The first of six articles that I am writing for the Baptist Studies Bulletin from the Center for Baptist Studies at Mercer University was posted today. These essays will be brief dispatches from the frontlines of America's culture war and the first one is about the battle to secure respect for the religious liberty of everyone at the United States Air Force Academy.
An institution created to train those sworn to secure the rights and liberties of the free people of the United States might be the last place that you would expect to find a struggle over constitutionally protected liberties, but that is the case. Officers denied equal rights to a free thinker who wanted to attend off campus meetings and hold meetings on campus, cadets and professors of minority faith complained of religious discrimination, and a senior officer led cheers designed to encourage evangelicals to aggressively proselytize cadets who had been singled out for "heathen flights."
Meanwhile, the Task Force created to investigate these problems concluded that the problems at the Academy were a matter of "religious insensitivity" rather than "religious discrimination."
I seriously doubt that we have heard the last word from this front in America's culture war.
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