Washington – A Pentagon investigation into the religious climate at the Air Force Academy found instances of religious intolerance, a religious leader briefed on the report said Tuesday.
The report will be released today by top military officials.
“I walked away with a feeling that the Air Force and Pentagon staff and some of the Department of Defense staff involved in this issue will acknowledge there has been a problem, there is a problem, and they will lay out a series of recommendations on how to deal with it expeditiously in a no-nonsense manner,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Tuesday about his briefing on the report.
The ADL has worked with the academy and military officials to address concerns over the school’s religious climate.
The Pentagon report also will include input from the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces, which sent a five-member team to the campus to conduct an outside review, said Jack Williamson, executive director of the nonprofit group.
On Tuesday, academy chaplain Capt. Melinda Morton, a Lutheran minister, submitted her resignation to the Air Force.
Morton, a 13-year Air Force veteran, was one of the architects of the academy’s Respecting the Spiritual Values of All People program, an effort launched in March to teach religious tolerance. She said she was pressured to deny a report by the Yale Divinity School that the academy has a religious bias toward evangelical Christianity.
Morton said she was fired in May as executive officer to chaplain Col. Michael Whittington, chief of chaplains at the academy. She said the academy “watered down” the RSVP program. Later, the Air Force told her she would be transferred in July to Japan, an about-face from an early commitment to keep her at the academy through summer 2006.
The academy said in a statement Tuesday that Lt. Gen. John Rosa, academy superintendent, offered Morton a job developing the next phases of RSVP training, but she declined.
“Her judgment was that was not likely to be productive,” said Eugene Fidell, Morton’s attorney.
Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family sent out an e-mail Tuesday urging supporters to contact their congressional representatives “to urge him or her to oppose any effort in Congress to tell Christians they can’t speak about their faith – even at the U.S. Air Force Academy.”
