The Christian Right and the military

Andrew Bacevich in his excellent book The New American Militarism (2005) talks about how the Christian Right has achieved a great deal of influence within the US military over the last 25 years or so. They see the military as a kind of mission field for their fundamentalist version of Christianity.

In the second part of an interview he did with Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com, Bacevich comments on this issue:

I think the evangelizing issue reflects at least three things. Number one, the elite disengagement from the military after Vietnam. The Episcopalians don't sign up any more, or the Presbyterians. Number two, the heightened political engagement of Christian evangelicals who, by the 1960s, had embarked on a crusade to save America from itself. Evangelicals have long seen the U.S. military as allies in that cause. American society may be going to hell in a hand basket with its promiscuity, its pornography, its divorce rates, its abortion, its women's rights, all these things evangelicals lament, but the military's a bastion of traditional virtue. Now, they misperceive soldiers in that regard, but I think that's one reason military service has a special appeal for evangelical Christians.

Third comes the politicization of the military. When I first became an officer, the tradition of being apolitical was still deeply rooted. As one consequence of Vietnam, that went away. The officer corps came to see its interests as lying with the political right. Evangelical Christianity is just part of a larger mix. (my emphasis)

He also has some other thought-provoking things to say in that same piece about US energy dependence, the development of his own perspective since the Vietnam War and America's "shortsighted infatuation with military power" which "revolves around this question of energy and oil".

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