www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Proselytizing, missionary "work," and other bad habits...        0. Proselytizing Definition:        1. To induce someone to convert to one's own religious faith.        2. To convert (a person) from one belief, doctrine, cause, or faith to another.

Evangelical Christianity has gotten a little out of hand here in America. As this page will demonstrate, if a restaurant owner isn't trying to convert me over a cup of coffee, or my own baseball team (the Colorado Rockies) isn't trying to win me over to their brand of Christianity, then Uncle Sam's very own military (the Air Force Academy just an hour south of my house) is pushing its interpretation of the Bible onto subordinates. This is NOT what America is about!

Okay, freedom of speech and expression should never be stopped or discouraged. And, I can understand how excited a person can become over a personal philosophy (everyone knows how much I, myself, "pushed" recycling and composting in the 90s!!). However, isn't it a little bizarre that certain Christian sects are so insecure that they feel it necessary to shout their views at captive recruits, casual passersby, or baseball fans?? I know, this little page isn't going to change anyone's mind. However, with a little luck (and a few thousand page hits) word might get out that a lot of us don't appreciate the religious views of others being forced upon us - especially when we're trying to enjoy a cup of coffee at McDonald's or a hotdog at the baseball park. And, of course, Christian "missionary" work is an intrusion into the lives of others that deserves a page all of its own (unfortunately I don't have time for that, at the moment...)...

- Roger J. Wendell
Golden, Colorado - August 30, 2005

Airline Proselytizing:

On February 9, 2004 CNN.com posted an article, by Tracy Sabo, titled:
Pilot's proselytizing scares passengers

The article described how a pilot, on a February 6th American Airlines flight from Los Angeles
to New York, proselytized to his crew and passangers once the flight was underway. Passenger Jen
Dorsey said, "We were just at the beginning of our flight. The pilot came on to greet everyone and
give his comments for the morning, and he said he'd recently been on a mission trip, and he'd like
all the Christians to please raise their hands."

Passanger Karla Austin confirmed the pilot announced, "If you are a Christian, raise your hand." Austin
said the pilot added, "If you are not, you're crazy."

The article suggests that none of the passangers raised their hands with many becoming worried enough
to start using their cell phones in addition to complaining to the flight crew.

The article reported that the pilot, later in the flight, apologized. Passagner Dorsey said, "He came
on and said, 'I want to apologize for my comments earlier. I think I really threw the flight crew off
a little bit, and they are getting a lot of flack for the things I said. So I want to apologize to my
flight crew."

The CNN article stated an American Airline spokesman, Tim Wagner, said the pilot denies using the word
"crazy." Mr. Wagoner stated, "He told the airline he recently had returned from a mission trip and was
encouraging people to use the four and a half hour flight to speak with passengers about their relationships
with God."

The article ended without identifying the pilot and quoting Spokesman Wagoner as saying the incident will
be "...handled internally according to American Airlines procedure."

Penny Proselytizing:

A penny for your thoughts?

As if having the government printing "official" religious messages on our money isn't enough, some Christians now go to great lengths to deface it with their own messages. I've seen all kinds of scribbled and stamped messages, on my dollars bills, reminding me that "Jesus saves" (thrifty Jesus!), the end is near, or that a certain Bible verse is near-and-dear to someone's heart. We'll, I never thought to photograph any of this religious graffiti until I found this unique little carving of a crucifix in my pocket change one day. I can't even imagine all the trouble a certain Christian went through to carve out a cross, in this penny, but I sure wish he hadn't!!

Public School Proselytizing:

Teacher Accused of Branding Kid With Cross An Ohio Teacher Stands Accused of Teaching Creationism and Burning Student by Russell Goldeman, June 20, 2008, ABC News "The school board of a small central Ohio community voted Friday to fire a teacher accused of preaching his Christian beliefs despite staff complaints and burning the image of a cross on students' arms, according to the Associated Press."

"Mount Vernon Middle School veteran science teacher John Freshwater has denies any wrongdoing, his attorney told the Mount Vernon News."

"Freshwater also displayed the Ten Commandments in his classroom and taught creationism, according to an independent investigation launched after the parents of the student who was allegedly branded filed a lawsuit."

"The suit alleges that he regularly discussed Christianity in his science class, even 'teaching the meaning of Easter and Good Friday,' and kept at least one and sometimes several Bibles in the room."

