Chuck Norris, a former Air Force Airman among other notable achievements, recently expressed disappointment at the Air Force’s decision to pull down a US Air Force Academy cadet’s Bible verse. He quotes and then agrees with retired General Jerry Boykin of the FRC, who noted

Once the academy allowed cadets to use these whiteboards for their personal use, censorship of religious commentary is unacceptable…

Norris then listed 10 examples of “prohibition of religious expression” in the military over the past few years, including USAFA’s Operation Christmas Child, Just War theory in ICBM training, the Camp Pendleton Cross, and the live Nativity in Bahrain.

He concluded the list with the perception that it gave him: 

Apparently the military’s urge for neutrality is officially and fundamentally transforming into hostility against faith and religious expression.

Norris then finishes with a stark contrast. Rather than a military leadership that pulls down a Bible verse as “inappropriate,” Norris quotes then-Commander in Chief President Franklin Roosevelt, whose introduction to the Gideon Bible included his admonition for his Soldiers to read it:

I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States…It is a fountain of strength, and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul.

Is Chuck Norris’s perception correct? Is the push for “neutrality” taking the form of “hostility?”

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