Are Military Chaplains Illegal?

A lawsuit now in court could wreck a long-held tradition.

Before there was a First Amendment, there were chaplains in the U.S. Army, ministering by popular demand among militia from their own hometowns during the Revolution. They were paid $20 a month by the fledgling government, and their status went unchallenged even after the Constitution was amended to prohibit state establishment of religion.

Today, there are 3,347 ordained men and women in uniform, earning salaries equivalent to other officers. A case pending in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, however, could leave the chaplains wholly dependent on their churches for financial support and strip them of their officer rank.

The case is a taxpayer’s suit brought by Joel Katcoff and Allen M. Wieder, who began the project in 1979 as Harvard Law School students. They targeted the U.S. Army, the largest of the armed forces with 782,000 active-duty soldiers. They allege that the government “by design and appearance, lends its prestige, influence, and power to organized religion.”

At issue is a direct conflict between the Constitution’s guaranteed free exercise of religion and the prohibition against state support of religion. In the military, the absence of pastoral counseling, worship, fellowship, or Bible study—all functions of the chaplain corps—would deprive GIs of opportunities to practice religion. But Katcoff and Wieder counter that those needs should be met privately by churches or mission-sending groups, and that tax dollars should not line clerical pockets.

Churches clearly have the most at stake financially, because each chaplain is estimated to cost the government more than $100,000 per year for salary, programs, and administrative costs. The comparison is inadequate, though, because churches simply could not provide a similar ministry, especially at remote outposts, where security clearance is needed, or in combat.

Political scientist Paul J. Weber of the University of Louisville believes it is “almost certain that the chaplaincy will be found to be constitutional.” Even if it can be proven that government support for religion exists, the importance of free exercise would outweigh it in this case, Weber says. But he thinks the army may be vulnerable on other fine points of law itemized in the suit, including entanglement with religious groups and restrictions against some groups placing chaplains.

Even though the army is likely to win in a pretrial settlement, the suit is being taken seriously because it is the first to confront the chaplaincy head-on. Previous court challenges have been dismissed because the plaintiffs were found to lack standing as a properly aggrieved party. The army’s motion to dismiss on these grounds was denied when district court Judge Jacob Mishler found Katcoff and Wieder were legitimate taxpayers. He also said the suit contains charges, which, “if proven, might well establish that the chaplaincy program is so overly broad in scope as to constitute a governmentally sponsored program of religious proselytism.”

The suit comes in the midst of stepped-up efforts to attract new chaplains. The need for Roman Catholic priests is as acute in the military as in other areas of ministry. The navy is attempting to place 40 new chaplains each year because of legislation that will force many older chaplains to retire.

In each branch—army, navy (including marine corps), and air force—Protestant chaplains comprise more than 70 percent of the corps, with Roman Catholics at about 25 percent, Jewish rabbis at 1 percent, and a handful of Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, and others.

The attraction the corps holds for seminary students is a combination youth ministry and interfaith experience removed from many of the denominational tensions pastors face. Navy Commander George E. Dobes, a Catholic priest, served as chaplain aboard an aircraft carrier with 5,000 crew members. Working with 18-to 23-year-old sailors fresh from boot camp, Dobes discovered they “didn’t know why they were there or what they were doing. They didn’t particularly like the close quarters or being away from home, so they would come to us and say, ‘Get me out of the navy.’ ”

Along with motivational counseling, Dobes conducted liturgical and nonliturgical Protestant services as well as Catholic Mass daily and provided for the needs of Mormons and Jewish sailors through lay volunteers. Chaplains also take charge of emergency communications, run the library, and pay regular calls to sick bay and the correctional unit. They are considered staff assistants to the chief commanding officer, who frequently seeks advice about troop “morale and morals.” But Dobes said “the biggest thing we tried to have was a ministry of presence, just being there, making sure we were seen and involved on the ship.”

The chaplain corps is well suited for women. LuAnn Johnson, recently ordained by First Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis, begins her stint as a chaplain at the naval hospital in Oakland, California. “I feel I’ve been called to serve in the professional ministry,” she says. “I have no option except this within my denomination.” The navy has 20 female chaplains, the army 13, and the air force 12.

Becoming a chaplain requires ordination in a recognized church and 90 semester hours of graduate theology training. Required also is official endorsement by a faith group that has formal ecclesiastical authority, a verifiable number of adherents, a structured way of preparing and designating ministers, the ability to supervise chaplains, and will not proselytize through its chaplains.

