Air Force Academy – Newly drafted Air Force guidelines for religious expression at the U.S. Air Force Academy will emphasize respect for others’ beliefs, while supporting spirituality, officials said Saturday.
“We’re getting there, but we still have a ways to go,” said former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, who chairs the academy’s Board of Visitors.
The Board of Visitors, which met at the academy Friday and Saturday, is the academy’s oversight committee and is akin to a board of trustees at a civilian university.
Gilmore added that the “religious respect” guidelines to be finalized after Aug. 1 “will be a good standard for the nation.”
It is “a real plus” to raise the issues, Gilmore said, which “are not a pervasive problem” in the cadet corps, as most Americans might believe. “We’re in serious danger of distracting cadets from their duties” through the intense media scrutiny, he said.
Generally, the guidelines will require authority figures to be sensitive about using their “power positions” in expressing their personal religious beliefs to subordinates. Additionally, guidelines will not tolerate cadet-to-cadet abuse and “won’t drive spirituality out of the academy.”
Rabbi Arnold E. Resnicoff, special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, said the guidelines would be “90 percent common sense and maybe 10 percent controversial.”
Resnicoff, the former national director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, was hired a month ago by the Air Force to advise acting Air Force Secretary Michael Dominguez on how the academy will develop religious-respect guidelines.
The academy has been embroiled in controversy over religious tolerance issues for several months. On June 22, an Air Force task force released a 93-page report that found a “perception of religious intolerance” at the academy, but no overt bias against cadets who are not evangelical Christians.
The task force recommended the academy develop guidelines regarding religious expression.
“The academy found this issue” while surveying staff, faculty and cadets, said Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, who led the task force that prepared the report, and has stepped up to addressing the matter.
The report outlines nine findings and nine recommendations. Although Brady did not publicly reveal details, he said the report showed a need for guidelines on how religious views are expressed, how the guidelines are enforced and how the complaint process should work.
In addition, Brady said cultural awareness must be integrated into the academy and an interfaith group should be formed to assist in evaluating how the academy is handling the issue.
“I think they have a handle on this,” Brady said of academy officials. However, some cadets aren’t used to dealing with people from different backgrounds, so training and education must be continuous since every year the academy “gets 1,300 new people and we have to mold them.”
Basically, the academy “looks just like America” in the attitudes of 18- to 22-year-olds toward religious respect. “This is not just an Air Force Academy issue,” Brady said.
Brady cautioned that cadets with minority religious beliefs will be accommodated where they can, but there still is a mission to accomplish. “To think you will accommodate everyone’s wishes in the military, it’s not going to happen,” he said.
About 60 percent of the recommendations are “quick kills,” Brady said, meaning they can be implemented quickly. He said an interim policy probably will come out in a few weeks after reviews by Dominguez and Air Force chief of staff Gen. John Jumper.
