Questions Raised Anew About Religion in Military

New York Times, 03-01-09

Terry Bradshaw stared intently into the camera, his eyes moist, as the interviewer asked him if his faith in God had helped him through his bouts with depression.

"Oh, yeah," answered Mr. Bradshaw, the Hall of Fame quarterback. "Well, I'm a Christian for one thing so, yeah, I'd been praying."

The viewers of this video were military personnel who were watching an official military production dealing with depression, suicide and "the importance of faith."

The screening of the suicide-prevention video and other recent incidents are reviving questions that the Pentagon had hoped to put behind it years ago: what the proper role of religion should be in the military and whether a pro-Christian culture permeates the armed forces...Officials said they had made great strides in the last few years, with training for officers and a concerted effort at the inclusion of all faiths.

"I'd be wrong to state that every chaplain does it right 100 percent of the time, but we work very hard at it," said Carleton Birch of the Army's Chief of Chaplains Office. "Chaplains ascribe to pluralism. We represent our own faith while respecting other faith groups."

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Supreme Court Lets Ban on Type of School Prayer Stand

Associated Press, 03-03-09
Coach Marcus Borden used to bow his head and drop to one knee when his football team prayed. But the Supreme Court ended that tradition on Monday when it refused to hear the high school coach's appeal of a school district ban on employees joining a student-led prayer.

The decision on the case from New Jersey could add another restriction on prayer in schools, advocates on both sides said.

"We've become so politically correct in terms of how we deal with religion that it's being pretty severely limited in schools right now, and individuals suffer," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization that focuses on First Amendment and religious freedom issues.

But Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said some parents had complained about Borden leading prayers before the East Brunswick, New Jersey, school district ordered him to stop and banned all staff members from joining in student-led prayer.

"The bottom line is people in positions of authority, like a coach, have to be extremely careful about trying to promote their ideas, or implying that if you don't pray, you may not play," Lynn said.

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Vatican-backed conference snubs creationism

Associated Press, 03-05-09
ROME - A Vatican-backed conference on evolution is under attack from people who weren't invited to participate: those espousing creationism and intelligent design.

The Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, says it was shut out from presenting its views because the meeting was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, a major U.S. nonprofit that has criticized the intelligent design movement.

Intelligent design holds that certain features of life forms are so complex that they can best be explained by an origin from an intelligent higher power, not an undirected process like natural selection.

Organizers of the five-day conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University said Thursday that they barred intelligent design proponents because they wanted an intellectually rigorous conference on science, theology and philosophy to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."

While there are some Darwinian dissenters present, intelligent design didn't fit the bill, they said.
"We think that it's not a scientific perspective, nor a theological or philosophical one," said the Rev. Marc Leclerc, the conference director and a professor of philosophy of nature at the Gregorian.

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Study: Jews Less Likely than Christians to 'Switch' Faith Affiliation

Christian Post, 03-02-09
Jews are less likely to change religious affiliation than Protestant Christians and Catholics, a new study claims.

While Jewish and Christian traditions are both reporting a decline in adherents, most Jews who leave the faith become unaffiliated rather than "switching" to another religious tradition, according to the study released last week by the American Jewish Committee.

Moreover, many who leave Judaism as a religion continue to identify themselves as Jewish for ethnic and cultural reasons.

According to the study, 76 percent of Jews are "stable," or currently professing the same religion that they were raised in. Meanwhile, 14.5 percent are "losses," reporting a different religion now than the Jewish faith they grew up in. And 9 percent of Jews are "gains," or have converted to Judaism from another faith.

For Protestants, there are high levels of switching between denominations, but as a whole Protestants are the most stable at 80.8 percent. But when denominational switching is taken into account, stability ranges from 39.3 percent to 59.8 percent.

The study broke Protestants down into four major denominational families - Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Baptists had the highest level of stability at 59.8 percent, and Presbyterians had the lowest rate among the four at 39.3 percent.

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