{"id":385,"date":"2011-04-27T11:40:29","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T15:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=385"},"modified":"2011-04-27T22:52:13","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T02:52:13","slug":"here-come-the-atheist-chaplains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/here-come-the-atheist-chaplains.html","title":{"rendered":"Here come the atheist chaplains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I suspect it&#8217;s only a matter of time before there are atheist chaplains  in the U.S. military, and a good thing too. The justification for  chaplains in the first place is that serving in the military restricts  your First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The  government therefore has an obligation to make such free exercise  possible, whatever your religion happens to be.<\/p>\n<p>It could be argued, as suggested in James Dao&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/04\/27\/us\/27atheists.html?_r=1&amp;scp=2&amp;sq=atheists&amp;st=cse\">piece<\/a> in today&#8217;s <em>New York Times, <\/em>that  atheism is not a religion but an absence of religion, and therefore not  entitled to consideration. That seems mistaken. If a law were passed  barring atheists from proselytizing, it would surely be declared  unconstitutional on Free Exercise grounds. More to the point, atheists  have spiritual and communal needs like everyone else.<\/p>\n<p>Today, there are more self-professed atheists in the military than Jews,  Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus. To the extent that they wish to  constitute themselves as a community of believers&#8211;believers in no  god&#8211;they deserve recognition. And so long as there is an accrediting  organization for their chaplains, they should be hired. Naturally, an  atheist chaplain would have to serve the needs of theistic personnel.  Just as theist chaplains must serve the needs of atheist personnel.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, shrewd critics of church-state separationism might embrace  an atheist chaplaincy. Why? Because they have long argued that Secular  Humanism is itself a religion, whose principles (yo, Darwinism) the  government must eschew as an establishment of religion. While this  position has been <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=vRY27FkGJAUC&amp;pg=PA501&amp;lpg=PA501&amp;dq=secular+humanism+Brevard+Alabama&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=iugMg-IfpY&amp;sig=tSz1tXAjGvrveFqTQJItVWSgocM&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=VDS4TeGnM8y1twfzh8HeBA&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=6&amp;ved=0CDoQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&amp;q=secular%20humanism%20Brevard%20Alabama&amp;f=false\">firmly rejected<\/a> by the courts, permitting, say, Fort Bragg&#8217;s atheist group, Military  Atheists and Secular Humanists, to have its own chaplain could re-open  the question. Separationists beware!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I suspect it&#8217;s only a matter of time before there are atheist chaplains in the U.S. military, and a good thing too. The justification for chaplains in the first place is that serving in the military restricts your First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The government therefore has an obligation to make&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[23,22],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-atheists","tag-military-chaplains"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Here come the atheist chaplains - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/here-come-the-atheist-chaplains.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Here come the atheist chaplains - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I suspect it&#8217;s only a matter of time before there are atheist chaplains in the U.S. military, and a good thing too. The justification for chaplains in the first place is that serving in the military restricts your First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The government therefore has an obligation to make&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/here-come-the-atheist-chaplains.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-04-27T15:40:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2011-04-28T02:52:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Here come the atheist chaplains - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/here-come-the-atheist-chaplains.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Here come the atheist chaplains - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"I suspect it&#8217;s only a matter of time before there are atheist chaplains in the U.S. military, and a good thing too. The justification for chaplains in the first place is that serving in the military restricts your First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}