The Air Force Academy, MRFF, and Cadets for Christ
This story has been floating around for a while. I initially picked it up from Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, but it's also being covered at truthout and at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's site.
The short version of the story is that a cult-like group called Cadets for Christ, led by a couple named Don and Anna Warrick, are entrenched at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. Cadets for Christ is part of the "Shepherding Movement". Cadets who join Cadets for Christ, according to Chris Rodda writing at The Huffington Post:
...are separated from their families and anything else that might interfere with their brainwashing. In the shepherding movement, the female is the "sheep" and the male is the "shepherd," and a woman's sole purpose in life is to be a good wife and mother, subordinating herself to her male shepherd.
The name most closely associated with this situation is that of Lauren Baas, a 2010 Academy graduate, who has become estranged from her family due to the influence of Cadets for Christ. The quick version of her story is that she went to the USAFA with the goal of becoming a pilot in the Air Force, got involved with Cadets for Christ, was placed into an arranged engagement to her "shepherd", and has basically given up all of her dreams to be a sheep. (The photo below, of a cookbook given to Ms. Baas, is rather chilling. Her last name is a pure coincidence.)
Cookbook belonging to Lauren Baas, via Chris Rodda at the Huffington Post
The Baas family, in an effort to call attention to the situation at USAFA, wrote a "holiday letter" to the Warricks. Their pain is heartbreaking. An excerpt from the letter, again via Chris Rodda at The Huffington Post, is below. The letter in its entirety can be read here.
Did you ever have the guts to ask Lauren about her career goals before squelching them? From birth she was a very determined individual. As parents, we taught her to work hard and be persistent in any endeavor she chose to undertake. She completed elementary and high school with great pride and high academic achievement. Her next goal was to graduate from the United States Air Force Academy and become a USAF pilot. Of course, being a female, you made sure that goal was extinguished. In your words, she is the sheep and her career is to follow the male shepherd. HOW DARE YOU PLAY GOD!!!
Did you know that Lauren never experienced the thrill of dating someone? Growing up, she was always quiet, shy and spoke of getting her feet on the ground before entering the dating arena. Of course, you instructed her that God sent a USAFA Cadet over two years her junior, to be her life long partner. They never had the opportunity to date, as it would interfere with their "Bible study." Five months into their relationship you were shoving "Biblical" marriage preparation materials down their throats!!! Don't tell us that you had no part in orchestrating their engagement. YOUR SELFISH GOAL WAS TO PERPETUATE THE FUNDAMENTALIST EVANGELICAL MISSION!!!
There's a lot of wrong going on here - a climate at USAFA that fosters religious intolerance, a lack of scrutiny of religious groups that are allowed to operate on campus, a particular group using classic cult techniques to isolate and control its members, families being broken apart by the activities of the aforementioned group.
The fact that this is happening at a military academy is unsettling, but when we move beyond that, the situation is one that's not uncommon on college campuses around the country.
It's not hard to see why.
Young adults starting college are often finding their first real taste of responsibility. They're away - possibly thousands of miles away - from home, they don't know very many people, they're seeking their own identity yet looking for some familiarity. There are clubs and groups of all sorts, and many students find their way to Bible/religious study groups. More than likely, they'll end up in one that's fairly congruent with whatever faith they grew up in - Catholics tend to find Catholic groups, different sorts of Protestant Christians will tend to find groups with similar views, and so forth.
Some, like Lauren Baas (raised Catholic), end up in groups that are radically different. Indeed, Ms. Baas' parents indicate that Cadets for Christ actively led her to reject her Catholicism1:
Do not attempt to trivialize these circumstances with the rationalization that we are merely a family that cannot accept the fact that their daughter has "chosen" to change religions and marry outside the Catholic faith. YOU KNOW, AS WELL AS WE, THIS STATEMENT IS SO FAR FROM THE TRUTH!!! You have taken Lauren's mind and soul and twisted it to your fundamentalist Christian liking. She was brainwashed to believe she was "unenlightened" and an "unsaved fool" in the Catholic faith. She now lives in fear of God and feels "shameful" if she does not continually stand guard against "ungodly people."
(From the Baas family's letter to the Warricks)
Had Ms. Baas simply decided to marry a non-Catholic, I suspect there wouldn't be much of an issue. Had she decided, on her own, to leave the Catholic church and join a different one, the situation would be different. In this case, though, it appears that she was intimidated and coerced2 into rejecting her previous beliefs and manipulated into an engagement - things that the "old" Lauren wouldn't have done.
