One of the darkest developments of many dark developments in the Bush years has been the slow ascent of Christianism as a core value of the military. The promotion of Christianists throughout the armed services, the insistence by the president that no public institution be regarded as a place where religion should be silent, clear discrimination against Jews and atheists in military educational institutions: the possibility of a secular military dedicated to defending all Americans regardless of their faith or lack of it has been called into question under the current administration. The resilience of the ban on gays – while the military has granted a record number of waivers to criminals – can only be understood if one sees the US military as an increasingly religious institution at this point, and not a rational secular one. The latest story of an atheist soldier being threatened by superiors is believable in this context. Volokh has details from the complaint.
Many people don’t realize just how serious the Christianists are in this respect. If America is a Christianist nation, its military, drawn disproportionately from regions where Christianism holds sway, must be also. It follows that non-Christianists can be a threat to unit cohesion and morale. The first commenter on Volokh’s post spells out the emerging Republican consensus:
The military, that is, is a place where any reduction in unit quality literally costs lives; it is not a place for ‘equal opportunity’ or social engineering.
I would argue that the presence of atheists in the military is vulnerable to that very same argument. Never mind the question of whether an atheist can feel any genuine loyalty to a Christian nation, given that he rejects the core principles on which our nation was built;
never mind the unlikelihood that someone who denies an afterlife would sacrifice his own life for any reason, instead of cutting and running like John Kerry; never mind the fact that atheism correlates with all manner of other moral degeneracies – "[Those w]ho changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections […] Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful…" (Romans 1:25-31) – and so speaks to the moral character of the soldier; the simple fact is that we are a Christian nation with a Christian army, and our soldiers’ strength and willingness to sacrifice their lives for the good of the United States and their fellow soldiers comes, in large part, from their Christian faith. An atheist cannot, by definition, share in that faith or that culture; he cannot pray with his troops or empathize with their worries and inmost beliefs; and how can a Christian soldier trust his life to someone who, the Bible makes clear, is hated by God and condemned to Hell? How can a Christian trust the leadership of someone who refuses to be led by God?
I’m sure (some) atheists would be able to serve with distinction in the military, just like some women could. But, again, the army is not a place for social engineering; the answer to prejudice in the military is not to forcibly integrate – with the attendant costs to unit cohesion and morale – and expect them to ‘get over it’ in situations when their ‘getting over it’ will cost lives. If (God forbid!) atheism becomes acceptable to the vast majority of the United States’ civilian population, then it will be time to permit atheists to serve. Until then, our army is – and should remain – Christian.