These strict criteria prevent some groups from providing chaplains, and Katcoff and Wieder charge in their suit that this inhibits free exercise of religion. They also charge that army worship services tilt heavily in favor of nonliturgical Protestant modes of expression. Armed forces spokesmen counter by saying it is just a matter of supply and demand.

Ironically, if Katcoff and Wieder put a stop to salaried chaplains, more flagrant discrimination could result. Privately funded chaplains would overwhelmingly represent larger, wealthier church groups. The military’s restrictions on who can be a chaplain serve to keep cults out and mean more highly qualified chaplain candidates.

A chaplain lives with inevitable tension over where his ultimate allegiance lies: his church or his military superiors. Louisville professor Weber believes the armed forces are most vulnerable to constitutional challenges on this point.

Recent confrontations between the nation’s Catholic bishops and Reagan Administration military strategists over nuclear policy illustrate the problem. Several bishops believe their pastoral letter advocating nuclear disarmament must spell out more clearly what the church merely suggests and what it mandates for its followers, including chaplains.

Most military chaplains are Protestant, and the Protestant theology that predominates in the corps is getting more conservative. That makes the chaplaincy attractive for evangelicals, who populate the corps to a greater degree than ever, according to Floyd Robertson, executive secretary for the National Assocation of Evangelicals’ commission on chaplains, NAE endorses about 30 chaplains each year from member churches. For evangelicals in more liberal mainline churches, the chaplaincy is a natural choice, Robertson said, because “it is one place you can have a ministry consistent with what you feel the Lord wants you to do.”

Armed forces chaplains probably will never be free from court challenges and conflicts brought on by their dual performance for God and country, yet their retention rate is the highest among officers in the service, with more than 90 percent returning for multiple tours of duty. They do not view it as a compromise of either faith or patriotism, but an opportunity to integrate and interpret both aspects of life to people in uniform.

BETH SPRING

Frank Gaebelein Dies At 83

With the death of educator, author, and editor Frank Gaebelein, “a tall tower of evangelical talent has fallen,” according to theologian Carl F. H. Henry. Gaebelein, 83, a resident of Arlington, Virginia, died January 19 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Doctors say he never fully recuperated from the double bypass surgery he had in November.

Gaebelein was a popular lecturer, a talented musician, an accomplished Bible expositor, and an avid mountaineer. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, for years a close friend of Gaebelein’s, described him as “a true Renaissance man.”

Gaebelein was known primarily as an educator. In 1921, at age 22, he became the founding headmaster at the Stony Brook School, a Christian college preparatory school in Long Island, which has become a prototype. He held the post for 41 years and considered his work there his most important accomplishment. According to Koop, Gaebelein “set a standard for Christian secondary education that led to a school that takes off its hat to no one.”

Gaebelein received a bachelor’s degree from New York University and a master’s from Harvard. He was ordained by the Reformed Episcopal Church. His most significant literary contribution was Christian Education in a Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1951). In this book, Gaebelein argued for the legitimacy of private education—especially Christian education—and he outlined a method. But those close to him say his favorite work was The Pattern of God’s Truth, a series of lectures published by Oxford University Press in 1954. In this work, Gaebelein sought to integrate faith and learning, and produced what is widely considered a seminal work in the philosophy of Christian education.

Gaebelein served as an editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, as style editor for the New International Version Bible, and as general editor of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, a position he held at the time of his death. Says Carl Henry, “He was a gifted writer, a skillful craftsman and a highly competent editor whose literary gifts enriched the evangelical movement at many levels.”

In all, Gaebelein wrote 14 books, including a mystery novel. For a long time, his family, friends, and professional associates urged him to write a book on the Christian and aesthetics. Some considered it sadly ironic that he never wrote the book, because it was perhaps his favorite lecture topic.

As a trained concert pianist, Gaebelein often supplemented his lectures on aesthetics with piano performances of classical music. He passionately encouraged excellence in thinking and was a stalwart opponent of anti-intellectual leanings within Christianity. He argued for the legitimacy of artistic expression, and he found spiritual significance even in mountain climbing, one of his favorite pastimes. It was with Gaebelein that the phrase “all truth is God’s truth” originated. D. Bruce Lockerbie, who will write Gaebelein’s biography, calls him the “model of a modern Christian humanist,” a term Gaebelein championed in spite of widespread opposition to the concept.

