A Peek at the Military’s Budget for Eternal Salvation

Posted on Aug 22, 2011

Flickr / euripedies

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is running an investigation into how much money the U.S. Department of Defense spends pressuring military staff and families to embrace Christianity, and it is finding violations of the Constitution and rules governing federal contractors.

Such misbehavior includes spending on concerts, performances and retreats organized by evangelical groups like the Military Community Youth Ministries, which targets “unchurched” military children for conversion. The group aims to “celebrate life with military teens, introduce them to the life-giver, Jesus Christ, and help them become more like him.” It received $12,346,333 from the Department of Defense over the last decade. —ARK

Talk to Action:

When the average American thinks of military spending on religion, they probably think only of the money spent on chaplains and chapels. And, yes, the Department of Defense (DoD) does spend a hell of a lot of money on these basic religious accommodations to provide our troops with the opportunity to exercise their religion while serving our country. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the DoD’s funding of religion. Also paid for with taxpayer dollars are a plethora of events, programs, and schemes that violate not only the Constitution, but, in many cases, the regulations on federal government contractors, specifically the regulation prohibiting federal government contractors receiving over $10,000 in contracts a year from discriminating based on religion in their hiring practices.

... Although it was clear from the start of MRFF’s [Military Religious Freedom Foundation] investigation that determining the total dollar figure for the DoD’s rampant promotion of religion (which is always evangelical and/or fundamentalist Christianity) would be next to impossible, as this would require FOIA requests to every one of over 700 military installations to find out how much each is spending out of various funds at the installation level, one thing we could look at was DoD contracts, so that’s where we started. What we’ve found so far is astounding.

Read more

More Below the Ad

New and Improved Comments

We are launching a major overhaul of our comments section.

In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread.

Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts.

Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with.

Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page.