As Pentagon officials appointed a rabbi to a new post overseeing the Air Force's religious environment, members of Congress and religious leaders disagreed over the extent of religious problems that have created a stir at the branch's academy in Colorado.
On June 27, the Pentagon announced that Acting Secretary of the Air Force Michael Dominguez had appointed a rabbi and former chaplain to a new post as the force's chief of staff for “values and vision.” Arnold Resnicoff retired as one of the top officials in the Navy's chaplain corps and has also worked as an ecumenical officer with the American Jewish Committee.
Dominguez's action came less than a week after a special task force released a report acknowledging some problems with the religious environment at the academy's Colorado Springs, Colo., campus. The 16-member team visited the school and interviewed hundreds of cadets, faculty and administrators. The team was appointed by Dominguez and led by Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for personnel matters.
“[The Air Force Academy] is aggressively addressing a subject that continues to be widely debated in the public arena,” the report, released June 22, read. “The root of this problem is not overt religious discrimination, but a failure to fully accommodate all [academy community] members' needs and a lack of awareness over where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expression of beliefs.”
It concluded: “The Air Force's core values, founded on respect, provide the guide to ensuring all religious activities at USAFA reflect adherence to the First Amendment prohibition against denying the free exercise of religion or establishing a religion.”
Dominguez appointed the study committee in May, shortly after allegations surfaced regarding the treatment of religious minorities at the school. A Washington-based watchdog group, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, catalogued the allegations in an April 28 letter to Pentagon officials. It complained that there was a pervasive and systematic bias in favor of evangelical Christians at the government-run school.
The letter detailed incidents in which administrators, faculty and upper-class cadets at the academy promoted evangelical forms of Christianity. It also alleged incidents in which cadets of minority faiths were harassed or humiliated.
The Air Force task force's report largely exonerated academy officials of fostering such an atmosphere and laid much of the blame for perceived religious intolerance on young, inexperienced cadets. Nonetheless, controversy over its conclusions was evident at a congressional hearing on the subject June 28.
Brady and two others who studied the situation testified before a subpanel of the House Armed Services Committee. The hearing-unusually packed with members of Congress, the press and the public-revealed sharp debates over the nature and extent of the academy's problems.
“This is hard stuff,” Brady said, regarding how to educate the academy's leaders as to which sorts of religious expressions are constitutionally permissible and which aren't. “That said, we have to provide better guidance [to faculty, administrators and cadets], and we can't just shy away from it because it's hard.”
But Kristen Leslie, a Yale Divinity School professor who worked with and studied the academy's chaplains in 2004, suggested the problems were broader than Brady's report implied. “What we saw was not consistent with good order and discipline,” she told the committee. “We were left with the impression that, in that environment, these 18-22 year olds were left to negotiate” the line between church and state for themselves.
Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) criticized Brady for his use of the term “political correctness” to describe the way the school's chaplains were taught to handle religious diversity. “In our context, ‘political correctness' has become a pejorative,” he said. While noting that he doubted Brady meant the term in a dismissive way, it nonetheless made him uncomfortable-as did the entire discussion about religion on a congressional panel that usually discusses matters of war, life and death.
“If we feel as uncomfortably as we do,” he said, “what must it be like to be a cadet [at the academy]?”
Associated Baptist Press