Here's a pretty good synopsis of evangelism and the military

[unhappycamper]

Chief of chaplains speaks out
By Patrick Winn - Special to the Times
Posted : Friday Aug 8, 2008 5:55:32 EDT

Deciphering the dos and don’ts of discussing religion within the Air Force is not a job for the meek. Some mobilized evangelicals see airmen as de facto missionaries. Lawsuit-filing watchdogs continue to claim Christianity is often force-fed to subordinates. Even chaplains, the military’s in-house arbiters of faith, don’t always agree on when evangelism is permissible.

Now it’s Maj. Gen. Cecil Richardson’s job to continue sorting out God’s role in the service.

Appointed in May as the service’s chief of chaplains, Richardson began his Air Force career in 1966, interpreting Cold War-era Russian intercepts. He’s a Protestant pastor who borrows his spirited preaching style from black clergymen, he said. And even as deputy chief of chaplains, a position he held for four years before assuming the top slot, Richardson found himself sucked into the sharp debate over evangelism’s boundaries.

In recent years, accusations of evangelical line-crossing have piled up. In 2005, Fisher DeBerry, then the Air Force Academy’s football coach, was ordered to remove a “Team Jesus Christ” banner from the locker room. Senior officers who were filmed in uniform at the Pentagon for a Christian promotional video were reprimanded. Then in February, again at the academy, three professed ex-terrorists and reformed Christians were accused of putting a “Jesus saves” message in a presentation to cadets.

Richardson, quoted three years ago in The New York Times as saying chaplains “reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched,” was cited in a lawsuit against the Air Force that claimed there was widespread proselytizing at the academy. The suit was brought by Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force attorney and longtime critic of alleged coercive Christianity within the military. (As a result of the suit, a private chaplain association’s code of ethics retaining the “right to evangelize those who are not affiliated” is no longer passed out at Air Force Chaplain’s School.)


Rest of article at: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/08/airforce_chaplain_080708/