Don Martin Jr.

As we thank those who served and sacrificed to preserve our freedom to worship God, we should honor their sacrifice by examining our faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

Lieutenant General Sir William Dobbie, British Army, served as the Governor-General of Malta from 1940 to 1942, during which time his wife, Sybil, served with him. The Germans bombed Malta constantly due to its strategic position near the sea lanes they used to resupply Rommel’s Army in North Africa.

Below is an excerpt from his book, A Very Present Help, published in 1945. Sir William completed it in September 1944, as the Allied Armies were advancing rapidly through France toward Germany after the Normandy landings earlier that summer. In this passage, he addresses the need for the people of Great Britain to turn to God, who had preserved them as a nation during World War II.

It is right that we should give honor where honor is due. Indeed, we are exhorted to do so. We cannot be too grateful to those gallant men of the fighting services and the Merchant Navy who have faced the enemy for us, many of whom have given their lives for us. But as we face the situation we cannot avoid the conclusion that their efforts, splendid though they were, could not in themselves have brought us through disaster to victory. That was God’s doing. We must recognize this, and show our gratitude to Him to whom, more than to any other, we owe the blessings of success.

But as we face up to this challenging fact, we cannot but realize how wonderfully gracious God has been in doing these great things for us. We cannot pretend that nationally we have deserved such treatment. It is true that our cause is just and righteous. It is superlatively so. But are we righteous? It must be confessed that we are not, and yet God has condescended to help us, even though there is much in our national life that must be displeasing to Him.

In spite of the way God has been speaking to us, both in judgment and in mercy, we as a nation have not turned to Him. We have not discarded or turned from many things that we know are abhorrent to Him (if we think about them at all). He is still largely crowded out of our lives and is ignored and disregarded by us—all this in spite of what he has done for us.

May God open the eyes of our nation to see, and open their ears to hear, and may we humbly acknowledge our sin and turn to Him. It is not enough to have a righteous cause. We need righteous people as well. (1944, pp. 124-125)

Like the people of the United Kingdom in 1945, people in the USA today need to acknowledge our sin and turn to God. Let us pray for that work to happen in our lives and in the lives of those throughout America who seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ—and for His Spirit to initiate another Great Awakening in our land.

By Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Denver, Colorado, USA

An address delivered on 25 October 2010 to Catholic Cadets at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado

None of you wants to sit through another classroom lecture. So my comments will be brief. Then we can get to some questions and answers. I’m also going to skip telling you how talented you are. You already know that. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. What you’ll discover as you get older is that the world has plenty of very talented failures – people who either didn’t live up to their abilities; or who did, but did it in a way that diminished their humanity and their character.

God made you to be better than that. And your nation and your Church need you to be better than that. Scripture tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps. 111:10). Wisdom – not merely the knowledge of facts or a mastery of skills, but wisdom about ourselves, other people and the terrain of human life – this is the mark of a whole person. We already have too many clever leaders. We need wise leaders. And the wisest leaders ground themselves in humility before God and the demands of God’s justice.

I want to offer you just four quick points tonight. Here’s the first. Military service is a vocation, not simply a profession.

The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word vocare, which means to call. In Christian belief, God created each of us for a purpose. He calls each of us by name to some form of service. No higher purpose exists than protecting other people, especially the weak and defenseless. This is why the Church, despite her historic resistance to war and armed violence, has held for many centuries that military service is not just “acceptable.” It can also be much more than that. When lived with a spirit of integrity, restraint and justice, military service is virtuous. It’s ennobling because – at its best – military service expresses the greatest of all virtues: charity; a sacrificial love for people and things outside and more important than oneself. It flows from something unique in the human heart: a willingness to place one’s own life in harm’s way for the sake of others.

The great Russian Christian writer Vladimir Solovyov once said that to defend peaceful men, “the guardian angels of humanity mixed the clay [of the earth] with copper and iron and created the soldier.” And until the spirit of malice brought into the world by Cain disappears from human hearts, the soldier “will be a good and not an evil.”¹ in a poetic way what the Church teaches and believes. And you should strive to embody this vision in your own service.

Here’s my second point. Protect the moral character you build here, and remember the leadership you learn here. You’ll need both when the day comes to return to civilian life.

I think it’s unwise for people my age to judge the world too critically. The reason is pretty simple. The older we get, the more clearly we see – or think we see — what’s wrong with the world. It also gets harder to admit our own role in making it that way. Over my lifetime I’ve had the privilege of working with many good religious men and women, and many good lay Christian friends. Many of them have been heroic in their generosity, faith and service. Many have helped to make our country a better place.

