Off We Go, Into the Christian Yonder

Conservatives have been arguing for years that the religious right is simply misunderstood. These vilified godly folks don't want to impose their beliefs on anybody else, we're told. They simply want to defend their traditional beliefs and practices against the aggressive impositions of a secular culture. Therefore any suggestion to the contrary is liberal hysteria or, worse, discrimination against "people of faith."

So how do conservatives explain what's been going on at the Air Force Academy?

As a number of newspapers have documented, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., has essentially established evangelical Christianity as its official religion.

The examples are legion. Last season, the football coach hung a banner in the locker room laying out a "Competitor's Creed," including the lines "I am a Christian first and last" and "I am a member of Team Jesus Christ."

And here are other examples among those noted in an April report by the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State: Campus chaplains have encouraged proselytizing among the students, and younger cadets who skipped out on prayer services have been forced by their seniors to march back to their dorms in a ritual called "heathen flight." On one occasion, every seat in the dining hall was covered with a flier advertising a showing of "The Passion of the Christ," including the tagline, "This is an officially sponsored USAFA event."

These are just a few examples among many. Non-evangelicals have described an atmosphere of pervasive religious pressure. A top academy chaplain was discharged for speaking out against this state of affairs.

So, again, what do the conservatives have to say about this? Not very much. I searched three major conservative publications -- the Washington Times, National Review and the Weekly Standard. I found only one article referring to the Air Force scandal: a Web-only column by conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt in the Standard decrying the Air Force's promised internal investigation as an unnecessary inquisition and devoting one sentence to summarizing the charges.

And no wonder the conservative press, normally obsessed with the role of religion in public life, would have so little to say about this scandal. It undercuts its long-standing effort to portray the religious right as merely defending itself. A notable subset of this effort consists of pleas by politically conservative Jews to their moderate and liberal brethren to stop worrying about the religious right. "All right, enough, already. The Christians aren't coming to get you," writes National Review's Jonah Goldberg in a typical salvo.