Can Evangelical Chaplains Serve God and Country?

I agree with James Madison...chaplains are a violation of equal rights...

First, James Madison, writing in his later years, was writing about the chaplains serving congress. He was not writing about military chaplains. (The courts decided those chaplains were part of a long, cultural tradition.)

Second, this article is about military chaplains and not about the chaplains in congress.

Does it make a difference? The answer is yes.

Military chaplains accompany our sons and daughters in the military to our war zones.

First, as a commander you must provide for the needs of your troops. You must find bullets, food, protection from the elements, and a path to victory. You must also deal with their fears, their customs, their medical needs, and their death needs.

Like it or not, your troops WILL have their religion. Despite the numbskull commander in Alaska who got his shorts in a wad when his chaplain quoted the maxim about "no atheists in foxholes", that saying is a reflection of reality. When death is on the line, the vast majority of your troops are going to ponder the meaning of death, the afterlife, and the meaning of life.

They will practice their religion. They will. One way or another they will. Either a "chaplain" will rise, like a shamen, with no input from the command, from the ranks or from civilian camp followers, or those troops will have a chaplain provided by a nation that cares about providing chaplains who will be knowledgeable of and work with the command structure in the best interests of those troops.

Look through history. People in war become very religious. Why? Death is on the line.

And they will practice their religion. As Americans, they cannot be deprived of their right to free exercise of their religion. However, it is far more than some rule on a piece of paper. It is about their very nature as living beings. As much as ammo and food, they NEED their religion to prepare their souls for whatever comes.

The courts have acknowledged that chaplains are the most reasonable way to provide for that need.

It is unrealistic not to acknowledge the difference between military chaplains and civilian chaplains.

Chaplain Xzins is right.

Hardshell, you may not be aware that your position is to the left of even the ACLU, which takes the position that under combat conditions, the only realistic way to assure people's right to freedom of religion is to have trained military chaplains.

This is a particular problem for religious groups such as the Roman Catholic Church due to their view of the sacraments. In theory, many though not all of the functions of a evangelical Protestant chaplaincy could be performed by laymen trained and organized by groups such as the Navigators. (And no, I'm not in any way, shape or form disparaging the role of office and ordination, or the role of baptism and communion in Protestantism; my point is that certain things which are very important to most evangelical denominations are absolutely essential to Roman Catholics.)

When even the ACLU supports the military chaplaincy, it shows just how radical our liberals have become in undermining it.

Once it is granted that ordained clergy simply must be present to ensure servicemembers’ religious freedom, the question becomes who should pay for their salaries and their training.

Part of why the ACLU believes military chaplains should have their salaries and their training paid by the government is that common sense and the sad experiences of long-ago wars show that it is both foolish and dangerous to send untrained civilian pastors into combat conditions.

That's a good way to get pastors killed, and also to get servicemembers killed trying to save the lives of untrained civilian pastors who make foolish mistakes which even the most junior of enlisted servicemembers who have completed basic training and AIT would know not to make.

It is true that civilian pastors have at various times in American military history been attached to the military in unofficial roles paid by someone other than the government. During World War I, for example, Dr. J. Gresham Machen took a leave of absence from his role as a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary to become a “YMCA secretary,” doing what was more or less the work of a behind-the-lines chaplain. It is also true that during major military mobilizations such as the Civil War and World War I, there have been times when the training given to chaplains was very weak at best, and chaplains often had to rely on their own combat experiences years earlier when wearing the uniform before being ordained, or had to learn things the hard way from frustrated sergeants. However, the modern military has greatly improved the military aspect of chaplaincy training, and there are reasons for that.

I'm focusing here exclusively on the constitutional question of why, in this very narrow case, even one of the most liberal organizations in the United States supports government-paid clergy. There are also numerous other religiously neutral roles which have developed over the years which are performed by the chaplaincy — counseling is probably the single biggest example of that.

To remove government-paid and government-trained chaplains from the military would have devastating consequences for Roman Catholic servicemembers. It would also cause problems for evangelical Protestants, and as a practical matter, would force the military to hire large numbers of psychologists and counselors to do the work now done by chaplains, many of whom would find themselves to be much less effective than chaplains.

I am painfully aware that what this PCUSA elder wants to do to the chaplaincy is already being done unofficially by too many senior chaplains at the O-5 and O-6 levels. Just as denominational bureaucrats tend to be those pastors with the greatest administrative and “political” abilities — often a synonym for knowing how to compromise and avoid offense — too many upper-level chaplains have gotten to their ranks by focusing on the counseling aspect of their chaplaincy role rather than teaching and preaching what they are supposed to believe.

But to eliminate the chaplaincy entirely, or to make it impossible for an evangelical or Roman Catholic chaplain to serve in the chaplaincy without compromise on homosexuality, would take a pre-existing problem and make it tremendously worse.

The troops have the right to free exercise of their RELIGION. Therefore, when they are taken to a far-flung land to lay their lives down, they MUST be provided with ALL that their RELIGION entails in order to protect that right. Their religion is FAR MORE than their worship, which is only a small portion of their RELIGION.

So, you have two constitutional requirements in conflict: free exercise and establishment of religion.

The reality is, though, that the chaplaincy is not an attempt to establish a state religion. Why? First, it provides for all forms of religion LIKELY to appear in the ranks of our troops, not just for Catholics, Baptists, or Methodists. The chaplaincy includes Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and even Buddhist chaplains. Oddly enough, I understand the atheists are trying to organize themselves as a religion, so they, too, can qualify for a chaplain.

So, this is NOT an establishment; it is an accommodation.

So, you have a CONSTITUTIONAL requirement to protect free exercise, you have taken them where there is no means to practice their religion, you have asked them to die, and you have said, “Though Sh_t” about their needs.

When a shamen appears in the ranks and tells them “The Horned One has appeared and decreed fighting in this war will send your soul immediately to Hell.”, and some listen, then you have injured your war effort by not accommodating their religion and not providing that as well as their bullets.

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