Fast Food Proselytizing:

(Click on this image for a clearer view of the receipt)

On October 26th, 2003 my friend Stu and his wife Nancy were driving through Longview, Texas when he decided to stop at McDonald's for a cup of coffee. Not only did the coffee cost him an entire dollar (There was an 8 cent "Take out" tax) but the cash register receipt said the following: "Bread of deceit is sweet to man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel. Pro 20:17 May God Bless You." After seeing a copy of the receipt, with my own eyes, I started to wonder if McDonald's cash registers will ever quote Buddha or Mohamed?

Goofy Proselytizing:

This photo (left) has been floating around the Internet for awhile so I thought I'd post it here as a reminder of how goofy religion can get. If there is a God, I doubt he or she hates anything. And I especially doubt that same God has any concerns about a person's sexuality - my guess is God has a lot more important stuff to be worrying about. Of course that's just my guess as who can know the mind of God?

In April 2005 I found myself in San Francisco only to discover even more proselytizers. The guy with the florescent green sign was actually a bit theatrical in that he continuously twirled his sign until he saw me and my camera. Then, of course, he stopped and posed for this momement of fame...

Military Proselytizing: (Oh, the irony in it!) Throughout much of 2003, 2004 and 2005 complaints continued to surface over the treatment of non-Christian cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In June, 2005 the Air Force established a set of guidelines to stop the heavy-handed tactics of the religious-right. Here are exerpts from a Rocky Mountain News article on the subject:

AF: Thou shalt respect diversity
By Dick Foster, Rocky Mountain News
August 30, 2005

"COLORADO SPRINGS - New Air Force guidelines on religious tolerance discourage public prayer in most official settings and caution senior officers and chaplains to respect religious diversity."

"The guidelines, two months in the making, strike at charges that members of minority faiths have been targets of slurs and discrimination by members of the Air Force Academy's evangelical Christian majority."

"Although the academy is at the center of the controversy, the guidelines will be applied across the entire Air Force and probably all service branches, an Air Force official said Monday."

The Air Force grounds its new guidelines in the Constitution, reminding its members of their oath to protect the "free exercise of religion and prohibition against governmental establishment of religion."

"The guidelines caution senior officers to be 'sensitive' that their own personal religious expressions might be seen by subordinates as official endorsements."

They direct chaplains to 'respect the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no belief.'"

"These are not matters of simple personal misunderstanding between individuals. They are, particularly in the hands of leadership, severe constitutional violations that should not be tolerated in the Air Force," said MeLinda Morton, an Air Force chaplain who resigned her commission in June after accusing other academy chaplains of proselytizing cadets."

"Morton called for congressional oversight of religious tolerance efforts at the academy and throughout the service."

"Chaplains and senior officers were the subject of the most serious charges of religious intolerance dating back to at least 2003, say those involved in the controversy."

"Members of a Yale Divinity School team reported witnessing a chaplain exhort new cadets in June 2004 to tell non-believing cadets that those not 'born again will burn in the fires of hell.'"

"Brig. Gen. John Weida, the commandant of cadets, second-highest ranking officer at the academy, encouraged cadets to proselytize, according to a June 2005 Air Force report on the academy's intolerance problem. Weida apologized for his actions in June. His promotion to major general has been postponed by Congress."

"Bruce DeBoskey, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, was hopeful but cautious about the new rules. "The guidelines appear to say the right things, but the question is how will they be implemented," said DeBoskey. ADL and others will closely monitor the implementation."

"'If the same people who have been the source of the problem are going to be implementing the changes without meaningful training, then we have a problem,' he said."

Fire the military chaplains!

In 2007 Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens engaged in a public debate on religion and Hitchens' book, God is not Great at the New York Public Library on May 7th, 2007. A member of the audience advised both that his brother was a successful, sought-after military chaplain and wanted the debaters' opinion on the matter. Christopher Hitchens responded: "I don't think that we should be paying for chaplains. I don't think the U.S. government should be employing any. James Madison coauthor of the Virginia statute on religious freedom and of the first amendment was very adamant on the point and was very clear, it's flat out unconstitutional to pay or employ a chaplain to open the proceedings of congress or to be in the armed forces. We can't have chaplains on our payroll and that's that."

"The Crusade for a Christian Military": Are US Forces Trying to Convert Afghans to Christianity?
Democracy Now - May 6, 2009

"AMY GOODMAN: The former prime minister of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, has called for an investigation into allegations that US soldiers are trying to convert Afghans to Christianity. He said, quote, "This is a complete deviation from what they are supposed to be doing."

