The Air Force Academy has just come through a major controversy on religious rights and freedom, as reported by this blog on May 16. The recent investigation arose because complaints of religious harassment surfaced during a previous investigation into rapes of female cadets at the academy.
As a result the Academy is instituting a RSVP (respecting Spiritual Values of all People) Program, according T.R. Reid in today’s Washington Post. Reid writes:
The Academy has assigned Lieutenant Col. Vicki Rast to a new position of “Chief, Climate and Culture”. (If a commandant gave me that job, my first question would be: Are you doing this to keep congress off your back or do you really want to change the culture? If so, can I count on your support?) "We have to respect every individual's religious beliefs," Rast declares. "We may not approve or agree with them, but we will respect their right to believe what they choose." All spring, a corps of chaplains, law professors and senior officers such as Rast … have been running classes designed to impart the principles of religious tolerance and universal respect. The training program, known as RSVP, for "Respecting the Spiritual Values of All People," is required not only for the 4,000 cadets but also for everyone else, military and civilian, at the academy.
There are two ways of framing this question. One is the concerns the proper role of spirituality in the workplace. Spero Forum was published some of my comments on this last week.
The second approach arises from a respect for the fact that God leads each person according to his/her own needs. For this reason, all of us, especially officers in charge of cadet training, ought to be careful about insisting that another person respond to God in a particular way. Those of us, who believe that there is an objective truth, must also acknowledge that our vision of the path is clouded. While we ought to set forth our own vision, (it may, after all, help someone else find a path.) we ought to respect the way that the other person is responding. Bill Wilson, one of AA's founders, learned this lesson and inserted the phrase "as we understood Him" after “We made a decision to turn our wills and lives over to the care of God..” It opened up a path that was closed if Bill insisted that everyone understand God the way he did.
Whenever I think of strong religious disputes I recall the magnificent passages from Lincoln’s second inaugural address in which he set forth the attitudes the country would need after the civil war:
“Both (sides) read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”
...
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
There is great humility in that phrase “as God gives us to see the right”. We can witness with firmness, remembering that God may give someone else to see the right differently, trusting that “the Almighty has his own purposes.” We only have to play our own part. We can help others play theirs but there is no need to insist that they play it by our rules. To me this is the spiritual principle that ought to under gird the Academy’s RSVP program.
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