The US military is increasingly sensitive to associations with events that might be perceived as religious.\u00a0 While it strives to protect the free exercise rights of its members, it is also cognizant of criticisms of inappropriate interactions between a government institution and religion.<\/p>\n
Few times is this more evident than near the end of the year, when the military struggles to support the religious celebrations of its members of varying religions.\u00a0 In general, there is little chance of offense between the varying religions that share holy days during this season.\u00a0 The greater possibility, in fact, is that critics of religion will be offended by the military’s support of military members’ religious celebrations.<\/p>\n
The military’s\u00a0handling of these events\u00a0is not uniform, and there are no official policies on the support of public religious celebrations by military members.\u00a0 This has led to some interesting contrasts.<\/p>\n
For example, military bases traditionally have displays during the “holiday” season, not unlike the White House’s National Christmas tree<\/a> and Menorah<\/a>.\u00a0 Searches for “Air Force Base” and “Christmas tree” show that, in the Air Force at least, there are still a great many military bases that do, in fact, light “Christmas” trees<\/a>.\u00a0 However, expanding the search to “holiday tree” reveals that there are also a significant number of bases that have abandoned the “Christmas” tree in favor of a “holiday” tree<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is greatly ironic for two reasons:\u00a0 First, at least one liberal organization that normally opposes such\u00a0incidents has specifically said that it has “no problem” with a Christmas tree being called what it is<\/a>:\u00a0 a Christmas tree.<\/p>\n Second, at least some of the military bases that chose the “non-offensive” holiday tree moniker also had base Menorahs<\/a>.\u00a0 One wonders why the bases felt the need to “neutralize” a Christmas tree while not requiring a “holiday candelabrum.”<\/p>\n Unfortunately, it is easy to criticize those who are trying to do what they believe to be the right thing in difficult circumstances.\u00a0\u00a0Base and unit commanders are in an awkward position given unpredictable accusations and seemingly contradictory judicial opinions.\u00a0 In the end, however, there is no military regulation, law, or judicial requirement that military bases neutralize Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, or any other belief system’s celebrations.\u00a0 (In fact, over-neutralizing religious celebrations can be offensive itself, as the White House found out when it sent out invitations for a Hanukkah celebration that was billed as a “holiday reception.”<\/a>)<\/p>\n While military commanders may choose to self-censor, there is no direction that they do so.\u00a0 In fact, one could argue that proudly supporting military members’ free exercise without restriction would be a better means to demonstrate the religious freedom characteristic of the American nation.\u00a0 Religious freedom in the United States–in which contradictory religions can co-exist without censorship or restriction–is unmatched in any other country in the world.\u00a0 Such liberties should be celebrated, not stifled in the hopes of preventing offense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The US military is increasingly sensitive to associations with events that might be perceived as religious.\u00a0 While it strives to protect the free exercise rights of its members, it is also cognizant of criticisms of inappropriate interactions between a government institution and religion. Few times is this more evident than near the end of the year, when the military struggles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[108,4,19,39,2,43,114,17,10],"class_list":["post-2763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-christmas","tag-churchandstate","tag-government","tag-jewish","tag-military","tag-obama","tag-people-for-the-american-way","tag-religious-expression","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}