Defense bill compromise affects chaplain prayers, guidelines

Posted: 10/13/06

Bill rescinds chaplain guidelines

By Robert Marus

ABP Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (ABP)—Congressional negotiators nixed an effort to create a right for military chaplains to offer sectarian prayers in settings where soldiers of many faiths may be present.

However, the last-minute compromise Sept. 29 between House and Senate leaders on the provision, tucked into a military-spending bill, also rescinds chaplain guidelines created in the past year by two branches of the armed services. Air Force and Navy officials had released the guidelines in the wake of accusations that some evangelical Protestant chaplains and officers at military institutions engaged in proselytizing and religious harassment.

The issue held up the National Defense Authorization Act for weeks, with House and Senate negotiators at an impasse over the provision.

In May, the House added language to the bill saying chaplains “shall have the prerogative to pray according to the dictates of the chaplain’s own conscience, except as must be limited by military necessity, with any such limitation being imposed in the least restrictive manner feasible.”

There is no such provision in the version of the bill that passed the Senate.

Conservative Republicans, led by Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, pushed the amendment that made the House version, as did conservative evangelical groups like Focus on the Family.

However, the Pentagon and many religious groups—including the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Anti-Defamation League—opposed the effort, saying it would cause unnecessary sectarian division in the military.

The measure would have explicitly overridden the new Air Force and Navy chaplain guidelines. Those rules—written in the wake of charges of religious harassment against non-evangelicals at the Air Force Academy in Colorado—instructed chaplains to offer “non-sectarian” prayers at events where those of multiple faiths would be present.

Military chaplains are allowed already to pray the way they choose in the chapel services they conduct or other settings where soldiers of different faiths are not compelled to be present. But Jones and his allies assert that the new rules violate the consciences of evangelical chaplains who feel compelled to invoke Christ’s name when offering public prayers.

The Air Force and Navy guidelines rescinded under the Sept. 29 compromise were designed to prevent the kind of allegations that divided the campus of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., last year.

In April 2005, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote a letter to Pentagon officials complaining that there was a pervasive and systematic bias in favor of evangelical Christians at the government-run school. The letter detailed incidents in which administrators, faculty and upper-class cadets at the academy allegedly promoted evangelical forms of Christianity or harassed cadets of minority faiths.

An outspoken parent of two Jewish cadets and a Lutheran chaplain at the school soon echoed the complaints lodged by Americans United.

A Pentagon study of the Air Force’s religious atmosphere resulted in the new guidelines for that branch. The Navy guidelines were similar.

But some conservatives, led by Jones, continued to oppose the changes. The Sept. 29 compromise asks Air Force and Navy officials to rescind them.

Meanwhile, Jones and others have promised to revive their effort to allow explicitly sectarian prayers at multi-faith events when the 110th Congress convenes in January.