It's reasonable to ask how a group can steer someone away from their worldview and into something so completely different. It's fairly straightforward - surprisingly so - but it can be difficult to spot if you're in the middle of it. I'd venture to say that Cadets for Christ uses some of these techniques on new members:
- Love bombing - new members are made the focus of attention with an ulterior motive of drawing them deeper into the group. They might be flattered or they might find that the group pays a lot of attention to anything they have to say. In short, the group welcomes them with open arms and makes them feel special. Of course, not every group that warmly welcomes new members is trying to brainwash them. It can be very difficult to distinguish between a group that is engaging in love-bombing its members and a group that is genuinely friendly and welcoming until one tries to leave the group.
- Controlling activities and contacts - the new members are presented with group-related activities that start to occupy all of their free time. They may be strongly encouraged to spend leisure time with other members of the group. Members might be encouraged or pressured to date within the group, or to invite their external friends to join. Members might explicitly be discouraged from spending time in non-group activities or with non-group associates. In extreme cases, members might end up leaving existing jobs to go to work within the group. The end result of all of this is that a member is eventually steered to a point where nearly all of his or her interactions are with group adherents.
- Controlling information - members are shielded from exposure to information contrary to the group's ideology, or are bombarded with information that agrees with the group. They're encouraged to reject disconfirming information and look for data that supports what they already consider to be true. Negative information may be portrayed as dangerous3.
- Authoritarian leadership - the leadership of the group is seen as inviolate and inerrant. When the leadership starts making important personal decisions for the group members, such as who they will marry, it's a very loud alarm that things are seriously wrong.
That's really about all it takes, and the Baas letter strongly suggests that Lauren was subjected to just these sorts of things as a member of Cadets for Christ.
Looking at the situation, it's very disquieting that the USAFA has allowed (and continues to allow) Cadets for Christ to operate on campus. The dual messages being sent are that the Academy condones the theology that Cadets for Christ espouses and endorses the techniques they bring to bear on their members. Neither of these messages is appropriate for a Service Academy. It's very disquieting, based on the articles linked above, that the leadership at USAFA when confronted with evidence of unconstitutional proselytizing by Cadets for Christ has deliberately failed to act appropriately on it.
And it's very disquieting that at least one family has lost a daughter.
-Jay
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1I am categorically not attempting to stake out a position that people should always and forever remain within whatever faith tradition they were raised in. As people grow and learn and experience new things, their beliefs often change. If your beliefs at age 30 are essentially the same as they were at age 10, you're doing life wrong.
2Threatening someone with eternal punishment in Hell as a consequence of not accepting a particular system of beliefs is every bit as coercive as forcing conversions at the point of a sword or at the end of a gun.
3Stop and think for a few moments about how often this occurs in daily life. Most often when this happens, someone is trying to sell you something. Nobody ever sold a car by saying "Go try the dealer down the street. Their prices are better and they sell better cars." It would be a rare pastor indeed who closed a sermon with "...and you should really read Ehrman's God's Problem for an interesting and insightful take on the problem of evil." You'll probably never hear a politician say "The problems we're facing aren't really the fault of any one individual or administration. They're the culmination of many decisions made by many individuals and administrations over the last several decades and it's going to take a long time, a lot of cooperation, a lot of money, and a lot of work to fix them."
I Haven’t Cross-Posted From James McGrath In A While…(Take Two)
(NOTE: To anyone who noticed that I posted this, then unpublished it - when I re-read it this morning, I realized I had left out a significant portion of what I intended to say. Sorry 'bout that.)
...so I thought I'd take a cue from this post and re-post (or perhaps re-re-post) this video:
The video is from a blog called Recovering Fundamentalists1.
I liked this particular video mainly because he gives a very nice visual explanation of the circular reasoning that goes into claims of Biblical inerrancy.
There are a number of flaws in the reasoning, not the least of which is that when books of the Bible refer to scripture, they're referring to scripture as it was understood when the text in question was written. In other words, a reference to scripture in Psalms doesn't include books like 2 Timothy, which was written much, much later.
This is something that seems quite obvious to people outside of the circle, but can be very difficult to recognize and acknowledge to people who are caught up in it.
He makes a couple of other good points in the vein of not letting fear of the answers2 (or of Hell) prevent you from asking the questions that might be bouncing around in your head.
That's important.
It's extremely easy to set aside questions you really need to get on the table simply because you might not like the answers. Maybe they run counter to what you've been taught. Maybe they force you to look closely at some doubt or concern that you hoped would just go away. Or perhaps they make you realize that it's time to set some changes in motion that have been needed for a while.
The take-aways are these:
- It's often useful to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective than you're used to.
- Don't be afraid to ask tough questions. The answers may challenge you, but in the long run you'll be the better for it.
Good advice, I think.
