Religious Expression or Religious Coercion: Commanders Caught in the Cross-Fire
The USAF is under growing scrutiny to determine if religious expression by commanders and chaplains is coercive. Watchdog groups, like Military Religious Freedom Foundation, are increasingly using media and litigation to challenge religious expression within the military. While the USAF must carefully investigate all cases for legitimacy, the USAF and DOD must avoid over-reacting to the deafening noise of media and litigation pressures while carefully protecting religious expressions as protected by the Free Exercise and Speech clauses. Most importantly, the USAF and DOD must not confuse offense as coercion or undue influence. To create restrictive guidance or policy on the potential of offense does not offset the constitutional freedom of religious expression and speech. Using whether or not one was offended to determine religious coercion is a faulty, woefully deficient proposition and must be avoided. Finally, this paper proposed several recommendations for both the Chaplain Corps and commanders as too much is at stake to ignore these issues. Hopefully, this paper will bring creative dialogue among all those concerned and will result in even better solutions.
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