Air Force's interim religion guides expected to be revised

MISAWA AIR BASE, Japan — The U.S. Air Force’s interim guidelines on religious expression, which have drawn sharp criticism from evangelical Christian groups and members of Congress alike, probably will be revised, said Rabbi Arnold E. Resnicoff.

“The guidelines will be different.… Not significantly, but there will be some clarifications,” he said during an interview Wednesday at Misawa.

New Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne “wants to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” said Resnicoff, special assistant for values and vision to Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley.

Resnicoff, a retired Navy chaplain who helped draft the interim rules, is visiting Air Force bases in Japan, Okinawa and South Korea this week to discuss the service’s new core-values initiative.

He also touched on the religion guidelines during a briefing with senior military leaders at Misawa on Tuesday, officials said.

Though worded as recommendations, the guidelines’ suggestion that “public prayer should not usually be included in official settings” such as staff meetings has ended the practice of opening Misawa’s weekly wing staff meeting with a five- minute nonsectarian devotional thought and prayer, said Lt. Col. Ernie Savage, 35th Fighter Wing chaplain.

The public prayer issue is “where most of us are struggling right now with the interim guidelines,” Savage said. After the guidelines were published Aug. 29, base officials decided to replace the opening prayer with a “more secular leadership thought,” he said — on what it means, for example, to be a good leader or a good follower.

“I’ve had more feedback since we stopped it,” the Protestant chaplain said. “People want it. It’s a pause in our day to acknowledge there’s something greater than ourselves who’s had a hand in our existence.

“Whether you call that higher power God, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed … I’m not naming that higher power for you in my prayer and devotion but I’m asking you to … think about what it is you do believe in.”

The Air Force issued the guidelines after complaints of religious harassment and intolerance of nonevangelical Christian faiths at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

According to an Oct. 31 Washington Post article, Christian advocacy groups, including the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family, have denounced the guidelines as infringing on religious freedom, while 70 House members wrote urging President Bush to issue an executive order protecting “the constitutional right of military chaplains to pray according to their faith.” Resnicoff said the Air Force received and sought hundreds of comments on all sides of the issue.

“From the beginning we thought the guidelines would not be as important as the training that would flow from those guidelines,” he said, training that would focus “on dual ideas: We will respect and support religious freedom — that’s a freedom that we fight for, that we sacrifice for, and that we should enjoy as much as possible.

“On the other hand, we will not push religion. It’s not appropriate for the government, for the military, to judge a person based on whether he or she is religious.”