Washington, USA - Terry Bradshaw stared intently into the camera, his eyes moist, as the interviewer asked him if his faith in God had helped him through his bouts with depression.
“Oh, yeah,” answered Mr. Bradshaw, the Hall of Fame quarterback. “Well, I’m a Christian for one thing so, yeah, I’d been praying.”
The viewers of this video were military personnel who were watching an official military production dealing with depression, suicide and “the importance of faith.”
The screening of the suicide-prevention video and other recent incidents are reviving questions that the Pentagon had hoped to put behind it years ago: what the proper role of religion should be in the military and whether a pro-Christian culture permeates the armed forces.
Military officials have worked to enforce tougher restrictions on proselytizing and religious bias since a flare-up over religious discrimination in 2005 at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where the football coach posted a locker room banner for “Team Jesus.” Officials said they had made great strides in the last few years, with training for officers and a concerted effort at the inclusion of all faiths.
“I’d be wrong to state that every chaplain does it right 100 percent of the time, but we work very hard at it,” said Carleton Birch of the Army’s Chief of Chaplains Office. “Chaplains ascribe to pluralism. We represent our own faith while respecting other faith groups.”
Signs of continued friction over the issue still abound, however. In a memorandum distributed last month at the Air Force Academy in response to several recent complaints about religious bias, base leaders reminded faculty members that “the Air Force is ‘officially neutral’ when it comes to belief systems.” The memorandum said cadets should not be made to feel that they would get better jobs by going to optional Bible study sessions.
Still, some military personnel and activists opposed to what they see as “forced religion” in the military said they believed the problem had continued largely unabated, and they said private groups like the Officers’ Christian Fellowship and the Campus Crusade for Christ’s Military Ministry maintained an outsized influence on many bases.
“The Army enforces policies against racism and sexism, but doesn’t bat an eye at these kinds of religious discrimination,” said Specialist Dustin Chalker, an Army medic based at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, who was raised in a Christian home but is now an atheist. “Why is it acceptable that soldiers are unable to serve this nation without attending state-led religious practices they find offensive and false?”
Specialist Chalker is now a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that accuses the military of ignoring laws and policies banning mandatory religious practices. Specialist Chalker, who earned a Purple Heart in Iraq, remembers returning from the war in 2007 and attending a mandatory ceremony that began and ended with a Christian prayer. The experience, Specialist Chalker said, was “humiliating and dehumanizing.”
Leaders of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group that brought the lawsuit against the Pentagon, point to episodes that they said represented a pattern of improper religious influence: official military retreats at off-base churches, the appearance of uniformed officers at religious events, displays of crucifixes at military chapels in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the practice of “dipping” the American flag at the altar of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., among others.
The foundation says the Terry Bradshaw video represents only the latest example of what it considers an improper blurring of secular and religious issues.
Mr. Bradshaw appears in a half-hour interview to discuss his experience with depression, with outtakes appearing in a six-minute video that includes a segment called “the importance of faith.” A suicide-prevention manual, training Army leaders in using the Bradshaw video, includes a “talking point” saying, “Spirituality is an invaluable ingredient in his battle with this disease.”
Chaplain Birch said testimonials like those from Mr. Bradshaw helped soldiers deal with depression. “No one’s trying to force religion on anyone,” he said of the video. “But someone’s personal faith testimony is part of their story, and we’re not going to go around and censor it.”
The prevalence of religious bias in the military remains in dispute. The Pentagon said last week that it had received 50 complaints of religious discrimination from all of the branches from 2005 to 2007. But Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a retired Air Force officer who has become an outspoken advocate on the issue, said his group now received more than 500 complaints of religious bias a month from members of the military.
David Horn, a former fighter pilot in the Air Force Reserve, is among those who have sought the group’s help. He tells of returning from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and, like Specialist Chalker, hearing prayers “in Jesus’ name” at homecoming ceremonies. He was so bothered, he said in an interview, that he wrote a letter to his local newspaper complaining about what he called the “unconstitutional” intrusion of religion in military life.
Four days later, Mr. Horn said, he received a negative evaluation — after years of positive appraisals — and ultimately lost his flying certification and his post. With his flying career in jeopardy, he plans to join the lawsuit against the Pentagon.
Last week, the Justice Department got an extension until March 30 to file its response in federal court to the suit brought in December. Under the Bush administration, the department argued in court last July that the accusations of bias raised by the foundation in an earlier version of the suit were “not systemic problems, but isolated instances,” best handled through internal military procedures and not in the courts.
Mr. Weinstein met last Tuesday with the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the first time the group has gotten an audience with a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr. Weinstein said of the meeting with General Schwartz that “the thing I found encouraging is that not only did he take it very seriously, but he also acknowledged that there is a problem, which is always a first step.”
But religious advocates said they worried about an overreaction.
“You can’t and shouldn’t eliminate the spiritual component in the military,” said Bruce L. Fister, a retired Air Force general who is executive director of the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, which is active on 200 bases worldwide.
Leaders of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation “would be happy if there were no religion whatsoever in the military,” General Fister said in an interview. “But the problem is that Christians are going to operate one way or the other, and whenever the church has been persecuted, it’s grown stronger.”