Politics

Military trying to ban Jesus, chaplain says

By Bill Moss, Published: April 2, 2014

Retired Army Chaplain Ronald W. Benzing says the military is trying to ban Jesus.

"We keep pushing back and it keeps coming," Benzing told the Henderson County Republican Men's Club last week. "Groups like ours with conservative, Bible believing chaplains, we're not asking for anything special. We're not asking for a rabbi to pray in the name of Jesus. All we're saying is let us pray the way that our churches that we represent expect us to."
Benzing was commissioned as a captain in the Army Chaplain Corps after completing his degree at Bob Jones Seminary. He served in the 3rd Battalion, First Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division in 1968 in Vietnam. In addition to service at U.S. bases, he also served in Korea and Germany. He retired as a colonel in 1995 after 28 years of active duty. He is vice president of the Associated Gospel Churches, which endorses men and women who want to serve as a chaplain in the armed forces.
"There were restrictions that came down from the Air Force telling chaplains that you could only pray in a certain way in formation other than in a chapel," he said.
Chaplains were told, "You can pray the way you want to but just don't pray in your prayer in the name of Jesus," he said. "We thought that was impinging on religious freedom and on chaplains to pray the way their churches expected them to pray," he said. "The Air Force had actually put into a regulation prohibiting that. So we took that in 2007 to Sen. Lindsey Graham and asked for his assistance and he had a meeting the Department of Defense and our group and as a result of that meeting the Air Force rescinded that regulation and pushed them back."
The Associated Gospel Churches is fighting to preserve religious freedom not only for service personnel but chaplains.
"We began to see more and more restrictions against prayer and even against preaching," he said. "Two months ago we had an Army chaplain in Alaska who was told by an Air Force chaplain who was a senior chaplain, 'You can't preach that sermon you preached Sunday morning at a Sunday night service.' 'Why?' 'Because I don't like what I heard.'
"That's too bad. I was a senior chaplain and I never even thought of the idea to tell some chaplain that I didn't like his sermon and he couldn't preach it again. That wasn't my prerogative.
"Don't people understand that these chaplains as well as soldiers have free exercise of religion?"
Benzing said his group is fighting military orders that tell chaplains, "You can be religious but you've got to be religious like we want you to be religious, you have to fit into our mold, and we say, 'No, we're not going to do that. We're free people.'
"We're representing a group of chaplains that says we're not going to let this happen. This is not right. We're going to push and we're going to go to whoever we can go to for help in the halls of Congress and say, 'We need your help.' ... We're not going to allow the government to silence those who are Christians in the military, and that's what's happening."