US Military converting Afghanistan civilians to Christianity

Muslim Advocacy Group Calls for Probe

By Hassina Leelarathna

(May 8, Los Angeles, California, Sri Lanka Guardian) A Muslim-American policy advocacy group has called on the US government to investigate reports of American military chaplains encouraging soldiers to convert Afghanistan civilians to Christianity.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council today called on Defense Secretary Robert Gates to open an investigation after Al Jazeera TV posted a video showing US soldiers being encouraged to convert the predominantly Muslim Afghan population to Christianity. In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him."

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

Salam Al-Marayati, MPAC Executive Director denouncing the practice said: "Our soldiers’ task is to protect their country and to establish safety in Afghanistan, not converting Afghans to Christianity. This type of open violation military guidelines will only fuel the Taliban insurgency and their recruitment efforts."

Religious discrimination is a violation of the First Amendment and is also against military policy. General Order Number 1 of the U.S. military's Central Command forbids active duty troops, including all those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, from trying to convert people to their religion.

According to Al-Jazeera, the videos were shot last year by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former member of the U.S. military who spent several days in Bagram. The videos also show copies of the Bible in Afghanistan's local languages (Dari and Pashto) intended for distribution to local Afghans.

Mikey Weinstein, President and Founder of the watchdog Military Religious Freedom Foundation, responding to the Al Jazeera video, said “it clearly shows that fundamentalist, evangelical Christians within the U.S. military are putting their fellow soldiers at extreme risk by attempting to convert Afghans to Christianity. These inciteful actions are grossly offensive to not only Muslims in Afghanistan and across the world, but to all those who hold faith in the U.S. Constitution. The United States’ armed forces are not on a mission to impose a Christian God on those who believe in Muhammad.”

Weinstein, has exposed scores of cases in which the Department of Defense has promoted and sanctioned fundamentalist Christian proselytizing among U.S. soldiers in violation of the U.S. Constitution, established federal case law and military regulations. One such case, eventually investigated by the Pentagon’s inspector general, involved high-ranking Defense Department officials appearing in a promotional video in uniform promoting the fundamentalist organization ‘Christian Embassy.’

The American military’s evangelist mission was clearly acknowledged in a two-hour program that aired on September 10, 2008, on the Discovery Channel's Military Channel. Titled "God's Soldier" it features an Army chaplain openly promoting fundamentalist Christianity to active-duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Filmed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) McHenry in Hawijah, Iraq, the program's credits say it was "Produced with the full cooperation of the 2-27 Infantry Battalion "Wolfhounds.'

The Christian reality series “Travel the Road,” has episodes filmed on location in Afghanistan which aired in April 2006 showing globe-trotting missionaries Will Decker and Tim Scott, embedded with the US Army, accompanying soldiers on patrol and evangelizing the local Afghans by distributing New Testaments to them in their native Dari language.

At least one soldier is openly fighting back against the Christianization of the US military. Jeremy Hall, who was brought up as a Baptist but is now an atheist, has filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, claiming that his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggesting that the United States military has become a Christian organization.

How much so is revealed in an explosive article by Jeff Sharlet in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, which has just hit the stands. Titled “Jesus Killed Mohammed: the crusade for a Christian military,” the article talks of how “Evangelicalism” has become a ‘populist religion’ that ‘merges militancy with love’ and that boasts of “an implicit rank system of spiritual maturity that runs from ‘Baby Christians’ of all ages straight up to the ultimate commander in chief. “

Among the troubling incidents Sharlet details is an Easter Sunday raid on Iraqi insurgents in 2004. Special Forces Officers, inspired by a showing of Hollywood actor Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, wrote the words "Jesus Killed Mohammed" in Arabic on their Bradley Fighting Vehicle and shouted the saying in both English and Arabic to entice Muslim soldiers into the open before embarking on an attack to put down the insurgency.

Another example is a speech given by Army Lieutenant Colonel Greg Metzgar before the Officers Christian Fellowship - a group with 15,000 active members at 80 percent of military bases - in which he stressed: "Christian soldiers must always consider themselves behind enemy lines, even within the ranks, because every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of `spiritual terrorism.'"

Sharlet writes that the evangelical transformation of the military which began during the Cold War has accelerated, making the United States one of the most religious nations in the world. “We are also among the most religiously diverse, but as the number of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and adherents of hundreds of other traditions has grown, American evangelicalism has entrenched, tightening its hold on the institutions that conservative evangelicals consider most American—that is, Christian.”

Sharlet does not show optimism for change, pointing out that some of those expected to face reckoning under the new Democratic administration remain in place or are in line for promotion. In addition to keeping on Robert Gates as defense secretary; President Obama has retained the Bush administration’s secretary of the Army, Pete Geren. Apart from being a star of the Christian Embassy video, Geren, in commencement remarks at West Point last year, characterized America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as struggles for religious freedom against the “darkness and oppression” of radical Islam—and also appointed as his national security adviser the retired Marine general James Jones, a regular on the prayer breakfast circuit.

“Nobody believes the new president shares Bush’s religious sentiments,” Sharlet writes, “but clearly he is willing to shave constitutional protections in exchange for evangelical peace. The new president appears to have adopted a hands-off approach not just to religion in the military but to the very relationship between church and state.”

-Sri Lanka Guardian