It's Proselytime!

Just a quick post on a breaking scandal, courtesy of Al Jazeera English: apparently US soldiers posted in Afghanistan have been conspiring to proselytize while on duty, a gross violation of the US Army Code of Conduct. Al Jazeera reporter Brian Hughes caught footage of Lieutenant-colonel Gary Hensley,  a military chaplain urging soldiers to spread the Good News. In his words:

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

This isn't the first time the US Army's policy of "getting people into heaven, one way or another" has been seen. In February, the US Army approved the embedding of two self-proclaimed "gonzo missionaries", presenters of a tv program called Travel The Road. The program follows Tim Scott and Will Decker as they plumb the furthest reaches of the poor-world, where they tape themselves trying to convert increasingly confused natives. 

This caused a mini-scandal, as again, the US Army Code of Conduct mandates that only journalists be embedded. Given that the only pretensions Mr. Scott and Mr. Decker had to journalism were that they carried cameras around and called themselves "producers of dynamic media", this was seen to be somewhat in contravention to the strictures of the US Army.

Right, back to work.