Gaebelein’s son, Donn, who succeeded his father as headmaster at Stony Brook for 13 years, says, “There was a side to my father few people saw. That was his tremendous outreach to the have-nots of this world.” Gaebelein served on the board of Bread for the World and was one of the founding board members of Evangelicals for Social Action.

He was the target of criticism when in 1965, as coeditor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, he was sent to Selma, Alabama, to cover the civil rights march to Montgomery. Gaebelein left the area reserved for journalists and joined the marchers. In a 1979 CT interview commemorating his eightieth birthday, Gaebelein said, “I felt so keenly the rightness of the march.… This was simply an expression of personal feeling and I do not regret it.”

In addition to the many public hats he wore, Gaebelein was a private counselor. Several notables from Capitol Hill, including Sen. Mark Hatfield, often sought Gaebelein’s insight. According to CT advisory editor Kenneth Kantzer, Gaebelein had “a broad understanding of the religious picture and of evangelicalism in the United States. His breadth of understanding led people to trust his wisdom about many things.”

Gaebelein once was asked what counsel he wished to pass on to the next generation of Christians. He replied, “Maintain at all costs a daily time of Scripture reading and prayer. As I look back, I see that the most formative influence in my life and thought has been my daily contact with Scripture over 60 years.”

Oral Roberts Reports A 7-Hour Talk With Jesus, Asks For Money

Two years ago, well-known television evangelist and faith healer Oral Roberts claimed he saw a vision of a 900-foot-high Jesus standing over his City of Faith medical center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An appeal letter based on this vision resulted in substantial donations to his 60-story diagnostic clinic and 30-story hospital, both completed in 1981. Also part of this City of Faith, which is associated with Oral Roberts University, was a 20-story research tower not yet in use.

In a recent fund-raising letter sent to thousands of his followers, Oral Roberts claims that God has chosen him to find a cure for cancer, using the research tower, which “lies gleaming on the outside but unfinished on the inside.” He further asks each recipient of the letter to send him $240.

The appeal letter runs a full 14 pages and is titled, “It’s Later than You Think” and “When Are You and Your Partners Going to Obey Me?” Roberts claims to have heard the Lord explicitly tell him this during a conversation with Jesus that he says lasted seven hours and which he describes as, “still continuing.” Jesus allegedly told Roberts, “I would not have had you and your partners build the 20-story research tower unless I was going to give you a plan that will attack cancer in both a physical and spiritual way that is different than other cancer research programs in the world today. I did not have you build this tower debt-free just to have it stand empty.”

Roberts writes that God told him in 1947 that he would feel divine presence in his “right hand,” and that he would be able “to pick up the presence of satanic power tormenting people.” The letter also says that God asked him, “Have you forgotten that I called you to be the John the Baptist of your time in the healing ministry?” Roberts states that he is “not a medical researcher,” but possesses “divine insight” as to the satanic nature of disease.

Cancer and other diseases are described by Roberts as a “satanic attack,” in which “Satan is trying to take control of the cells and cause them to multiply out of their divinely placed order.” He adds, “Cancer itself is the work of the devil, specifically Beelzebub, which means ‘god of the flies,’ or corruption.”

To bring about “the full forces of God’s gifts of the Holy Spirit alongside medical science,” Roberts quotes Jesus as giving him the following instructions “in that calm voice I have heard so many times before” during their conversation:

“Ask each friend and partner for $240 to be given now or to send $20 a month for the next 12 months. Do this until the full $240 is planted. Do as I tell you. Obey me.”

“Tell them that this is the Lord speaking through you, Oral Roberts, to them. When are you going to obey me? When?”

To those who respond and give $240, Roberts quotes the Lord as saying, “I will show them spectacular things of my miracle power.” Roberts then lists 14 “increases,” including improved health, peace, joy, energy, longer life, more money, and additional gifts of the Holy Spirit. At the bottom of this list, Roberts states, “I already know which five of these increases are for me and my family as we obey.”

In addition, Roberts will send donors a series of “at least” 48 tapes, containing his personal commentary on the entire New Testament. He has made further appeals concerning the research center on his regular television broadcasts.

Roberts and James Winslow, head of the medical complex, were unavailable for comment. City of Faith public relations staff declined to make any statements.

LLOYD BILLINGSLEY

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