Now, I am slightly concerned that he goes down a path towards the end that may be more aggressive than it needs to be for an introduction type video. My thinking is that people who are starting to question fundamentalist beliefs are likely to be doing so bit by bit, so perhaps terms like "undermine" and "dismantle" aren't the most useful. I could be wrong. I agree with him that the question of Biblical inerrancy is central to the matter, but that's a question that can be addressed with history and scholarship without the need for overt hostility. I think people would be more receptive to that approach, and more inclined to ask deeper and more involved questions.
-Jay
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1I haven't browsed around Recovering Fundamentalists enough to get a good feel for what they're all about, so other than saying that it looks like they might have some interesting things to say, I'm not going to get into much about them right now.
Book Review – Mary Mae And The Gospel Truth by Sandra Dutton
(NOTE: Updated to fix a bad tag.)
What happens when a precocious ten-year-old from a conservative religious family encounters fossils in her school yard and starts asking questions?
Sandra Dutton offers a look at this situation through the eyes of Mary Mae Krebs in her book Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth.
Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth
We meet Mary Mae at a church service in Ohio, circa 1988, where she's singing with her visiting grandmother. It seems that Mary Mae isn't content to simply accept everything she's told, and she manages to attract some attention to herself by asking uncomfortable questions about the Genesis creation stories.
"The world is six thousand years old. You look in your Bible."
"Where?"
"Well, Genesis. Where else? You got the whole Creation, right there."
Soon as we get home, I get my Bible out and run my finger down every line of Genesis. I'm looking for six thousand, whether it's in numbers or spelled out in letters. I go through it twice. Second time I'm reading with a flashlight in bed. Only six I find is on the "sixth day," what God created, and in different folks' ages, like Enoch living three hundred and sixty-five years.
I tell Mama Sunday morning I can't find no six thousand, and she says she don't have time to look, she's got too much work to do. (pg. 12)
Mary Mae's questions and her refusal to let other people think for her provide sources of tension between her and her mother, her pastor, her Sunday school teacher, and her friends. At various points, she questions a number of issues that she spots in Genesis:
- Light and dark existing before light sources like the sun.
- Varying lengths of generations.
- How all the animals could possibly have fit on the ark, and the logistics associated with their care.
The answers and explanations given to her tend to be in the vein of "you just have to have faith" or "if the Bible says it, it must be true", but these don't deter her. I think that's admirable, and anyone who has ever had a child respond to every answer with "why?" should be able to understand Mary Mae's persistence.
At school, Mary Mae's teacher, Miss Sizemore, is teaching her students about fossils, and the ancient age of the Earth, and how the rock layers visible where the local highways are cut through the mountains represent different geological periods. She finds herself fascinated by the trilobite fossils that she finds in the rocks exposed by an excavation at the school yard and in other places, and she comes to realize that explanations like "God put them there to test us" just don't wash.
A large measure of my interest in this book flows from the fact that I have no life experiences to compare with Mary Mae's. I grew up as a liberal Catholic, and (try as I might) I cannot recall any time in my school-age years where I learned something in (public) school that caused tensions at home or at church. I was, of course, familiar with the Genesis creation stories (although it was much later before I realized there were two stories instead of just one), and the story of Noah's flood (again, the actual text suggests two versions of the story), but my Sunday school classes never tackled them in any detail (which I now consider to be a failing...). For me, the science-vs-religion question is really a no-brainer: we learn about the observable world by observing it, and science is the framework for making sense of those observations.
As I consider Mary Mae's conundrum, I have to cast it in terms of what I expect the people around her to say and do. Through this preconceptual lens, Dutton's characters serve their purposes quite well - Miss Sizemore as the voice of secular science for example, or Mary Mae's mother presenting the extremely conservative religious perspective - although the only supporting character with much complexity is Granny (who really serves as an older and wiser version of Mary Mae's own conscience). While there might be a small risk that a reader could be trapped by stereotypes, Dutton made a smart choice to avoid overdeveloping the ancillary characters beyond Mary Mae's perspective.
The book touches on a number of related topics, and Dutton exposes several important ones just enough to spark some discussion:
- Kids in public schools being given alternative work when the curriculum conflicts with religious beliefs.
- Parents pulling their kids out of school for homeschooling and realizing that it's not as easy as they expected.1
- Parents of different religious backgrounds deciding how to raise their children.
- People believing whatever their pastor happens to tell them on any given day.
In the end, Mary Mae and her family come to a compromise position that, from the perspective of a ten-year-old is probably sufficient. In many real-life situations similar to Mary Mae's, some sort of compromise may be the best anyone can hope for, and I think Dutton realizes that.
