A report issued by the Family Research Council (FRC) and distributed on Capitol Hill on July 9 claims Christians face growing hostility toward their faith within the American military.
In the report, titled “A Clear and Present Danger: The Threat To Religious Liberty In The Military,” FRC lists incidents from the past few years that show the military’s increasing intolerance of all things Christian.
For example, an ethics course at Vandenberg Air Force Base was stopped on July 27, 2011, although it had been taught for 20 years. It “was pulled for ‘thorough review’ by the Air Force primarily due to its use of Christian reading materials” in the study of St. Augustine and the just war theory.
The day before the ethics course was pulled, U.S. Congressman John Culberson (R-TX) “determined that Houston National Cemetery was preventing Christian prayers from being said at military funerals.”
The report also highlights the way Rev. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, was “disinvited” to pray at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service in 2010 because of outside comments in which he referred to Islam as “evil” and said the treatment women receive under Islamic law is “horrid.”
More recently, on June 7, 2013, FRC claims the “Pentagon directed the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, in Trenton, New Jersey, to take down a video that mentioned ‘God’ because it might be offensive.”
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.