I was part of a delegation, many of us Vietnam veterans, who had gone over to Russia to help the Russian veterans of the war in Afghanistan to readjust. This ex political officer, who spoke perfect English, tried to convince me that I, as an army chaplain in Vietnam, had done the same thing in the American army that he had done in the Soviet army, i.e., to encourage the troops to support and fight for the idology of our respective regimes. I insisted that the role of a chaplain is quite the opposite. A chaplain is to represent and embody the religious tradition to the soliders--to the their pastor in the field. When a soldier has religious and moral objections to fighting in the war, the chaplain is required to assist him, and if appropriate, to help him obtain a conscientious objector discharge. I had in fact done this on a number of occasions.

After a few vodkas, he broke down and wept, telling me that he had endorsed atrocities done by Soviet soldiers against the Mujahadeen and had done so in the name of Communist ideology. He now knew that this ideology was entirely false and had considerable guilt about it. I talked to him of grace, repentance, forgiveness and redemption.

It occurs to me that what we are now experiencing in this country is the rise of a large number of "political officers" like Bill Frist and the religious leaders who have wholeheartedly endorsed a bellicose politicy of American religious/moral pre-eminence and "exceptionalism" and then married it to a distortion of traditional biblical Christianity.

They are seriously attempting to create a one party state (remember it was the Community party which totally controlled the Soviet government and enforced its ideology on the entire populace).

We see the emergence of something that could morph into a similar situation here. The religious right is not content with simply exerting a moral and religious influence on society, which is perfectly within its legitimate prerogative, but it wants to control the entire government as well.

This is very dangerous and political and religious leaders have warned us against it. We need to take these warnings seriously and be ever vigilant.