Soldiers sent on evangelistic Christian religious retreat vacations w/government funds

Baseball, Jesus, and Alaska's Military Bases
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/9/235113/0696

I should back up here and explain exactly what Strong Bonds, a program currently being investigated by MRFF, actually is. Plain and simple, it's an evangelistic Christian program operating under the guise of a pre-deployment and post-deployment family wellness and marriage training program. A few years ago, Strong Bonds replaced a decade old, proven program called Building Strong and Ready Families (BSRF), which was a collaboration between the Army Nurse Corps and the chaplains. Strong Bonds cut out the Nurse Corps, creating a program run entirely by chaplains, eliminating the important physical and mental health aspects provided by public health nurses, and turning the whole thing into a program of Christian religious retreats -- paid for with your tax dollars. A lot of tax dollars.

It began with the Department of Defense (DoD) paying an advertising agency $100,000 to "sell" the Strong Bonds program to Congress. The result of the DoD's ad campaign was an unprecedented amount of funding, now being spent liberally on religious retreats, typically held at ski lodges, beach resorts, and other attractive vacation spots, luring soldiers who would never attend a religious retreat to sign up for the free vacation. MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein sums up this form of coercion with the following analogy:

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MRFF has already amassed quite a collection of DoD contracts for Strong Bonds retreats, which include funding for travel and accommodations, training materials, outside trainers, child care, and, of course, Christian entertainers. That one Unlimited Potential baseball ministry thing at Fort Wainwright, for example, cost taxpayers $38,269. And, this same ministry has been "Serving Christ Through Baseball" at number of other Army bases in the United States, including Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, and Fort Drum, as well as many bases overseas, presumably at a similar cost per event.

But, of even greater concern than the clear constitutional violation of the spending of tax dollars on this scheme to promote Christianity, qualified health professionals like the Army Nurse Corps are being edged out of programs dealing with issues like PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide prevention in favor of a religious approach. And, Strong Bonds isn't the only place this is happening. MRFF has uncovered that suicide prevention in the military now often includes materials such as the teachings of Rick Warren and, completely unbelievably, the teaching of creationism.

That we know as much as we do about Blackwater USA is in part due to the first-rate reporting of several journalists, including The Nation magazine's investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill. In his bestselling book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" (Nation Books, 2007), Scahill describes the company as "a sort of Praetorian Guard for the Bush Administration's `global war on terror.'"

{prince}

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In addition to Prince, "A number of Blackwater executives are deeply conservative Christians, including corruption-smeared former Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, who is also a member of the Sovereign Order of Malta, which Scahill describes as `a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century `territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the Moslems,'" Chris Barsanti wote in a review of the book for In These Times.

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The two families {prince & DeVos} exercized enormous political influence both inside and outside Michigan. "They were one of the greatest bankrollers of far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of prominence," Scahill writes.