"His comments come after a report on Al Jazeera showed footage of soldiers at Bagram Air Base discussing how to distribute Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari. The US military is denying it allows its soldiers to proselytize to Afghans. The military claims the Bibles shown in the video had been confiscated and destroyed and were 'never distributed.' Admiral Mike Mullen told a Pentagon briefing Monday, quote, 'It certainly is, from the United States military's perspective, not our position to ever push any specific kind of religion, period.'"

"The Pentagon has also sharply criticized Al Jazeera for releasing the year-old footage, which was shot by filmmaker and former soldier Brian Hughes. Military spokesperson Colonel Greg Julian said, quote, 'Most of this is taken out of context. This is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism. There is no effort to go out and proselytize to Afghans.'"

"Well, on Tuesday, Al Jazeera released unedited footage of the US soldiers' Bible study in Bagram to counter the Pentagon's allegations. These excerpts from the unedited video show military chaplain, Captain Emmit Furner, leading the discussion on the definition of the US Central Command's General Order Number One that explicitly forbids active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion."

"CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: By all means, do as scripture tells you to do and share the word, but be careful how you do it. Do it professionally; represent the Christian faith in a professional manner. Proselytizing is against the rules. That means going out and just actively seeking out somebody. I'm not going to say a lot about it. Just be careful. Remember to represent the Christian faith in a respectable, professional manner. And there are ways to win people to Christ that are not overbearing or offensive to people. There are ways to do it."

"AMY GOODMAN: The initial report aired by Al Jazeera included footage of Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, calling on soldiers to hunt people for Jesus."

"LT. COL. GARY HENSLEY: 'The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That's what we do. That's our business.'"

"JEFF SHARLET: I think that's anything but the truth. You know, what we see on that videotape is really just the tip of the iceberg. When Mikey Weinstein, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, came to me and said, 'You know, you should be writing about this subject,' I was a little skeptical that it could be as widespread as they said. But in more than a hundred interviews at every rank, I encountered that same kind of thinking. And the same kind of thing that you see there on display with Lieutenant-Colonel Hensley is replicated over and over and over, from private to general. But most frighteningly, it's concentrated in the Officer Corps.'"

"AMY GOODMAN: You write extensively about Hensley. Tell us who he is and the significance of this videotape."

"JEFF SHARLET: Well, Lieutenant-Colonel Hensley, that you see in that videotape, you know, talking about hunting people for Jesus, was at the time the top chaplain, top military chaplain in Afghanistan. And I don't know if you can quite make it out on that videotape, if you look closer at the T-shirt he's wearing, it shows his affiliation with a sort of fundamentalist group called Chapel NeXt. And you can see a sort of a Christian cross inscribed over a map of Afghanistan."

And if you follow that-I mean, the rest of that footage is just as equally disturbing. At one point, speaking of the sort of the apocalyptic times that he believes we're in, he says that, you know, the US soldiers there have a mission basically to, you know, carry out the work of God. And then he declares that we, meaning the US military, 'We are the new Israel,' and repeats this for emphasis, "We are the new Israel.'"

"You know, I would have thought that was-this guy was just a kind of a rogue, a maverick, if I didn't speak to so many other officers with just the same attitude. In the story, I talk about Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Young, who is also in Afghanistan at Kandahar Air Base, and he was quite plain in boasting about a PowerPoint presentation he had given to Afghan warlords explaining that American government was based on Christianity, that our Christian god was what made it great, and Afghanistan had a choice if it wanted to achieve democracy. And of course that choice was going to be for Jesus."

"These people don't even know that they're crossing the line between church and state."

"MIKEY WEINSTEIN: 'A few months ago, a four-star general, a commander in the US military-I won't give his exact name, but commands hundreds of thousands of troops-asked me, 'How bad is it, Mikey?' And I'll tell your viewers today, and I'll show them, exactly what I did. I said, 'General, hold your pen six-and-a-half inches above your desk. Now drop it,' as I've just dropped that pen. I asked him why it dropped. And he said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Why did it drop?' He said, 'Well, gravity.' That is how bad this is. It is that ubiquitous. It is that-it is in the very particulate of the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is our US military. It's everywhere. We're about two inches away, you know, from a fundamentalist Christian America through our US military.'"

