New report recommends turning the Armed Forces into a secular theocracy

National Post, 30 April 2022

The panel’s chaplaincy recommendations are a total assault not only on religious liberty, but the very idea of religion itself

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) may go to war — not in Ukraine, but against its own members who don’t conform to a new standard of theological intolerance.

This week, the minister of national defence released the report of the Minister’s Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination. The panel, set up in December 2020 by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was given the “clear mandate to seek out the policies, processes and practices that enable systemic racism and discrimination in the Department of National Defence (DND) and CAF.”

The terms of reference made it clear what the panel was to find: “All forms of systemic racism and discrimination, including anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, LGBTQ2+ prejudice, gender bias, right-wing extremism and white supremacy are exhibited within the CAF.” (It’s noteworthy that “right-wing extremism” was slipped in there. This government has a rather expansive view of what constitutes right-wing extremism; some days it is anyone who disagrees with the prime minister.)

The report is admirably brief for government work, a brisk 100 pages, but no less ambitious on that account. Unusually for a government body, the advisory panel began its weekly meetings with a prayer. Members turned toward “our Grandfathers the thunder beings, our Grandmother Moon and our Creator, however imagined.”

It turns out that the panel has a rather limited view of how the CAF should permit its members to imagine the Creator. Indeed, the panel advocates firing all Muslim and Orthodox Jewish chaplains, as well Catholic priests and many Protestant pastors. They will all fall afoul of the new theological orthodoxy.

The panel concedes that many CAF members find in religion “a source of solace, optimism and compassion,” and can turn to their “unit chaplain … for effective support in ethical guidance or spirituality through the new Total Health and Wellness Strategic Framework.” Bureaucratese like that makes it clear that this won’t end well.

So does the panel’s ominous warning that, “Some chaplains represent or are affiliated with organized religions whose beliefs are not synonymous with those of a diverse and inclusive workplace.”

As an example, the report notes that “some churches’ exclusion of women from their priesthoods violates principles of equality and social justice, as do sexist notions embedded in their religious dogmas. In addition, certain faiths have strict tenets requiring conversion of those they deem to be ‘pagan,’ or who belong to polytheistic religions. These faiths’ dogmas and practices conflict with the commitment of the Defence Team to value equality and inclusivity at every level of the workplace.”

Thus all those chaplains must go, for the CAF “cannot justify hiring representatives of organizations who marginalize certain people or categorically refuse them a position of leadership.”

The advisory panel’s view is that if a soldier who’s been wounded in battle, or even dying, calls for a chaplain, the CAF should not provide one unless it approves of the theological beliefs being offered. What the panel does not make clear is why the soldiers themselves are entitled to hold unacceptable religious views. Perhaps they aren’t — or won’t be.

The panel denounces religions that propose monotheism rather than polytheism. That follows logically if you believe that there is a true God; other gods are by definition false. Does the panel take offence at Joshua, who challenged ancient Israel to declare itself, saying, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”? Joshua was fearsome in battle, but would have no place in the CAF.

The panel is advocating a crippling relativism here, in which a chaplain is not permitted to believe that his own religion is true.

The panel recommends, in effect, that the CAF hold the theological view that there is no difference between believing in the Triune God of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and professing belief in the divinities of the Roman pantheon, and that all its chaplains should hold this view.

Should a Jewish chaplain consider that belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is — what’s the word? — true, and that faith in Jupiter is false, then he would be sent packing by the CAF. On the other hand, if you could find a Muslim chaplain who holds that Allah and Apollo are equally valid divinities, then he could be retained. But you won’t find him, because anyone who believes that is no longer a Muslim.

But what if a “Muslim” who believes that there are other gods besides Allah could be found? Even that would not satisfy the extremist relativism of the panel.

Continue reading at the National Post.