Colorado Springs – Proselytizing by evangelical Christian leaders is a systemic problem at the Air Force Academy, a chaplain who helped create the school’s religious tolerance program said Thursday.
Capt. Melinda Morton, 48, a Lutheran minister, said she is speaking out because she believes strongly that the religious bias at the academy should be corrected.
“It’s systemic,” she said.
The academy, Morton said, “publicly embraces” only evangelical Christianity. She said much of the money in the chaplain’s budget is spent on evangelical programs.
“We know we have a problem, we’ve admitted we have a problem, and we’ve developed a program to address the problem,” said Johnny Whitaker, spokesman for the academy. “We consider it serious. Is it systemic? It’s big enough that we’ve developed our own program. I guess it depends on the meaning of systemic.”
Morton’s comments came on the second day of a three-day visit by an 18-member Air Force task force charged with reviewing the religious climate at the school.
The task force was created in response to ongoing claims of religious intolerance at the academy, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a “Christ-killer” by a fellow cadet.
The task force is to deliver a report by May 23 to Michael Dominguez, acting secretary of the Air Force.
Morton is one of the architects of the academy’s Respecting Spiritual Values of all People – or RSVP – program, launched earlier this year in response to a survey of faculty and cadets that showed there was a wide perception that Christians were favored over non-Christians on campus.
Morton said she was fired last week as executive officer to Col. Michael Whittington, chief of chaplains. Morton is still a cadet chaplain and an administrator of the RSVP program.
Air Force officials said they moved Morton so a new executive officer could be in place to help transition the new chief of AFA chaplains because Whittington retires in June.
“She was not fired,” said Maj. Gen. Charles Baldwin, chief of chaplains for the Air Force. “She was moving on to a new job. … This is just the normal Air Force way of doing business.”
Morton said she was pressured to deny a report by Yale Divinity School professor Kristen Leslie that a chaplain told 600 cadets during basic training last year “to go back to their tents and tell their fellow cadets that those who are not born again will burn in the fires of hell.”
“I was told by Chaplain Whittington that if someone was going to be loyal to the chaplaincy and the Air Force, then someone would take a certain view of the Yale report and view Dr. Leslie as disloyal,” Morton said.
She said that she has been unable to “make headway” in getting academy leaders to see the bias toward evangelical Christians.
Whittington was not available for comment on Thursday.
Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 Air Force Academy graduate whose son, now a sophomore, was called a “(expletive) Jew,” said he was outraged by the removal of Morton from the executive officer’s job.
He said the Air Force is not serious about keeping the academy free from religious bias.
He said the task force is nothing more than “people sitting on lawn chairs sipping mint juleps, waiting until Friday afternoon.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Erin Emery can be reached at eemery@denverpost.com or 719-522-1360.