And yet I think it’s true – I know it’s true – that my generation has, in some ways, been among the most foolish in American history. We’ve been absorbed in our appetites, naïve about the consequences of our actions, overconfident in our power, and unwilling to submit ourselves to the obligations that come with the greatest ideals of our own heritage.

Most generations of Americans have inherited a nation different in degree from the generations that preceded them. You will inherit an America that is different in kind – a nation different from anything in our past in its attitudes toward sexuality, family, religion, law and the nature of the human person; in other words, different and more troubling in the basic things that define a society. My generation created this new kind of America. Soon we will leave the consequences to you.

And this brings us back to my second point: here the leadership and moral character of my generation failed, you need to succeed. The task of Christian moral leadership that will occupy much of your lives in the future will not be easy. It will place heavy demands on people like you who learned discipline and integrity in places like this.

Here’s my third point. Guarantees of religious freedom are only as strong as the social consensus that supports them.

Americans have always taken their religious freedom for granted. Religious faith has always played a major role in our public life, including debate about public policy and law. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution explicitly guarantees this freedom. But that guarantee and its application are subject to lawmakers and the interpretation of courts. And lawmakers and courts increasingly attack religious liberty, undermine rights of conscience, and force references to God out of our public square. This shift in our culture is made worse by mass media that, in general, have little understanding of religious faith and are often openly hostile. As religious practice softens in the United States over the next few decades, the consensus for religious freedom may easily decline. And that has very big implications for the life of faithful Catholics in this country.

Here’s my fourth and final point. Given everything I’ve just said, how do we live faithfully as Catholics going forward in a culture that’s skeptical, and even hostile, toward what we believe?

Knighthood is an institution with very deep roots in the memory of the Church. Nearly 900 years ago, one of the great monastic reformers of the Church, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, described the ideal Christian knights as Godly men who “shun every excess in clothing and food. They live as brothers in joyful and sober company (with) one heart and one soul. … There is no distinction of persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather than to noble blood. They rival one another in mutual consideration, and they carry one another’s burdens, thus fulfilling the law of Christ.”2

Bernard had few illusions about human nature. And he was anything but naïve. Writing at the dawn of the crusading era, in the early 12th century, he was well aware of the greed, vanity, ambition and violence that too often motivated Europe’s warrior class, even in the name of religious faith.

Most of the men who took up the cause of aiding eastern Christians and liberating the Holy Land in the early decades of crusading did so out of genuine zeal for the Cross. But Bernard also knew that many others had mixed or even corrupt and evil motives. In his great essay “In Praise of the New Knighthood” (c. 1136), he outlined the virtues that should shape the vocation of every truly “Christian” knight: humility, austerity, justice, obedience, unselfishness and a single-minded zeal for Jesus Christ in defending the poor, the weak, the Church and persecuted Christians.3

Our life today may seem very different from life in the 12th century. The Church today asks us to seek mutual respect with people of other religious traditions, and to build common ground for cooperation wherever possible.

But human nature — our basic hopes, dreams, anxieties and sufferings — hasn’t really changed. The basic Christian vocation remains the same: to follow Jesus Christ faithfully, and in following Jesus, to defend Christ’s Church and to serve her people zealously, unselfishly and with all our skill. As St. Ignatius Loyola wrote in his “Spiritual Exercises” — and remember that Ignatius himself was a former soldier — each of us must choose between two battle standards: the standard of Jesus Christ, humanity’s true King, or the standard of his impostor, the Prince of This World.

There is no neutral ground. C.S. Lewis once said that Christianity is a “fighting religion.” He meant that Christian discipleship has always been — and remains — a struggle against the evil within and outside ourselves. This is why the early Church Fathers described Christian life as “spiritual combat.” It’s why they called faithful Christians the “Church Militant” and “soldiers of Christ” in the Sacrament of Confirmation.

The Church needs men and women of courage and Godliness today more than at any time in her history. So does this extraordinary country we call home in this world; a nation that still has an immense reservoir of virtue, decency and people of good will. This is why the Catholic ideal of knighthood, with its demands of radical discipleship, is still alive and still needed. The essence of Christian knighthood remains the same: sacrificial service rooted in a living Catholic faith.

A new “spirit of knighthood” is what we need now — unselfish, tireless, devoted disciples willing to face derision and persecution for Jesus Christ. We serve our nation best by serving God first, and by proving our faith with the example of our lives.

Copyright 2010 by Charles J. Chaput. All rights reserved. Published by permission.

