (50 miles) south of Denver, Colorado. The 1,400 cadets were given medical examinations, haircuts, and a tour of the site. They were shown the cadet school, the gym, the library, the dormitories, the field house and the most imposing edifice on the complex - the interfaith chapel.
The chapel's 17 shining spires soar high against a backdrop of a steep Rocky Mountain ridge. It has a Protestant chapel on the upper floor with seating for 1,300 and windows decorated with 2,400 pieces of stained glass for "coming into God's light". On the lower floor is the Roman Catholic chapel with seating for 500 and an altar made with stone from the same Italian quarry that supplied Michelangelo. The Jewish synagogue has Jerusalem brownstone donated by the Israeli Defence Forces. Two interface rooms serve other religions.
The US air force (USAF) has always paid attention to the spiritual needs of its recruits. As cadets were welcomed this year, however, the air force chief of staff, Gen John P Jumper, reminded commanders that pushing their religious faiths is against regulations.
The academy is under pressure to end religious intolerance following complaints from Jewish and Christian cadets that they were harassed by evangelical Christians.
The US Air Force Academy (USAFA)registered 55 allegations of religious bias from 13 cadets dating back to 2000, compared with just one complaint at the army's academy at West Point and none at the US Naval Academy.
An investigation by the air force's Inspector General acknowledged complaints that mandatory academy gatherings often opened with Christian prayers and that academy faculties sponsored newspaper advertisements declaring "Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world".
The lead came from the top brass, which is supposed to honour the separation of church and state. Brig Gen Johnny Weida, a former Thunderbirds pilot who was brought in to sort things out after a sexual abuse scandal two years ago, sent a mass e-mail to the 4,000-member cadet wing asserting "the Lord is in control" and urging them to attend National Day of Prayer activities on May 1st, 2003.
Last year leaflets promoting Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a movie beloved of the Christian right, were placed on every chair in the cafeteria with a note saying: "This is an officially sponsored USAFA event."
Retired air force colonel David Antoon recalled arriving with his son last year for orientation and hearing a chaplain boast to assembled cadets about the popularity of Christian Bible studies, as several other chaplains responded "Amen" and "Hallelujah". The colonel took his son elsewhere.
In another instance a chaplain told several hundred religious cadets in an assembly to tell their comrades that they would burn in hell if they weren't "born again". A Jewish student told his father he would "beat the shit out of the next person tells me our people are responsible for the execution of Jesus Christ".
Even on the football field the Christian ethos was dominant. The coach of the academy's Fighting Falcons football team, Fisher DeBerry, led team members in prayers to the "master coach" above, and erected a banner in the locker room proclaiming: "I am a Christian first and last . . . I am a member of Team Jesus Christ."
MeLinda Morton, a former Lutheran chaplain at the academy, said that on arriving in 2002 she saw senior officers regularly "crossing the line" between appropriate religious expression and coercive evangelical indoctrination. Morton was reassigned to Okinawa after she co-signed a letter warning of "stridently evangelical themes" in Protestant services.
THE EVANGELICAL ATMOSPHERE at the air force academy comes in part from a growing relationship between evangelicals and the military as more liberal ministries lose their enthusiasm for the Iraq war. It is also affected by the advance of evangelism in the state in which it is located.
Colorado Springs is ground zero for the religious right. Just across the valley from the academy are two of the largest evangelical ministries in the US: the New Life Church, and Focus on the Family. Scores of other evangelical churches serve the region.
Could it be, asked Col Antoon in a letter to the Dayton Daily News in Ohio on June 3rd, that the US's most powerful evangelical organisations have "made the Air Force Academy a test case for their religious-right agenda?"
The New Life Church, one of the US's biggest church buildings, was built where it can be seen from the academy, and painted in the blue and silver colours of the US air force. The denim-wearing founder of the church, Pastor Ted Haggard, maintains that the tools of the state should not be used to advance a religious cause, but defends evangelical endeavour at the academy, saying that "advocacy is fundamental to a pluralistic society; I mean Ford advocates against Chevy, Coke advocates against Pepsi".
New Life promotes clean-living, nuclear families that reject gay unions and pre-marital sex. It draws tens of thousands of enthusiastic adherents from the soulless exurbs between Colorado Springs and Denver, people who hark back to the civility and innocence portrayed in 1950s family movies.
The associate pastor of New Life, Rob Brendle, a 31-year-old former army officer in check shirt, jeans and shining black shoes, shows me around the hexagon-shaped sanctuary, which holds 7,500 people. Giant TV screens are suspended from a ceiling packed with technology and lighting equipment like a Hollywood studio. "We call it the livingroom because it's where the family gathers," he says. Nearby is the original church with a capacity of 1,500, where Rob preaches to young people on Seared nights.
As we walk around the complex he greets other clean-cut young men and modestly dressed women with smiles and embraces. He takes me to the World Prayer Center where a giant globe revolves and supplicants write real-time prayers on computers, which are flashed to computer screens around the world. It is the day of the suicide bombings in London and the latest invocation reads: "Pray for the wisdom of the British administration to effectively deal with this attack and Britain's greater war on terror."
