Armchair Atheists

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Americans who do not believe in God have decided it’s time to give President-elect Barack Obama his first memo: the Department of Defense ought not speak for God.

At a press conference in Washington, the DC Secular Coalition for America’s director Lori Lipman said that the country’s atheists, humanists and freethinkers were suffocating under an air of pro-Christian bias within the military.

In an eight-page open letter, Lipman asked President-elect Obama to protect her members from what she described as Christian discrimination, sectarianism, theocracy and an invisibility that she said had long been visited upon non-Christians.

“Atheists and others with no religious affiliation make up 21 per cent of the U.S Armed Forces, and yet they suffer harassment, discrimination and proselytizing in a military increasingly dominated by a powerful minority of evangelical Christians,” she said.

She argued that “other military personnel who do not hold a born-again Christian belief are similarly marginalized.” She proposed a new set of policy recommendations in a memo to President-elect Obama, seeking to influence his military.

Lipman asked for a new directive that explicitly identifies nontheistic personnel as protected, and specifically called for:

– Vetting of new appointments and promotions to ensure that appointees are committed “to fostering a secular military that protects the religious liberty and freedom of conscience of our soldiers.”

– A directive from Mr. Obama’s new Secretary of Defense that would “demonstrate your administration’s commitment to implement the change we need” and require all branches to update their regulations with regard to promoting religion over non-religion, proselytizing, discrimination and the role and training of chaplains.

– A survey of military personnel “in order to determine the pervasiveness of the problems of religious discrimination and proselytizing.”

– The establishment of a Commission for Religious Accommodation charged with, among other things: creating effective channels for reporting failures to accommodate religious and nonreligious service members’ beliefs; investigating such failures; and ensuring composition of the chaplain corps represents the diversity of belief, and the lack thereof, within the military.

Lipman argued that while some existing regulations support the free exercise of religion, “they are silent on accommodating the hundreds of thousands of atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nontheists currently serving in the U.S Armed Forces who have no religion to exercise.”

The policy recommendations released focus special attention on the chaplain corps in the military, whom Lipman argued were not only biased towards non-Christians but also, in her view, “often are the worst offenders.”

“One of our goals with these new proposals is to make chaplains accountable for the religious climate on military bases, on ships and anywhere members of our Armed Forces are serving,” she said.

She also argued that evangelical Christians are over-represented among the over 3,800 chaplains serving the U.S armed forces.

She said: “Within the Army, Reserve and National Guard, 71 percent of chaplains represent other denominations, the bulk of which are evangelical Christian churches. Jewish, Mormon and Islamic faiths combined count for less than a percent of the 71 per cent of the chaplains in the ‘other’ category.”

Jesse Masai is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.