Endnotes:

1. Vladimir Solovyov, The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy; translated by Nathalie Duddington; edited and annotated by Boris Jakim (Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 2005) 349; original Russian text published in 1897

2. Bernard of Clairvaux, “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, V. 7 (Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, 1977) 127-167

3. Note that Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade, wrote his essay specifically as an apologia for the founding of the first military-religious order, the “knights of the Temple” or the Knights Templar. The Templars took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, lived in common and dedicated themselves to the defense of Christians in the Holy Land. But as R.J. Zwi Werblowsky writes in his introduction to Bernard’s essay in The Works noted above, Bernard was also concerned with “the theology of a reformed and sanctified knighthood” in contrast to the frivolity and vanity of worldly chivalry.

Quotations:

“We already have too many clever leaders. We need wise leaders. And the wisest leaders ground themselves in humility before God and the demands of God’s justice.”

“When lived with a spirit of integrity, restraint and justice, military service is virtuous. It’s ennobling because – at its best – military service expresses the greatest of all virtues: charity; a sacrificial love for people and things outside and more important than oneself. It flows from something unique in the human heart: a willingness to place one’s own life in harm’s way for the sake of others.”

“Most generations of Americans have inherited a nation different in degree from the generations that preceded them. You will inherit an America that is different in kind – a nation different from anything in our past in its attitudes toward sexuality, family, religion, law and the nature of the human person; in other words, different and more troubling in the basic things that define a society. My generation created this new kind of America. Soon we will leave the consequences to you.”

“A new “spirit of knighthood” is what we need now — unselfish, tireless, devoted disciples willing to face derision and persecution for Jesus Christ. We serve our nation best by serving God first, and by proving our faith with the example of our lives.”

by Major Jonathan C. Dowty, U.S. Air Force

Recent articles have highlighted the moral struggle faced by Christian men and women in the U.S. military. When the U.S. Air Force Academy established an official area for a pagan congregation, it aroused a wide variety of emotions—ranging from those who found the pagan belief system repulsive to those who felt anyone should be free to do as he pleases. Military Christians, too, experienced tension between the tenets of their faith and the dictates of their profession.

Following publicity surrounding the creation of the Academy pagan area, one commenter highlighted this very conflict when she said the Academy’s actions were “great news” and showed “a willingness to be accepting of “other” faiths.

Is the creation of a pagan circle at the Air Force Academy “great news”? There are two distinct perspectives at issue, that of a Christian and that of a member of the military. Ultimately, they form the perspective of a military Christian. 

The Christian Perspective
For Christians, the news of the pagan area on a military installation is heartbreaking. Christians know there is one way to God and only one way to eternal life—through Jesus Christ. To see fellow Americans, fellow human beings, led astray into a false ideology that will lead to their eternal separation from God is saddening. 

Let there be no doubt, the religious freedom protected by the Constitution guarantees the rights of one faith to disagree with another. Theologically, Christians are permitted to believe and express the belief that neo-paganism is wrong or even evil, just as any other faith is free to hold equivalent theological perspectives about any other competing faith. Still, despite the sometimes common negative stereotypes, believers in Jesus Christ want others to share in their joy and hope. When people actively reject what Christians view as a gift, it grieves them.

Thus, as a Christian, it is not “great news” that the U.S. military is facilitating the gathering of neo-pagans.

The Military Perspective
Military officers acknowledge and protect the right of men and women around the world to participate in the spiritual beliefs of their choice. Our recognized human liberty of religious freedom includes the provision of a dedicated space for a congregation of neo-pagans at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which military officers swear to uphold and protect, pagans in America—including in the military—have their free exercise rights protected. (It is true the military is not obligated to create a congregation area for every conceivable belief system, but that is a topic for another time.) As noted at the time, it is great news that the American military is getting positive credit for its protection of religious liberties, something it is frequently (and falsely) accused of violating.

Otherwise, however, the report of the installation of a pagan area is not “great news” because such a statement would imply a positive value judgment on the subject of the report. Contrary to the implication in the original question, the U.S. military does not “accept” any faiths; it merely accommodates them. Likewise, members of the U.S. military protect freedoms, they do not endorse or support the individual choices those freedoms may engender.

In an oversimplified analogy, Americans are free to smoke in this country (in some places). While at times a person may be obligated to support that choice enshrined in law, they are not required to “accept,” celebrate, or otherwise make a positive value judgment on the installation of a smokers’ pit in a pavilion outside a military unit’s back door. While they may acknowledge others’ ability to participate in such conduct, they do not condone, approve of, or support it. In fact, they may know, even if others refuse to believe, that their lives could be healthier if they made a different choice. To apply this example to the issue at hand, members of the U.S. military willingly protect human liberties even if they disagree with the actions people take as a result of those freedoms.*

Thus, as a military officer, the creation of the pagan area is not “great news;” it is simply “news” that is consistent with military policy accommodating religious belief systems. Again, the positive portrayal of the military’s standard support of religious freedom is “good news.”

