Plus The Fact That The Military Does Have Catch-22s

There's an absolutely fascinating article in today's WaPo about an army chaplain who converted to Wicca.

The article tells the story of Don Larsen, an army chaplain in Iraq, who had a crisis of faith over the sectarian killings there and decided to move away from any religion that insists that it is the one true way to connection with divinity. It sounds as if he'd always been a spiritual seeker and someone who was able to see that most religions have, at their core, more in common with each other than different. On July 6, he applied to become the first Wiccan chaplain in the U.S. armed forces, setting off an extraordinary chain of events. By year's end, his superiors not only denied his request but also withdrew him from Iraq and removed him from the chaplain corps, despite an unblemished service record.

The story concerning the army's decision will sound familiar to most Wiccans:

Once chaplains are accepted into the military, they are paid, trained and deployed by the government. But they remain subservient to their endorsers, who can cancel their endorsements at any time.

That is what happened to Larsen, according to unclassified military e-mail messages obtained by The Washington Post. When [a Wiccan church,] the Sacred Well Congregation[,] applied on July 31 to become Larsen's new endorser, the Army initially cited a minor bureaucratic obstacle: It could not find a copy of his previous endorsement from the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, a Dallas-based association of Pentecostal churches.

The following day, a senior Army chaplain telephoned the Full Gospel Churches to ask for the form and, in the process, disclosed Larsen's plan to join Sacred Well.

Within hours, the Pentecostal group sent Larsen an urgent e-mail saying it had received a "strange call" from the Army Chief of Chaplains office. The caller "mentioned that a Donald M. Larsen . . . was requesting a change-over . . . to Wiccans," the e-mail said. "Please communicate with this office, as we do not believe it is you."

Larsen pleaded in his reply for the Full Gospel Churches not to cancel his endorsement until he could complete the switch. "Being here in Iraq has caused me to reflect on a great many things. However, as long as CFCG holds my endorsement, I teach and practice nothing contrary to your faith and practice," he wrote, adding: "It is all about the soldiers, please help me to continue to minister to them during this transition."

The Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches immediately severed its ties to Larsen. The Sacred Well Congregation could not renew his papers, because it was not yet an official endorser. Lacking an ecclesiastical endorsement, Larsen was ordered to cease functioning immediately as a chaplain, and the Pentagon quickly pulled him out of Iraq.

Dolinger, the Army Chief of Chaplains spokesman, denied that any discrimination was involved. "What you're really dealing with is more of a personal drama, what one person has been through and the choices he's made. Plus, the fact that the military does have Catch-22s," he said.

Jim Ammerman, a retired Army colonel who is president and founder of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, acknowledges that there is a longstanding agreement among endorsers not to summarily pull the papers of a chaplain who wants to make a valid switch.

"But if it's not a valid thing, all bets are off," Ammerman says, adding that Wiccans "run around naked in the woods" and "draw blood with a dagger" in their ceremonies. "You can't do that in the military. It's against good order and discipline."

That description drew a laugh from Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson, the Air Force's deputy chief of chaplains. "He's right, we can't have that in the military, but I don't think we've had any of that in the military," Richardson says.

Richardson says there are simply too few Wiccans in the military to justify a full-time chaplain.

According to Pentagon figures, however, some faiths with similarly small numbers in the ranks do have chaplains. Among the nearly 2,900 clergy on active duty are 41 Mormon chaplains for 17,513 Mormons in uniform, 22 rabbis for 4,038 Jews, 11 imams for 3,386 Muslims, six teachers for 636 Christian Scientists, and one Buddhist chaplain for 4,546 Buddhists. [The article earlier noted that the number of "Wiccans in the United States rose 17-fold -- from 8,000 to 134,000 -- between 1990 and 2001. By the Pentagon's count, there are now 1,511 self-identified Wiccans in the Air Force and 354 in the Marines. No figures are available for the much larger Army and Navy. Wiccan groups estimate they have at least 4,000 followers in uniform, but they say many active-duty Wiccans hide their beliefs to avoid ridicule and discrimination."]

This is the worst sort of religious discrimination and Wiccans are used to seeing the military and the Veterans Administration utilize their "Catch 22s" to justify and cover up their discrimination. You can't say that you "support the troops" if you specifically deny some of our troops the same religious rights, such as having a chaplain of their faith, that you grant to other troops. As the WaPo acknowledges, Wiccans are right to be concerned about what will happen to them if they self-identify: Two incidents may bear them out.

When a Texas newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, reported in 1999 that a circle of Wiccans was meeting regularly at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, then-Gov. George W. Bush told ABC's "Good Morning America": "I don't think witchcraft is a religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this and decide against it."

Eight years later, the circle at Lackland is still going strong, and the military permits Wiccans to worship on U.S. bases around the world. But when Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2005, the Department of Veterans' Affairs refused to allow a Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, to be inscribed on his memorial at the Fernley, Nev., veterans' cemetery. Ultimately, Nevada officials approved the pentacle anyway. (WaPo, would it kill you to get this story correct? Stewart's widow is currently involved in a fairly high-profile suit to get the VA to do the right thing; the fact that Nevada officials went ahead and placed the pentacle on his Nevada memorial doesn't change that fact, but someone who didn't know about the case would read your article and think that everything is now honky dory. It's not.)

Interestingly enough, Don Larsen joins, all unknowing, in a conversation that's spanned several pagan blogs concerning the relative lack of well-written Pagan theology: You can't intellectually talk about witchcraft. You gotta show up," he says. "What Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a lot of us universalists think is, people need the magical side, the mythological side, of religion. "We don't need more Calvinist rationalizing. We need mystery. We need horizons. We need journeys."

The WaPo's generally respectful tone goes all to hell when it begins to describe an Imbolc ritual in which Larsen participated:

Wearing the kind of fanciful robes you might see at a Renaissance fair, Larsen and other members of the Sacred Well Congregation greeted Imbolc this year in a circle of stones behind Oringderff's ranch house in Schertz, near San Antonio. Under a pair of gnarled mesquite trees was an altar; in the middle of the circle, a bonfire.

Eight women and eight men, mostly middle-aged couples, held hands. They danced in circles and figure eights, passed a large goblet of wine and pressed closer to the flames as the night grew chilly.

There was no nudity. No blood. No mention of the devil.

But there was a ceremonial dagger, a dish of salt, burning incense and a 35-minute service full of abstruse allusions to Celtic and Norse gods and goddesses. The part assigned to Larsen included such lines as: "Hail Sudri, and the Spirits and Creatures of Fire! Guardians of the Southern Gates of Gorias. We call upon you. . . . Salamanders of Fire, join us here!"

You know, WaPo, bite me. Ever see how the pope dresses? What's so scary about a dish of salt? Most xians have a goblet of wine and a piece of unleavened bread on their altars. Sikhs use ceremonial daggers; xians place ancient implements of torture and execution all over their churches. Catholics burn incense. And "abstruse"? Ever listen to a catholic mass? The article makes no attempt at all to explain, as an article meant to inform the general public about a minority religions should do, why Wiccans call South, just an out of context quote selected to sound as alien to xian ears as possible.