Thanks to Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the U.S. military is no longer promoting Southern Baptist Christianity by way of official military insignia on Bibles. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have all revoked any permission to use their trademarked emblems on the Holman Christian Standard Bibles, which are published by LifeWay Christian Resources’ Holman Bible Publishers, a subsidiary of the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Bible Convention.
Nearly 2,000 military personnel had complained to MRFF that the Holman Military Bibles were being conspicuously placed for sale in military Exchange stores, all around the world. Holman published a special edition for each branch of the Armed Services: the “Soldier’s Bible”, “Sailor’s Bible,” “Airman’s Bible,” and “Marine’s Bible”. These Bibles even have “quotations, prayers, and inspiration” from Presidents and other historical figures from the different branches of service. As an anonymous U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate said in a letter to MRFF, these Bibles were “a big step towards establishing the Holman Christian Standard Bible as the official religious text of the military services of the United States.”
If it bothers you that this ever happened in the first place, you will be horrified by things like the “Left Behind” video games that an evangelical organization gave to soldiers, in which the “Soldiers for Christ” have to convert everyone who isn’t Christian.
Christian fundamentalists have been heavily pushing their agenda in the military for quite awhile now. As if that weren’t bad enough for the personnel who aren’t Christian, this also threatens even more to turn the “War on Terror” into a real religious war; Christian vs. Muslim.
The world has seen these wars before. Nobody won. Many thousands of people died, in a world whose population was many times smaller than it is now. Religious war now would cause millions — or more likely all of the billions — of casualties.
The removal of these Bibles is an important step in wrenching our government out of the claws of over-zealous religion, but there still remain problems like the US Joint Forces Staff College “preaching” to officers about how very bad the Muslim religion is …
Check out the MRFF’s good work here.
