"Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine."

The symbol you see beside this paragraph is the official U.S. military headstone designation for an atheist soldier. I've placed it here because CNN is reporting that Army Spc. Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq war veteran and atheist, is suing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Department of Defense for illegal religious discrimination. Spc. Hall claims that he was subjected to intense evangelical Christian proselytizing while on duty, and also passed up for promotions based on the view that his lack of visible piety would make him unfit for leadership. His lawsuit is also joined by Michael Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Weinstein and others have long alleged that there is a pervasive pattern of evangelical proselytization in the U.S. military, and CNN has periodically picked up on this story. Just last August, a scandal broke when several generals were found to have appeared in uniform inside the Pentagon for a promotional video by a group called "Christian Embassy." In Hall's recent lawsuit, the allegations of the videotape have again surfaced. All in all, from the Air Force Academy to General William Boykin, there does seem to be some pattern of evangelizing, although it is difficult for an outsider like myself to say how ingrained it is. When I served in the USAF Auxiliary-Civil Air Patrol many years ago, many of my fellow members and the chaplain were evangelicals. I once took our flight chaplain to task for misrepresenting the character of ancient Gnosticism during a pep talk, but that is a another story.

There are a number of intriguing angles to this issue. Clearly, one role of religion here is to help create "docile bodies," in this case a standing army of evangelical soldiers whose behavior and discipline are subject to the all-seeing Panopticon of Jehovah's omniscience and moral judgment. Also, the evangelical Christian nature of most military proselytizing potentially lends a propaganda victory to Al-Qaeda, which has long pushed the idea that the U.S. army is essentially modern "Crusader" force.

More importantly though, this lawsuit (and the accompanying media story) helps us think about what constitutes "atheism" in American culture. Legally and culturally speaking, "religion" is defined as a "set of beliefs." Notice how this is almost exactly equivalent to the notion of devotion expressed in Protestant Christianity. That is no accident. While other religions, like Roman Catholicism, Judaism and Islam emphasize correct practice and action (orthopraxis) over specific beliefs, Protestant Christianity, especially evangelical Protestantism, emphasizes correct belief (orthodoxy). Although radical, certainly some members of the Jewish community have embraced a form of atheism while maintaining the need for ritual action.

The culture of religion and religion of culture in the U.S. has thus been framed in such a way that even dissent against its dominant content (Protestant Christianity) still follows the form (lack of "belief in God" or belief in a "lack of God") established for public discourse. Of course, other characteristics, such as monotheism, are also at work here, since few atheists discuss their disbelief in polytheisms. Atheism in the U.S., generally speaking, is a form of negative or inverse Protestantism, since, like Protestantism, holds that belief is somehow the most fundamental and irreducible characteristic of "religion." This stands in contrast to Secular Humanism, which is generally focused on promoting a common ethical way of life, rather than denying the theistic claims of others.

This is certainly not the only way that atheism has been expressed in worldwide religious arenas. Nor is atheism a modern phenomenon. The ancient Charvakas (Wikipedia has the best link, unfortunately) developed a high degree of skepticism regarding Gods and such. Jainism, a living religion of 8 million people today, has produced some of the strongest anti-theistic critiques ever known, yet it would be inaccurate to call it atheistic in the modern EuroWestern sense, as it is not materialistic or atomistic, in contrast to the U.S military's symbol for atheists.

Although the lawsuit has no chance of challenging or causing Americans to rethink how they view "religion," it nonetheless tests the boundaries of religious and ethical inclusion. Politically speaking, atheists are some of the least trusted people in the United States. In fact, several state Constitutions appear to discriminate against atheists. In 1961, the Supreme Courts's landmark case "Torcaso V. Watkins" nullified these portions of the state Constitutions, but they remain interesting by way of demonstrating the legal and historical climate for religion in this country.

Hinduism Seen Through a Glass-Very Very Darkly

When attempting to keep track of current trends and events in religion, I am constantly reminded of the varying ways that different media sources frame those events. For example, in many newspapers of record across the world, there is no "Religion" section, as you often find in U.S. newspapers. Stories with overtly religious content are often instead covered under News or Culture. In some cases, newspapers that appear on first glance to cover religious stories instead offer a section of devotionals, as does Qatar's web-based edition of its English-language newspaper.

The upshot of this is that while religious events and stories in other countries often are not covered in the U.S. press, there is a category that consistently features such content. Unfortunately, that News Section is called "WEIRD." That's right. In an era where many complain that there is too much political correctness, one has to look long and hard to find coverage of worldwide religious events in mainstream news coverage, unless, like the Burmese protests or the Chinese conflict with Tibet, the event reaches a large critical magnitude.

