Air Force Academy Battles Accusations of Intolerance

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• INSTRUCTOR:

  We will start with Exercise 1. In this scenario please imagine that you are the minority faith in your workplace. What things might you find sensitive or offensive?

• TOM BEARDEN:

  This is the latest attempt by the U.S. Air Force Academy to combat a perception of religious intolerance on campus. It's called the RSVP program, Respecting the Spiritual Values of all People. The mandatory classes are designed to help students and faculty who are 80 percent Christian better understand people of other faiths.

  Junior Lindsay Thomas is Jewish. She said she didn't have to imagine a scenario of religious insensitivity; she was confronted with one last year when a major training event was held on the first night of Passover.

• SPOKESPERSON:

  Knowing when big holidays are and not scheduling things during those sometime times is really important. Knowing it's the time of worship for this person and scheduling a major event like that was just offensive to a lot of people.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  For the past eight months the academy had been under attack by several alumni, a former Air Force chaplain and others for allegedly permitting an environment that is hostile to non-Christians.

• SPOKESMAN:

  I'm going to throw it really high this time.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Academy graduate Mikey Weinstein, who is Jewish, is leading the charge. One of his sons is also a graduate and another is still there.

• MIKEY WEINSTEIN:

  My kids have been told that all of their ancestors, all of their descendents, they themselves will burn eternally in the Lake of Fire, for not accepting an evangelical biblical world view of Christ.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Weinstein filed a federal lawsuit to halt what he called illegal proselytizing and evangelizing throughout the Air Force.

• MIKEY WEINSTEIN:

  There's been an attempt to have essentially an evangelical coup in the military. You have the vast majority of the chaplains corps and laity, meaning anybody else who is not a chaplain, who now view the military as a missionary field. And their goal is to see a spiritually transformed military with ambassadors of Christ in uniform.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Weinstein says some evangelical Christians have used the authority of their rank to intimidate other service members, telling them that they need to be Christians if they're to succeed professionally in the Air Force.

  Rev. Melinda Morton is a Lutheran minister who was an Air Force officer for 13 years. The last three were spent at the academy.

• REV. MELINDA MORTON:

  I felt that that was a very important place to be in order to serve people that – for whom I had a great appreciation and felt that they had to fill a need in the military.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  At her invitation, a delegation from the Yale Divinity School spent a week at the academy with cadets and faculty during basic training of freshmen in the summer of 2004. Their job was to assess and report on the climate at the academy.

• REV. MELINDA MORTON:

  One of the matters that had kept coming up over that summer was the Yale team began to comment on what they saw was a particularly overt and strident emphasis on Christian evangelical proselytization of the cadets in the field by chaplains and, frankly, by others in leadership positions.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Specifically, the report said the cadets were encouraged to return to their tents, proselytize fellow cadets and remind them that those not born again will burn in the fires of hell. Morton says her superiors at the academy ignored the Yale report until it surfaced in the press. She says she was then asked to disavow it.

• REV. MELINDA MORTON:

  I was simply being asked to disclaim that as were other chaplains by direct phone calls and other things to present a united front that the matters that we had reported in our document never occurred and that they were false.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  You were asked to lie.

• REV. MELINDA MORTON:

  Yes, I was.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Morton resigned from the Air Force over the issue. Like Weinstein, she thinks evangelicals have targeted the military.

• REV. MELINDA MORTON:

  The evangelical community viewed this as a mission field and promoted this as an opportunity to fulfill your obligation to be a missionizing agent in the world.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Col. Randy Robnett, chief chaplain at the academy arrived after Morton resigned but disagrees with her assessment.

• COL. RANDY ROBNETT:

  I've never seen evangelicals claiming the military is a mission field. We bring our faith with us. And the military is a crosscut of our society and, you know, mostly America is Christian. But I don't see my chaplains, anyway, claiming the military is a mission field. They feel a call to a mission, and that is to come in and care for military families, folks that are deploying, helping folks understand this global war on terrorism, helping them to find their faith, whatever that might be.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  The Pentagon eventually responded to the Yale Divinity School report by issuing interim guidelines for the entire Air Force in August of last year.

  Those guidelines said prayer should not be included in official settings like staff meetings, classes, or sports events, but non-denominational prayers can be included in some ceremonies. Official communication, including e-mail, should avoid the perception of endorsing religion, and authority figures have a greater responsibility to avoid expressing their religious beliefs to subordinates.