The Christian Military Perspective
Within the military profession, Christians should always strive to treat everyone with respect, to act in a way that demonstrates the love of God, and to live a life of example and encouragement that draws men and women to Jesus Christ. [See the commentary, “The Witness of the Soldier Christian,” in the Spring 2010 edition of this journal—ed.]

Under current law, military service does not require a military member to support religious beliefs contradictory to his moral beliefs, including paganism. For example, it is perfectly acceptable for a Christian in a military Bible study to say another faith is a “false religion,” or to say adherents of a non-Christian faith will be subject to the wrath of God at the judgment. Those are religious beliefs American citizens—even those in the military—are free to hold. Religious adherents in our military are expressly permitted to conduct themselves within their faith activities as their beliefs require.

Even though members of the military have that freedom, there are obviously times when they should avoid asserting the moral superiority of their religious beliefs. A military officer can’t always say “You need Jesus!”, even if he knows he is spiritually and morally correct. For example, standing in a group of mixed rank airmen during the duty day is not the acceptable time for a Muslim officer to announce that non-Muslims are infidels, nor for a Christian officer to declare that Islam is a false religion. There are times and places when such discussions are appropriate, as well as those when they are not.

While military members are not required to support religious beliefs contradictory to their own, they are required to support religious freedom. From an official perspective, support of that freedom does not equate to government endorsement of any individual belief system. The personal perspective is somewhat more challenging. If a military member—Christian, pagan, Muslim, Buddhist, or a member of any other faith—requests accommodation or assistance with spiritual needs, a military officer must honor his requests to the extent mission requirements allow, even if his faith is morally opposed to the tenets of that belief system. Under the protections of the U.S. Constitution and military law, a person in a military chain of command is obligated by his position to support the free exercise of service members’ faiths, even if those faiths are morally contrary to Christianity. Usually this would simply involve directing them to a chaplain, or acting on a chaplain’s analysis of an accommodation request.

A military Christian who feels he may someday be morally obligated to obstruct the exercise of a non-Christian’s faith, even if his motivation is the eternal disposition of that person’s soul, is not fit for a position of military authority. Within the context of military regulations, a military officer cannot use his authority to advance or restrict any religious faith.

Though not everyone will agree, a military Christian can fulfill his legal requirements of meeting the spiritual desires of his non-Christian subordinates or peers without compromising his faith. Whether it is excusing a Jewish soldier from formations on the Sabbath (when military necessity allows), finding a chaplain to help a Muslim find a Koran, or coordinating to find a place pagans can congregate, permitting those military members to exercise their faiths is not the same as morally accepting them.

Ultimately God has given men freedom, including the ability to choose their eternal fate. While governments and men can (and should) encourage moral behavior, the U.S. Constitution protects the right of men and women to believe as they choose. In addition, there are no Biblical examples of the followers of Christ enlisting the power of the state to control the faith of, or to convert, non-Christians.  The Gospel was always presented as a choice.

A Christian is morally obligated not to actively encourage someone’s non-Christian faith. However, a Christian is not morally obligated to proactively prevent non-Christians from exercising their faiths. The fundamental paradox of human liberty is that men and women are free—even free to choose to be wrong.

Conclusion
To directly answer the question, no, it is not “great news” that the U.S. Air Force Academy installed a dedicated area for neo-pagan congregation. It is the correct decision under the U.S. Constitution, but it is a disappointing and sad commentary on the declining spiritual state of modern America.

Christians are saddened by those who are not only lost, but also facilitated in their spiritual confusion by the support of the U.S. military. Members of the military support the right of neo-pagans to have a dedicated site, but they do not find the creation of the site “great” because they do not support, nor are they obligated to support, the pagan belief system itself.

As originally stated, it is “great news” that some have given the U.S. military credit for being supportive of the spiritual needs of its members, regardless of their faiths. The reputation of the U.S. Armed Forces in America and in the world benefits from the accurate portrayal of its protection of religious freedom, not the inaccurate depiction of it promoting a specific faith. While this support for service members’ spiritual requirements has been the standard practice for some time, public misperceptions have caused some to believe otherwise.

As this topic demonstrates, as a Christian in the military you may experience tension between what you believe and desire to do as a Christian, and what you must do or say as a military officer. Current events assure us that there will be more incidents like this in the future. Some Christians cannot reconcile that tension, and the military may not be the best career choice for them. Military Christians who can stand for Christ in our world today, despite the tension, can be a potent salt in a unique and influential culture.

*For those that do not catch the unspoken caveat, there is no Constitutionally-protected right to smoke.

Jonathan Dowty is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and fighter test pilot in the U.S. Air Force. He has served in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, including Operation Iraqi Freedom. He writes on issues of religion and the military at God and Country: christianfighterpilot.com/blog.