This is the Army, or part of it

Does Secretary Gates know about this?

For the past several years, two U.S. Army posts in Virginia, Fort Eustis and Fort Lee, have been putting on a series of what are called Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concerts. As I’ve written in a number of other posts, “spiritual fitness” is just the military’s new term for promoting religion, particularly evangelical Christianity. And this concert series is no different.
On May 13, 2010, about eighty soldiers, stationed at Fort Eustis while attending a training course, were punished for opting out of attending one of these Christian concerts.

Hey, Mr. Secretary, when you’re dumping your excess of Admirals and Generals, you might start with this guy:

The Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert Series was the brainchild of Maj. Gen. James E. Chambers, who, according to an article on the Army.mil website, “was reborn as a Christian” at the age of sixteen. According to the article, Chambers held the first concert at Fort Lee within a month of becoming the commanding general of the Combined Arms Support Command and Fort Lee in June 2008. But he had already started the series at Fort Eustis, as the previous commanding general there.

When I was in the Navy there was none of this stuff, possibly because we were a little too busy doing our real jobs. One would think that with the US Army currently engaged in two wars (or at least one and one-half, since the last combat troops left Iraq yesterday) it wouldn’t have time to promote a single faith over any others.