But it's also a little troubling, in my view, for a couple of reasons.
The first has to do with the audience of the book. A few obvious candidates are:
- Kids who are in the same situation as Mary Mae - they're learning things at school that contradict what they've been taught at home or in church, and they're trying to figure out a way to reconcile these views.
- Parents of such kids who are trying to deal with challenges to their belief system.
- Pastors/clergy or teachers of such kids who are looking for ways to help the kids work through the issues.
The compromise position that the book takes means that a lot of parents (who want their kids to believe the same way as they do) and clergy (whose livelihood depends on people believing certain things) won't find the book useful - they may want books that reinforce their beliefs. The kids who are in situations most like Mary Mae's are also likely to be kids from families and churches with very conservative religious beliefs for whom compromises simply aren't acceptable.
Teachers of such kids may be justifiably reluctant to suggest that children challenge the beliefs of their parents. Teachers that do so may well find themselves looking for work.
That leaves the kids themselves, and I'm honestly not sure how many kids would find this book on their own. That's a shame, because a clever child reading about Mary Mae's journey could come away much better prepared to engage with their parents about questions of belief.
There is one other audience for the book, and I think it's probably a large one (though difficult to count): close friends or relatives of families with Mary Maes who might find themselves involved in the situation.
So, in effect, Dutton's compromise solution to the problem at hand might have the unintended consequence of keeping the book out of the hands of many of the people who would benefit the most from it. I think that's just a reflection of the nature of the subject and not any fault of hers.
The other reason I find the compromise troubling is that I don't think that it is a stable equilibrium. This is beyond the scope of the book, but I think it's relevant to mention.
We leave Mary Mae at a point where she's been told that there are some gaps in the Biblical narratives, and science can step in to fill those gaps. If her interests never went beyond trilobite fossils, that might be sufficient. But is that likely? I'm not at all sure that it is.
At some point, she'd learn some world history and find out that Egypt had a well-documented culture and civilization that continued moving right along during the time when, according to the Bible, the world was under water and Noah's family was all that was left of humanity. She might learn of solid evidence of human habitation in the Americas dating back well over 11,000 years - older than the Earth by some Biblical reckoning.
Maintaining a claim of Biblical truth vis-a-vis science and history becomes an increasingly untenable goal, unless "science" and "history" are redefined to bend around the Bible.
At the end of the day, Dutton has put together a sensitive, gentle story that validates the message that it's OK for kids to ask questions and look outside of the beliefs they've been raised in. That's the first step of many. I would hope that the book can find its way into the hands of families facing circumstances like Mary Mae's, and that it might help nurture the spark of curiosity that all children seem to have.
-Jay
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1I am of two minds about homeschooling. I can see how, if it's done properly, it could be rewarding for both parents and children, but I've seen far more instances of it being done poorly than of it being done well. That's all I'll say about it now. It's a topic for another time, perhaps.
TSA – Security Theater Gone Haywire
(NOTE: This is a difficult topic to write about. I've not experienced the new security screening procedures. I've linked to people who have, and I think it's best to let their stories speak for themselves. I'm trying to maintain a distinction between the body scans (which I think do have a place in airport security, but not as a step that everyone should have to pass through) and the "enhanced" pat-downs (which I, like many, regard as government-sanctioned sexual assault).)
Unless you live in a cave, you're aware of the TSA's new airport security screening procedures.
In a nutshell, depending on what airport you're going through, you might be subjected to a full-body scan and/o an "enhanced" pat-down.
The scans are of two types - Backscatter X-ray and Millimeter Wave scans. Both of these techniques work because the energy in the scan passes through fabric and reflects off of skin. The resulting images are rather like this:
y TSA-Released Sample of a Backscatter X-Ray Image
Images from millimeter-wave scans are somewhat less distinct, but even so, I can understand why folks are upset about this. (Personally, while I'm not thrilled about the scans, if the image above is as detailed as it gets, and if there are reasonable controls on the images, and if they weren't being used as a first layer of security on adults only, then I could probably live with them.)
Refusing the scan triggers the enhanced pat-down, which is gut-wrenchingly described here (women, when you read this, put yourself in the author's position. Men, imagine this being told to you by a woman you're close to, and remember that you, too, will likely have to go through a similar experience.):
Erin's Story. (Link via Amy)
One of the aspects to this that doesn't seem to get enough attention is that kids will be put through this as well. Consider that we've spent decades telling our children not to let strangers touch them, but now they may not be able to avoid that:
Advice from Sarina Behar Natkin about how to prepare your kids for a possible security pat-down. (Also via Amy)
And for survivors of rape or other sexual abuse, the experience may simply be unendurable:
Bug_girl at Skepchick has some thoughts, and Jezebel's Irin Carmon has some additional words on the matter.
