Whose God Is Their Co-Pilot?

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

It was with happy anticipation that retired Air Force Colonel David Antoon and his son Ryan, 18, arrived last year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., for an orientation for accepted students. But their pride soon turned to perplexity. On the schedule was a visit to the school chapel. A loyal alumnus, Antoon remembered academy chaplains as a low-key group who made no attempt to press their brand of faith on others. But that day, before a crowd that probably included future cadets of all creeds, the chaplain at the microphone boasted about the huge popularity of Christian Bible studies, and several of his colleagues, Antoon recalls, responded, "Amen" and "Hallelujah."

"My jaw just dropped," says Antoon. "I thought, Is this the Air Force Academy or Rocky Mountain Bible College?" For this and other reasons, Ryan passed up his all-expenses-paid congressional appointment to the academy and enrolled elsewhere.

The Antoons' experience was not an aberration. This week, after a six-week barrage of allegations, the Air Force is expected to release a report based on more than 300 interviews, addressing charges that the academy is rife with an officially encouraged religious evangelization. Critics say the behaviors violated the Constitution and Department of Defense regulations--and threatened troop unity by teaching future commanders overt religious favoritism.

The Air Force has admitted the merit of some of the charges. This month the academy head, Lieut. General John Rosa Jr., who attempted some corrections a year ago, publicly conceded, "I have problems in my cadet wing, I have issues in my staff, and I have issues in my faculty." It might take six years, he said, to change the culture. Yet other allegations are contested, and a congressional fracas over the issue suggests the nation's faith-tinted "culture wars," which have until now spared the armed services, may impact actual warriors.

The first stories appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette. They gained traction thanks to a July 2004 memo by a Yale Divinity School team that advised academy chaplains on rape counseling but made note of "stridently evangelical themes" in Protestant services and warned that this could "encourage religious divisions." The letter was co-signed by Captain MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran chaplain at the academy. She has been reassigned to Okinawa--punishment, she claims, for speaking out, although the Air Force denies it. She has questioned the influence on the school of the many powerful Christian groups headquartered in Colorado Springs, sometimes called "Evangelical mecca." Some groups, she says, "have Bible studies and classes in which faculty members can learn how to evangelize in their opening statements to students each year."

Other incidents have been compiled by Mikey Weinstein, a Jewish graduate of the academy, who was shocked last year when his son Curtis, a cadet, told him he would "beat the s___ out of the next person who ... tells me our people are responsible for the execution of Jesus Christ." A Reagan Administration lawyer, Weinstein began documenting alleged religious slurs and church-state violations at the academy from sources that he says now number about 120, and he alerted national civil liberties groups.

Taken together, the complaints suggest evangelical saturation. They claim that mandatory gatherings often opened with prayers and that some professors actively recruited cadets to join evangelical churches. At Christmastime some senior faculty members would sign religious ads in the base paper, including this 2003 message: "We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world. If you would like to discuss Jesus, feel free to contact one of us!" Revered football coach Fisher DeBerry once hung a banner in his locker room reading I AM A MEMBER OF TEAM JESUS CHRIST. He allegedly led game-day prayer "in Jesus' name." DeBerry has said he actually prayed to a "Master Coach."

The ranking evangelizer was the academy's second in command, Brigadier General Johnny Weida, a deeply religious former Thunderbirds pilot who was brought in to help restore dignity to the school after a 2003 sexual-abuse scandal. Promoting the National Day of Prayer on May 1, 2003, Weida sent a mass e-mail urging participation and noting that "the Lord is in control." He established a call-and-response routine at campus events. When he shouted "Airpower!" evangelical cadets would yell "Rock, sir!" The cheer was allegedly a reference to Jesus' words that his house is built on rock, intended to provoke curiosity among non-Evangelicals and start conversations about Christ. If so, it also verbally erased any distinction between loyalty to the Air Force and to Weida's God. (The academy has declined interview requests for Weida and other senior personnel, as well as all comment on the allegations, pending the upcoming report.)

The ethos may not have been as pervasive as some allege. "There's this idea that all evangelical Christians walk around shoving their faith down other cadets' throats, and it's not true," says academy computer-science professor Martin Carlisle, himself an Evangelical. The Air Force chief of chaplains, Major General Charles Baldwin, says the Yale team members "don't have all the facts." Yet religiosity infiltrated the school's unofficial vocabulary--cadets who did not attend chapel were known as the "heathen flight"--and presented some with down-the-rabbit-hole conundrums. As a cadet last year, Patrick Kucera, an atheist, tried filing a complaint about Christian proselytizing with the academy's Military Equal Opportunity (MEO) office. The MEO officer, says Kucera, not only discouraged the filing on technical grounds but also said he felt obliged, as a believer, "to try to bring you back to the flock."

For civil liberties groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which investigated some of Weinstein's claims, the allegations suggested "egregious, systemic and legally objectionable violations" of the Constitution's Establishment Clause, as it said in a letter to the Department of Defense. Congressional reaction, however, has been split. Last month Steve Israel, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, introduced what he thought would be a popular amendment to a defense-spending bill requiring the Air Force to submit a plan ensuring religious tolerance and full religious freedom at the academy. Opposition by the committee's Republican majority was so fierce that he withdrew it. Said Republican committee member Walter Jones: "I think we've got too much concern about political correctness." Jones is pressing for hearings on religious repression within the military--but he means repression of Christian expression, such as not permitting chaplains to offer public prayer "in Jesus' name." Tom Minnery, public-policy head of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, argues that "cadets are trained to give the ultimate sacrifice. They ought to be encouraged to grapple with the ultimate meaning in life, and they ought to be encouraged to make a decision about God, one way or another."

That sentiment is a long way from current constitutional jurisprudence. It also happens to be quite distant from the military norm. While irritations do occur (a group of evangelical chaplains has been suing the Navy for years on claims of alleged career discrimination), Evangelicals have usually found ways to give witness without offending the military's doggedly maintained principle of pluralism. This week's academy report may provide hints as to whether this admittedly tricky model can survive as Evangelicalism becomes more assertive and its critics more defensive. Meanwhile, if the report is released as expected, academy personnel will have precisely one week to digest it before the next impressionable first-year class arrives, on June 29. --With reporting by Jeff Chu/New York, Rita Healy/Denver, Maggie Sieger/Chicago and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Jeff Chu/New York, Rita Healy/Denver, Maggie Sieger/Chicago, DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON