Vandenburg Air Force Base

Air Force's use of Christian messages extends to ROTC

By Jennifer Rizzo , CNN

Washington (CNN) - The Air Force’s use of Christian religious messages goes beyond those used in briefings for missile launch officers, as reported by CNN last week , and extends to training for ROTC cadets.

In a lesson designed to teach the Air Force’s core values to ROTC cadets, Christian beliefs such as the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule are used as examples of ethical values, CNN has learned.

Slides go on to explain what each of them are, for example listing 7 of the Ten Commandments.

An Air Force ROTC instructor came forward with the slides to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group which tries to ensure religious freedom among the troops, after seeing a CNN report last Wednesday on Christian biblical references and saints’ pictures included in ethics briefings for missile launch officers.

“I felt extremely uncomfortable briefing some of these slides, deleted them, and added what I felt were more relevant examples,” the instructor said in an email to Mikey Weinstein, the foundation’s president.

The instructor, who wishes to not be named due to fear of backlash from the military, claims the lesson was provided by the Air Education and Training Command (AETC), the same unit that oversees the training of the missile launch officers.

David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Force's Air Education and Training Command, verified the ROTC ethics briefing and said a comprehensive review is underway "of training materials that address morals, ethics, core values and related character development issues to ensure appropriate and balanced use of all religious and secular source material."

Smith added the teaching of ethical issues must be done "in a religiously neutral way that assures we comply with the Constitution's Establishment Clause."

Last week, the Air Force suspended its ethics briefing for new missile launch officers after concerns were raised about the briefing's heavy focus on religion.

The Air Force says headquarters officials were not aware of the religious component of the ethics course, despite it being taught for nearly two decades by chaplains. The matter came to their attention they said when they received an inquiry by Truthout.

On the Vandenberg Air Force Base Nuclear Ethics & Nuclear War ...

: “With these truths in mind, this most holy synod makes its own the condemnations of total wars already pronounced by recent popes, and issues the following declaration: Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas, along with their population, is a crime against God and man himself.  It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation” (no. 80).

As reported in the news recently, the president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein, has objected to a course, taught by military chaplain Captain Shin Soh at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, on Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear War. He reacts especially to a section of a power point presentation focused on “Christian Just War Theory,”  which he asserts is a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment establishment clause (i.e., it does not comply with the separation of church and state). However, as the well-known just-war ethicist and historian, James Turner Johnson , correctly notes, an objective history of the just-war tradition should contain references to Christian contributions (e.g., by Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) as well as to other sources (e.g., chivalry). The basic mode of reasoning of just war can also be found in other religious traditions (including Islam)–and it is a framework that is accessible to human reason; hence, it undergirds and contributed to the rise of the modern laws of war (e.g., the Hague and Geneva Conventions). Having viewed the power point presentation myself, I agree with Johnson’s criticism rather than Weinstein’s–although it does seem to me that Captain Soh (judging from the power point presentation alone, and not from anything else he perhaps said during classes) offered a one-sided, overly biblical, and selective perspective on just war, one that argues criteria (justice in the conduct of war), namely, proportionality and discrimination. These two criteria are meant to govern the use of force during war by distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants (discrimination) and by refusing to use excessive force (proportionality); each of these taken together should minimize civilian casualties (i.e., collateral damage).