The "Weird" section of news coverage is often where you will find material relating to Hinduism. Given the open admittance of ignorance that many Americans have concerning religious traditions such as Mormonism or Islam, one can begin to see that there is almost no framework in which to comprehend such a different set of cultural traditions and assumptions. Many Hindus are quite devoted, and see little use for a separation of religion from other everyday concerns. This is certainly not unique to Hinduism, as indigenous religion coverage also ends up in the "Weird" section as well.

There are movements afoot to change some of the cultural illiteracy behind this. Hindu leaders and institutions are asserting themselves in U.S. public discourse in ways unheard of since Swami Vivekananda lectured attendees at the Parliament of World Religions in the 1800's. Nevada Hindu leader and priest Rajan Zed, columnist for the Washington Post's "On Faith," gave a gentle Hindu invocation in the U.S. Senate last year, sparking an outburst from evangelical Christian protesters in attendance. Now Chaplain Zed has organized a series of protests against the film "The Love Guru," a new Mike Myers film suspiciously similar in tone to the 2002 film "The Guru." Other Hindu spiritual leaders have also condemned the film.

Chaplain Zed is not alone either in the interfaith world. The scatological and urinary humor replete in the movie has aroused the ire of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has condemned the movie, and in doing so won the praise of Zed. Prominent Hinduism scholar, Vasudha Narayanan, has also given some unfavorable comments about the movie's use and lampooning of Hinduism and its cultural symbology. At least in India, the movie may be banned.

When coverage of very real Hindu-Muslim tensions over sacred space are minimized in Western media, and even coverage of Hindu thoughts and opinions about the U.S. Presidential Election are covered under "Weird News" it is small wonder that the most coverage Hinduism gets involves spoof movies from popular comedic actors. Meanwhile, Hindu images have become part and parcel of American culture, from Jimi Hendrix's appropriation of Vishnu's universal form in Axis: Bold As Love to Kali lunchboxes and even Ganesha toilet seats, there is little sense of the way that Hinduism influences the daily lives of 900 million people. Except perhaps, through a taste of (or fear of) the exotic.

Natural Disasters Produce Religious Echoes

It has been one week since the earthquake centered in the Chinese province of Sichuan, in Southcentral China. In that time, some have wondered just how religion is playing a part in people's lives at this time. The death toll is currently around 50,000 and still rising, not to mention that there are over 4 million people displaced at the present time. This presents a real challenge to those who are unfamiliar with the Chinese religious landscape in times of relative peace, much more so in times of upheaval and disaster. Chinese religion is a set of multilayered accretions and tends to be defined in terms of social locations and small common rituals. What this means in practice is that four different megaflavors of ritual and ideological systems are existentially available for most people to draw on: Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and popular Polytheism. All of these have suffered under Chinese communism, but none of them have been eradicated by any means, and sub-varieties of each exist. Moreover, other missionary religions, such as Protestant Christianity and Islam, continue to make significant inroads into the Chinese population.

In the wake of the earthquake, one of the few reporters to take careful note of the religious activity in the area was NPR's Melissa Block. In particular she observed how parents of children, upon finding them dead, would build small altars, bring candles and incense, and burn paper money as they were wrapped up. In Chinese (and Japanese) indigenous religion, money is a regular element of sacrifice, not only because it represents the hard work and commitment of the earner, but also because capital is a form of power. The sacrifice of money is a transfer of power to the ancestral realm, as the children take their place in the spirit world. Just as in Confucian religion China is termed the 'Middle Kingdom,' responsible for carrying out the 'Mandate of Heaven,' so the otherworld in Chinese religion often resembles a mirror image of the sociopolitical world of China, complete with a 'Celestial Bureaucracy.'  Money and power grease the wheels of a Celestial Bureaucracy just as they do in the Middle Kingdom. A radical separation between this world and the Otherworld does not exist in Indigneous Chinese religion--differences between human persons and "Other-than-human" Persons (such as ancestors, nature spirits, and immortals) are ones of degree, rather than kind. Of course, the situation is different in non-indigenized missionary traditions of Christianity and Islam, although at least Protestant Christians, both pastors and laypersons, are facing theodicy questions of  their own.

This also helps to explain the massive anxiety being experienced by the Chinese government at this time,. In addition to the controversies over the Olympics and Tibet, for some the earthquake is a religious challenge to the legitimacy of the government. The "Mandate of Heaven," perhaps best thought of as a transcendental seal of political approval/legitimacy from the Celestial Bureaucracy, is a fickle gift at best, and tradition holds that natural disasters can be a sign that Heaven no longer favors the current regime. Thus, for this reason, as well as many others, it behooves the Chinese government to spare no expense in confronting the tragedy in both religious terms and purely humanistic ones. In this they may have succeeded, because the response of the Chinese people, if news reports are to be believed, has been an outpouring of nationalist fervor, not unlike that which the United States experienced after September 11th. Of course, some in the United States have also interpreted the occurrence of either human-made or natural catastrophes here in religious terms as well.