  We spoke to a number of cadets of various faiths about how they viewed the religious atmosphere on campus today. Natalie Chounet is a Buddhist.

• NATALIE CHOUNET:

  Personally I saw a change in the attitude at the end of last year, at the end of last academic year. So it's been relatively recent, but I think it's growing and everyone's kind of realizing that everyone has different needs and we have to start accommodating them.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Andrew Galbraith identifies himself as spiritual but doesn't subscribe to any organized religion.

• ANDREW GALBRAITH:

  Personally, if I see somebody who's a great leader, who credits some of their characteristics to their faith, I think that's a great thing. I think it's great that people have faith. Now, there is a very fine line between having your faith be known and imposing it. But what's not imposing to me may be imposing to somebody else. And that's where commanders and officers have to be very careful.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Michael Liebovitz, who is Jewish, says he doesn't have a problem with most non-denominational prayers at military ceremonies.

• MICHAEL LEBOVITZ:

  I think a lot of the prayers that we do are part of our military heritage. There have been times when I felt like that prayer was not all the way appropriate and I have not been afraid to approach a general officer and discuss it with him.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  What reaction did you get?

• MICHAEL LEBOVITZ:

  Very open. In fact, they wanted to discuss it further. It was almost like an interview like we're having right now.

• NATALIE CHOUNET:

  I feel that if I'm in uniform I should only have to pray or have any religious activity voluntarily. If I'm at an official dinner that's mandatory, I don't think I should have to pray or listen to anyone else pray.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Christa Sperling is an agnostic.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  Have you felt pressured to affiliate with any religion?

• CHRISTA SPERLING:

  My Christian friends have talked to me about their religion. But that's part of their religion, and that's something that I need to respect too, that part of their faith is to evangelize to others so I've never felt like if I did not accept their religion that would ever be a problem but of course they're going to talk to me about it just like I talk to them about my reasons for not believing.

• SARAH RIPMA:

  I am an evangelical Christian, and I would say that our faith is to live out what we believe and that doesn't mean to get in everybody's face and say, this is what I believe and you should believe that too, because that's just – that's not how you love people; that's not how you act with people.

• SINGING:

  I'll follow after you every day —

• TOM BEARDEN:

  But some evangelical ministers and a group of 72 congressmen felt the guidelines the Air Force issued last summer were too restrictive. They lobbied the Air Force and the White House to scale them back.

  (GROUP SINGING)

  Ted Haggard heads the National Association of Evangelicals and is the pastor of the 12,000 member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, which is just across the highway from the academy.

• REV. TED HAGGARD:

  I just think it's a mistake to say the law now, the government needs to come in and tell chaplains how to be chaplains and tell cadets how they can talk to one another about religious issues and tell generals or anybody in the chain of command how they should handle their religious speech. If we start to do that with the law, it's going to squelch religious expression completely and potentially eliminate it.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  He says he thinks Air Force leaders should be encouraged to talk about their faith, whatever it may be.

• REV. TED HAGGARD:

  We are woefully amiss if we go down the trail of saying under the banner of freedom of religion it means we're protected from being exposed to anyone else's religion. That's not good. It's not right. It's not good for the world, and it's certainly not good for America. But, instead, people need to be exposed to one another.

  It's good for an Islamic leader to persuade me. And it's good for a Jewish rabbi to try to persuade me and it's good for me to try to persuade a Jewish rabbi, and then we all go out and have a meal together. That's the spice of America.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  But the new leadership team at the academy says it's not acceptable for Air Force officers to do that persuading while on the job.

  Major General Irving Halter is the academy's vice-superintendent.

• MAJ. GEN. IRVING HALTER:

  All we're trying to do is make sure that people have an awareness that when they speak — when I speak this uniform, for instance, I'm a different person than somebody who is maybe in church speaking or in any other public venue speaking. And we are high-profile people and so we have a responsibility to make sure the folks that we're talking to don't somehow or another think that we're trying to push them into a particular faith view.

• TOM BEARDEN:

  In early February, the Air Force revised the religious guidelines, shortening them by about half, and easing the restrictions on public prayer so that chaplains may still pray in the name of Jesus.

  Pastor Haggard was pleased with the changes. Mikey Weinstein, however, says the new rules go exactly in the wrong direction. He plans to pursue his lawsuit.

  Like the first set of guidelines the new directives are said to be interim. The Air Force says there is no timetable for making them permanent.