Finally, MSNBC reports that a U.S. Airways flight attendant and cancer survivor was forced to show her breast prosthesis to a TSA agent during a security screening.
Incredibly, a number of news outlets are reporting the results of a CBS survey as showing that 81% of survey respondents support the enhanced security measures.
Only, they don't.
The 81% number from CBS Survey is in response to the following question: "Should Airports Use Full-Body X-Ray Machines?"
I suspect the survey numbers would have reflected a much lower level of approval to the following proposition: "Should TSA Agents Touch Travelers' (Including Minors) Genitalia As Part Of Security Pat-Downs?"
A big problem is that TSA appears to function primarily in a reactive mode - Richard Reid tries to light his shoes so everyone has to send their shoes through the scanner. Someone loads their underwear up with explosives, so TSA has to perform panty-checks. I'd wager that nobody will be carrying toner cartridges onto planes for a while. I shudder to think about what happens when someone gets taken off a plane with explosives hidden internally, since at that point you're basically up to full body-cavity searches.
The fact of the matter is that there are only a limited number of things you can do with a plane. The most relevant are:
- You can try to hijack it and crash it into something, but after 9/11, I think that's fairly unlikely to happen. I believe that locked cockpits and a generation of passengers who watched the Towers fall have cut that option out.
- You can blow it up. Preventing this is, at the heart, an explosives detection problem and not an identify-the-bad-guys problem. Better cargo screening (including carry-on cargo) is a huge part of the solution. Better techniques to detect explosive signatures on clothing and hands is another.
Pawing up under the skirts of female travelers and groping their breasts isn't going to improve security. Nor is juggling the testicles of male travelers. Nor will traumatizing children, cancer survivors, and rape victims. Those will, however, push the Bad Guys to figure out better ways to hide things.
Brilliant.
-Jay
Disclosure and Some Background
I'm working on a book review right now that's a bit of a departure from the sort of things that I usually read. I'll refrain from too many details just yet, but just to keep everything above-board, the author contacted me about writing a review and provided a review copy of the book on the strength of some previous posts of mine.
With that out of the way, I'll provide some background.
The book in question is about a fundamentalist Christian1 girl trying to sort out her love of science (specifically her interest in evolution) and her religious background.
This is a topic of personal significance to me for several reasons, but the one I'll focus on here is that nobody ever approaches the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of the kids.
Pretty much every forum or blog out there that routinely covers the topic deals with it from an adult perspective. When kids enter into the discussion at all, it's most often (these days) in the context of discussion about the Dover trial or of creationist school board candidates and textbook selections in Texas2, or somehow in connection with Ken Ham's Creation Museum.
While the adult-side discussions of evolution and creationism (and the broader discussions of science, religion, and whether or not they can coexist) are certainly important, even crucial, it's all too easy to forget that on the other side of the court cases and the school board elections and the museum exhibits are tens or hundreds of thousands (or more) of kids who are directly impacted by the outcomes of those events. In the U.S., most of those children will be from religious backgrounds that are at best ambivalent towards evolution and at worst outright hostile to the concept3.
Some of these kids may respond to material about evolution by simply ignoring it, or learning enough to pass a test, or challenging it with what they may believe are strong, well-reasoned objections that they read in a book or on a website somewhere4, but some of them will start to engage with the material, and that engagement will lead to some questions that may well fly headlong into the face of religious doctrine and foundational beliefs.
This is a difficult enough situation for adults to work through, and it's easy to suppose that it's much harder for kids, since the parents and family members that they would normally go to for answers might not be receptive to discussing the subject - few topics are more capable of dividing people than religious disagreements - but it's a situation that I suspect is more common than people might think, particularly as increasingly unfettered access to the internet means that more children will be exposed to different points of view than they have been in the past.
So, all that being said, I was intrigued by the opportunity to review a book that deals with the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of a child trying to sort things out. It should be interesting.
-Jay
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1Still wishing there was a word that was equally descriptive but less pejoratively loaded...
2Why Texas, you ask? It seems that Texas is a huge influence on textbook publishers because of the number of students in the state. Texas buys a lot of textbooks. Textbook publishers want to sell textbooks to Texas. Therefore curriculum decisions in Texas can influence the textbooks that are used in many other states.
3I'm operating on the assumption that parents teach their kids according to their own beliefs, and based on the numbers shown here.
4When I was active on some of the E/C forums, it wasn't uncommon to see the same arguments pop up nearly word-for-word in many different threads. Once you're familiar with them, it's even possible to tell where they originally came from.
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