The photograph on the right is of a Moslem suicide bomber, holding a Koran. But the photograph on the left is of US soldiers holding a Bible. The similarity is not accidental. All see themselves as warriors for God.

Jason Leopold of the Baltimore Chronicle has written a chilling story, chilling at least for anyone who values the well-being of our country. Leopold describes the environment new recruits face when entering basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

Frank Bussey, director of Military Ministry at Fort Jackson, has been telling soldiers at Fort Jackson that “government authorities, police and the military = God’s Ministers.”

Bussey’s teachings from the “God’s Basic Training” Bible study guide he authored says US troops have “two primary responsibilities”: “to praise those who do right” and “to punish those who do evil – Gods’s servant, an angel of wrath.”

Left unmentioned is defending the Constitution of the United States, to which they pledged an oath of allegiance, or even defending the country as a whole… Instead, Leopold reports,

soldiers on the battlefield have told disturbing stories of being force-fed fundamentalist Christianity by highly controversial, apocalyptic “End Times” evangelists, who have infiltrated US military installations throughout the world with the blessing of high-level officials at the Pentagon. Proselytizing among military personnel has been conducted openly, in violation of the basic tenets of the United States Constitution.

Instead, as Leopold shows, there is widespread violation of US law regarding separation of church and state, often with the connivance of ranking base military officers at Fort Jackson and elsewhere. The purge of army officers by the Bush administration takes on a new dimension when we witness the lawlessness of the military opportunists who have risen after their departure. American taxpayers are paying for a future US ‘Christian’ Taliban.

The executive director of Military Ministry, retired US Army Major General Bob Dees, wrote in the organization’s October 2005 “Life and Leadership” newsletter, “We must pursue our particular means for transforming the nation – through the military. And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens….”

Moreover, Military Ministry’s parent organization, Campus Crusade for Christ, has been re-distributing to military chaplains a DVD produced a decade ago where Tommy Nelson, a pastor at the Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, tells an audience of Texas A&M cadets and military officers when they join the military “then you are also in the ministry.”

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has issued a report on radical Christianist subversion of our military. It should be a must-pread for all Americans, who should then aske themselves how much they want religious war both abroad and at home. Because if history is any guide, and on these matters it is, religious war is what these forces are seeking. In part, the report describes

Mandatory Christian concerts at basic training installations — This story was written about by Josh Harkinson on Mother Jones a few weeks ago, but the track-covering done by Eric Horner Ministries after the Mother Jones story is a story in itself. Eric Horner, a Christian country singer, regularly appears at military bases, with some performances being mandatory for basic trainees. He has endorsements from General Petraeus and other commanders, was introduced to George Bush by Fort Jackson’s base commander, Brig. Gen. James H. Schwitters, and, most recently, has been made an “honorary Ft. Jackson drill sergeant” by Gen. Schwitters.

The problem is not entertainment. The problem is the goals of those providing the entertainment. The more I looked into the story the more frightening it became. For example, Mother Jones reports that

This summer [Mikey Weinstein] uncovered plans by the Pentagon to ship “freedom packages” to soldiers in Iraq that were to contain Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic, and Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a video game inspired by post-Rapture novels in which “soldiers for Christ” hunt enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers. Partly due to Weinstein’s efforts, the packages were never sent.

This example is not isolated, the MRFF Report also included a photo of an office door in a Military Police battalion’s office at Ft. Riley, Kansas, depicting a picture of Ann Coulter and her quote, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” I was unable to find the photos on the web, but see the AP report here.

Chris Hedges reports, about 50% of military chaplains are currently affiliated with the Christian right. To put this in perspective, what would people think if almost 50% of educators were members of the Communist Party? My comparison is not unreasonable, for chaplains are uniquely trusted people for many young and poorly educated men and women seeking to serve their country and improve their lives by enlisting. You might say “But radical fundamentalists are a p[art of our country.” Yes they are. But they are not anywhere close to 50%. And they explicitly reject the values this nations was founded on. By genuinely American standards, they are Americans, but they are bad ones. Like Communists.

Training soldiers to give their primary allegiance to a specific deity, particularly one as violent and murderous as the fundamentalist Christian one, is an act of open rebellion against the Constitution and against the American people as a whole. The military officers involved need to be court martialed and expelled from the armed forces whose oath of allegiance they have sullied. Campus Crusade for Christ and other subversive organizations should be publicly denounced as the enemies of our country.

The issue becomes even more grave when we observe the rise of the right wing’s private army, Blackwater. Blackwater’s leadership, a single multimillionaire, is also an important part of the Christianist radical right. Anyone paying attention to the news knows that Blackwater’s people have been involved in war crimes, but have been immune to prosecution by both Iraqi and American courts. The Bush administration has actively covered their misdeeds, even when these crimes inflame Iraqi opinion against the US, resulting in additional deaths of legitimate American soldiers. They receive no-bid contracts awarding them enormous amounts of money while undermining our country’s civil institutions. For example Blackwater’s government contracts for guarding New Orleans after Katrina from September 8 to September 30, 2005, totalled $409,000 for providing fourteen guards and four vehicles to “protect the temporary morgue in Baton Rouge, LA.” If anything it is worse in Iraq. According to Jeremy Scahill Blackwater’s mercenaries are paid six to seven times what regular U.S. soldiers make and are given better equipment and body armor.

Blackwater represents the rise of a private army, an army paid much better by tax funds from political allies than are legitimate US soldiers. You can get access to substantial information on Blackwater here. If we look at past history, the Roman Republic was destroyed through the rise of private armies loyal to particular men rather than the republic. Blackwater represents such a force, paid by American citizens while simultaneously our own army is undermined and subverted from within. Wporse yet, it is potentially an ideological force, swerving radical Christianists bent on destroying the United States as we have known it, replacing it with a theocratic horror second to none.

This danger these developments pose is not lost on some legitimately Christian observers, such as here.

A little more historical perspective is useful here.

The United States is unique among major Western nations in not having had a history of religious war. In England and the European continent were not so fortunate. Millions died as Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists sought to exterminate one another in the name of their God. In many ways the most violent war in European history was a religious one. The Thirty Years War annihilated one third of the population of what is now Germany and the Czech Republic. Poland entered the war a Protestant country, and left it a Catholic one. The means employed were not peaceful conversion. Ending in 1648, with the English Civil War finally coming to an end three years later, this violent and relatively recent history was powerfully in our Founding Fathers’ minds. They did all they could to prevent its equivalent happening here.

Today the subversives in the radical right are undermining their work, undermining America from within, all the while wrapped in the flag they claim to love while ignoring every value it symbolizes.