Nearby is a bookstore called Solomon's Porch with hundreds of approved publications, including Walk on U2, an account of the Dublin rock group's "radical biblical agenda" by Presbyterian pastor Steve Stockman from Belfast. Thomas Friedman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree is promoted by Pastor Ted, who likes the idea that an unregulated globalised world creates a level playing field for commodities and ideas - which to evangelists means the freedom to spread the word of Jesus Christ.
In his office, where a hardwood elephant from India indicates his open Republican sympathies, Pastor Rob takes up the theme of how the level playing field is a boon for Christian advocacy. He speaks enthusiastically of promoting evangelism in countries such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.
"We don't view it as a jihad-type war where evangelical Christians are against the rest of the world," he says. "Our position in places like the Middle East or Ukraine is that people should be afforded the same freedom as in Ireland, Great Britain, France and the United States to worship according to their conscience.
"What we objected to about Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan is not that people don't worship Jesus Christ but the fact that the government dictated that the people had to worship Allah or they get dragged out to a soccer stadium and get their throats slit.
"We object to the fact that they don't get the freedom to choose to worship Allah if they like or Mohammed or Buddha or Jesus Christ or the trees or the stars. We have a moral conviction that we think people ought to worship Jesus Christ and their lives would be better, but it would never be our ambition that government impose that preference on their people.
"All we want is the playing field to be levelled so that they have the freedom to choose how to worship or not to worship at all. We want the freedom to erect a church and we want the people who are believers in Afghanistan or in Iraq or in Ukraine to be able to give their best argument. That's what makes Western civilisation great, isn't it?"
The proselytising members of New Life Church have found fertile ground abroad, especially in Ukraine, which left the Soviet Union in 1991. "The process through which Viktor Yushchenko was elected [in 2004] was heavily influenced by evangelicals," claims Brendle, who visited Ukraine before the Orange revolution as part of a link-up with New Life's sister mega-church, the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations in Kiev, which claims 26,000 members and has a Nigerian pastor, Sunday Adelajah.
"It was Pastor Sunday's people and other evangelical Christians in Kiev who led the charge in the demonstrations that said we are not going to tolerate a curtailing of the freedoms we have received and enjoyed over the last 12 years."
PASTOR TED HAGGARD, who is also head of the National Association of Evangelicals, the US's largest Christian lobby group, talks to the White House (occasionally president George Bush himself) every Monday morning. I point out that it would not go down well in Ireland if Catholic bishops called the Taoiseach's office every Monday to discuss policy. Pastor Rob says the phone conference is part of an arrangement by presidential adviser Karl Rove to keep in contact with key leaders of the president's constituency, which includes evangelical Christians, "but it's not as if leaders of evangelicals have politicians in their pocket and are secretly calling shots."
Evangelicals do have a responsibility to represent their world and ideology, however, and right now they are focused on the vacancy in the US Supreme Court and are marshalling their forces for a tough fight ahead.
The key issue is abortion. Evangelists want to undo Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that makes abortion legal. They claim that new technology shows a flutter of life from the moment of conception and that this can help change society's views.
"It is becoming increasingly apparent through science and technology that an unborn child is in fact a life," says Pastor Rob Brendle. "We would be in favour of a justice who would consider the newest information about the life of a foetus. We would be opposed to a justice who is unwilling to consider the discussion about abortion, or re-address Roe v Wade."
The cultural war in the US, he believes, "is becoming more intense and the fallout is becoming more profound". He sees a window of opportunity for evangelicals now "because of the influence of evangelical Christians in the last election, because of president Bush's professed evangelical faith and for other reasons, the rise and influence in communities of mega-churches among them."
Their enemies in the culture war are "people in the United States who believe laws are best written by a really educated intellectual intelligentsia that sit cloistered in a hallowed hall in Washington and wear black robes, and who do not revere the constitution".
EVANGELISTS IN COLORADO Springs see the controversy at the air force academy as the repression of traditional Christian expression. Focus on the Family vice-president Tom Minnery believes there is anti-Christian bigotry behind the protests.
"We fervently hope that this ridiculous bias of a few against the religion of the majority - Christianity - will now cease," he declared following the report by the air force Inspector General, which acknowledged there were perceptions that the academy favoured evangelical Christians and was intolerant of others but that there was no overt religious discrimination at the academy apart from a few cases of "insensitivity".
"All along it has been an absurd notion that a campus with chaplains and a chapel must somehow bottle up religion," he said. "Academy cadets are trained to render the ultimate sacrifice, and should be encouraged to grapple with life's ultimate meaning, not be harassed when they do so."
At a US air force-funded conference for the 600 air force chaplains from across the US, held in Colorado Springs last month, the message went out that they should not push their beliefs aggressively but that it was okay to evangelise cadets who did not attend church. Any drive for converts in the services will inevitably come increasingly from the Christian right. The number of evangelical and Pentecostal chaplains in the air force has doubled in the past decade while the number of Catholic, Methodists and melanin Protestant chaplains has declined.
In response to the critics, the air force two weeks ago named Rabbi Arnold Resentful, a former naval chaplain, to a new advisory position on religious tolerance. Gen Wadi was counselled and has apologised for discouraging those who do not share his beliefs. And coach Fisher Duberry of the Fighting Falcons is now attending sensitivity training required for all staff members of the US Air Force Academy, and has taken down his banner proclaiming that his players are members of "Team Jesus Christ".