Over the weekend, Tom Carpenter’s Forum on the Military Chaplaincy jumped the shark when he said the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty was a “Christian Supremacist Endorser” whose ideology was like ISIS.

Carpenter linked to a pay-per-click article with the grammatically awkward title “10 Ways The Ideology of ISIS And Franklin Graham Is Near-Identical,” written by “progressive” Christian Benjamin Corey.  Carpenter then said [emphasis added]:

Could not much of the same criticisms be made of the Christian Supremacist Endorsers (ie the oxymoron Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty) and some of the chaplains they endorse?

(Hypocritical, don’t you think, that a group claiming to support religious expression calls another group “oxymoronic” for supporting religious expression?)

Here are a couple of highlights from the article Carpenter recommended [emphasis added]:

They both want to keep Muslims out of America…
They are both willing to use violence to destroy the other…

For someone to say US military chaplains want to discriminate against Muslims and commit violence is repugnant, even for Tom Carpenter. As noted, this is coming from a group that claims to advocate for “compassion [and] respect for others.” Not a whole lot of compassion or respect for CALL and their Christian chaplains, is there, Tom?

More to the point, the article to which Carpenter linked is internet click-tripe. Nearly half of Corey’s top 10 list is so generic anyone is “near-identical” with ISIS (including Carpenter and his Forum on the Military Chaplaincy):

They both do outrageous things on social media…
They both want culture to reflect their own personal views on gender and gender roles…
They are both desperate to recruit like-minded people to their cause…
They both want to spread their ideology across the globe…

Corey’s article has the intellectual depth of Sesame Street.

How Carpenter managed to go from “loving his neighbor” to claiming military chaplains have “near-identical” ideology with ISIS is anyone’s guess, but heartfelt intolerance and prejudice toward Christians who do not share his worldview may be one viable explanation.

It would seem Tom Carpenter and the Forum on the Military Chaplaincy are a bit more agenda-focused than he would publicly let on. In that regard, Carpenter shares characteristics with Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, who publicly claims he’s fighting a principled cause, when his true vendetta is a self-declared “war” on Christians.

Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy for Carpenter, though, is the fact his intolerance is directed toward those he believes are intolerant. He is expressing the very characteristic he projects onto and then criticizes in others.

When a non-profit group’s support for “religious liberty” translates into comparing those he doesn’t like to ISIS, any legitimacy they may have previously been able to claim evaporates.

ADVERTISEMENT