"MIKEY WEINSTEIN: 'It's very incontrovertible. What you saw in that, what Al Jazeera released, is nothing new. We've been talking about it forever. But there are hundreds of thousands of translated-into Arabic, Pashto, Dari-biblical tracks, Bibles, coins. There are so many para-church organizations: the Worldwide Military Baptist Missions, the Soldiers Bible Ministry, the Campus Crusades Military Ministry. You can't count them all. This is how bad it is. And, you know, docile and supine America needs to wake up, because what we're doing, we look exactly like the Crusaders of 1096 to the Iraqis and now the Afghans. And that's all there is to it, Amy.'"

Missionary "Work:"

I'd often thought, ever since I was a pre-teen in the late 60s (when Christian aggressiveness was on the rise), that there couldn't be anything more arrogant than going to another country to force your religious views on others - especially when those others haven't had educational or economic opportunities to raise their standard of living much above the subsistence level. In other words, it's inappropriate to preach and pass Bibles around an impoverished community in an effort to convert somebody, to what much of the world sees as a questionable religion anyway, at a time when there are more important/honest needs to be met! Add to this arrogance the fact that many Christians represent (and support) a system that exploits nature, the land, and indigenous peoples and you have a missionary quest that resembles nothing more than economic conquest! And, if I were the target of Christian missionary practices I would be especially angered about their practice of sending pimply-faced 20 year olds to convince me that their religion was superior to something that may have provided my community spiritual satisfaction for thousands of years - possibly predating the Bible itself! - Roger J. Wendell Golden, Colorado - August 2005

In an article titled; Missionary zeal: To convert or comfort?
(Sunday Denver Post April 10, 2005, p. 5e)
Colorado Voices Columnist Danielle Steinfeld said;

"That beggar [an Indian Hindu with an elephantine leg in Kuala Lumpur] never had the fortune, or misfortune, to see an American missionary. He couldn't have reached a church on his own legs, and no missionary was looking to reel him in to sanctuary. He didn't need to be converted to Christianity to save his soul. He needed something more basic: food to survive, and medical treatment for his disfiguring disease."

His religion already worked fine for him, it preached generosity to the sick, the poor, the starving. That was all he needed - the gererosity of those who had more than he."

The money raised by our Christian missionaries was never meant for him. That money went into saving souls, not saving lives. It was money misspent, just like the Bibles provided to the orphans of the recent tsunami [Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004]."

As I grew up, I began to notice that Christianity doesn't pay much attention to saving lives. It puts membership first. As long as you're a member of a congregation, or ofa mission in a Third World country, you count. But if youhaven't been saved yet, you're still invisibile. You might as well be a beggar with elephantasis.""

Missionaries in Hawai'i:
James A. Michener, from his 1958 classic, Hawaii

"In one sense Abner did profit: he got each of his parishioners properly dressed for the opening of church, and on the Sunday when the sprawling edifice was consecrated, curious processions from miles around marched through the dust in their unaccustomed finery from Captain Janders' store. . . . Had Abner studied the climate for even a moment, he would have built his grass walls only a few feet high, leaving open space between them and the roof so that air could circulate, but churches in New England were built foursquare, and so they were in Hawaii, with no air stirring and the congregation sweltering in the natural heat, plus the radiation of three thousand closely packed bodies."

Doing Good for God
Sam Harris, from his book, Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 33-34

"What about all of the good things people have done in the name of God? It is undeniable that many people of faith make heroic sacrifices to relieve the suffering of other human beings. But is it necessary to believe anything on insufficient evidence in order to behave this way? If compassion were really dependent upon religious dogmatism, how could we explain the work of secular doctors in the most war ravaged regions of the developing world? Many doctors are moved simply to alleviate human suffering, without any thought of God. While there is no doubt that Christian missionaries are also moved by a desire to alleviate suffering, they come to the task encumbered by a dangerous and divisive mythology. Missionaries in the developing world waste a lot of time and money (not to mention the goodwill of non-Christians) proselytizing to the needy; they spread inaccurate information about contraception and sexually transmitted disease, and they withhold accurate information. While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. By contrast, volunteers for secular organizations like Doctors Without Borders do not waste any time telling people about the virgin birth of Jesus. Nor do they tell people in sub-Saharan Africa - where nearly four million people die from AIDS every year - that condom use is sinful. Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. This kind of piety is genocidal. We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?"

Worse than Proselytizing:

"The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soakd publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum - or The Witches' Hammer - indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemd 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women "suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth - a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women." - Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, p. 125

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