When did religion start sneaking into the modern U.S. military?
We think it started in 1972 at the end of the draft. When we had a draft, people were coming into the military fairly evenly from what we now refer to as blue and red states. When the draft ended, we saw a huge demographic shift to mostly red states, where there is this fusing of this massive so-called patriotism with this fundamentalist, evangelical Christian worldview. There’s a difference. We have a number of evangelical Christian clients and supporters. Evangelical Christians want to proselytize, but they do agree and they understand that the Constitution will regulate how they can proselytize, by time, place and manner. Fundamentalists view the Constitution as flawed man’s law. You’ve spent a lot of your own personal money. You have night-vision cameras and attack dogs. Is this really challenging for your family? Yeah. I haven’t told you one thing, and that’s that my wife suffers from multiple sclerosis. Thank God she has the remitting, relapsing type as opposed to progressive. Wh
