The Department of Defense vs. freedom of religion

A Navy chaplain may be courtmartialed for participating while in uniform in a protest over the Defense Department policy forbidding chaplains from praying in the name of Jesus.

Whatever may be said of that chaplain's participation in the demonstration, if the unconscionable and obviously unconstitutional prohibition he was protesting stands, all Christian chaplains should resign their commissions- or be defrocked by their denominations if they don't. Prayer to a generic deity is simply incompatible with the Christian faith, however intrinsic it may be to the shallow folk religion of our culture.

For that matter, so should chaplains of other faiths. This policy clearly constitutes the governmental establishment of a national religion of the least common denominator. It makes it a matter of national policy that chaplains must operate under the assumption that all religions worship the same deity, to whom the convictions of and differences between individual faith traditions are in principle unimportant. As long as this policy remains in force, the Defense Department actually has its own dogmatic theology! A clearer violation of the First Amendment would be hard to imagine.

As satisfying as this might be to the sentimentally shallow folk religion of our culture, the practice effectively denies the right of any service member- chaplain or not- to practice his or her own religion according to its own inherent content. You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's- and you don't have to be Christian to recognize that this DoD policy is not only unconstitutional, but a threat to everybody's religious freedom.

Discretion obviously is required in a chaplain's exercise of his function, given the fact that he (or she) is called to minister to people of all faiths. But there is a difference between being respecting the beliefs of others, and even facilitating their practice of them, on one hand, and being required to sacrifice your own on the other.

HT: Drudge