An amended federal lawsuit filed last week against the Department of Defense charges that the U.S. Army’s suicide prevention manual and associated PowerPoint presentation inappropriately promotes religion, specifically Christianity, as a way to deter distraught soldiers from taking their own lives.
The “Suicide Awareness for Soldiers 2008” presentation includes a number of slides that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), co-plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, deems a violation of the Constitution’s 1st amendment, which specifies that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
One slide says, “Soldiers need to take care of each other and rid any thoughts of survival of the fittest. Almost all religions adhere to some form of Christianity’s Golden Rule, or the Categorical Imperative of Immanuel Kant.” This slide includes an image of a group of silhouetted soldiers with one soldier up in the clouds looking at a large cross. In a similar 2007 presentation, the same image was used without the cross.
Another slide instructs chaplains and behavioral health providers to “emphasize the importance of spiritual health, connectivity with a faith community, and a relationship with God.”
In one of the final slides, the presenter is instructed to teach the audience the phrase “that you persevere, that you stay alive” and encourage them to repeat the phrase as a motto when in difficult times. The notes go on to explain that “this is derived from the Greek word ‘Hupomeno’ which is used in Christian scriptures, particularly in the Pauline epistles. It is also used by James, the bishop of Jerusalem, as Jerusalem was in devastation and about to be destroyed. He wanted all Christians, despite the persecutions and violent times, to not lose hope, to keep on enduring.”
Advocacy groups say this is just the latest in a long string of religious freedom abuses by the U.S. military. The original MRFF complaint accused the Army of subjecting soldiers to fundamentalist Christian prayer ceremonies against their will during mandatory military events. It also includes examples of the Pentagon’s involvement in the production of “Travel the Road,” a Trinity Broadcasting Network program that features missionaries embedded with an Army unit in Afghanistan trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, and in “God’s Soldier,” a Military Channel program that featured an Army chaplain openly promoting fundamentalist Christianity to active-duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
Defense Department spokesperson Eileen Lainez told the Associated Press that the agency does not comment on pending lawsuits. But she did say that it has identified fewer than 50 complaints about alleged violations of religious freedoms during the past three years among the 1.4 million personnel in uniform.
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