Army Specialist Jeremy Hall’s lawsuit made headlines in the past few days. He was deployed in Iraq and his being an atheist upset an officer and other soldiers to the point where the Army sent him home because his safety could not be guaranteed.
When he was a gunner and his Humvee was under fire, a commander later asked him if he believed in God. Apparently Hall responded “No, but I believe in Plexiglas.” Later he organized a meeting of atheists, which was interrupted by an officer who told him
People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!”
And back in the United States,
Hall currently has a no-contact order with a sergeant who, without provocation, threatened to ‘bust him in the mouth.’ Another sergeant allegedly told Specialist Hall that as an atheist, he was not entitled to religious freedom because he had no religion.
I can see why the Army removed him from his original unit if cohesion of the team was threatened, but wonder why they didn’t just put him somewhere else in Iraq. Or maybe being an atheist can be the new way to get out of a deployment!
Meanwhile, an officer apparently deployed to Afghanistan in 2005 for the purpose of converting Muslims and other soldiers to Christianity. Our local paper in Silver Spring, Maryland just did a profile on a new evangelical preacher in the area who recently retired after 23 years in the Navy.
. . . But then, ‘‘God called me to preach.” The next year, he was shipped to Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province in a support role with coalition troops. There, he followed his calling, preaching to military personnel on the base where he lived and venturing out to hand out Christian literature and, through interpreters, talk to local Afghans about Jesus.
He violated orders, used interpreters, and didn’t get sent home? When you compare the experience of Hall to the preacher, it gives credence to claims of religious bias in the armed forces regardless of official policy.
In any case, it irritates me to no end to think of friends being deployed and meanwhile you have someone who puts their mission ahead of everyone else there. One day this guy in uniform is handing out Christian literature to the local Muslims, the next day someone like my wife shows up to do her job, wearing the same uniform. The Gazette is a small paper, so I imagine they’ll print my response:
The profile of the new pastor and his path to Sligo Baptist Church was interesting, but I found his prosyletizing while serving as a naval officer disturbing (“Former naval officer hopes to revitalize Sligo Baptist Church as new pastor,” 4/23/2008).
While Corrigan’s service to his nation is admirable, it is widely known among service members that U.S. Central Command’s General Order No. 1A prohibits “proselytizing of any religion, faith or practice.” Yet the Gazette reports how Corrigan “followed his calling” to preach, deploying to southern Afghanistan to support coalition troops in 2005, where he was “venturing out to hand out Christian literature and, through interpreters, talk to local Afghans about Jesus.”
As an officer serving in Afghanistan, Corrigan would have been subject to that order even if he was serving in support of coalition troops. The primary reason behind that prohibition is that any attempt to convert a Muslim to another religion is illegal in Afghanistan.
Additionally, as a policy matter, the U.S. and its allies want to avoid any appearances that our presence in that country is a pretext to convert Muslims to Christianity. This is already a highly sensitive issue among the populations of many Muslim countries.
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