Brig. Gen John Weida

The United States Air Force Academy is too Christian and an atmosphere of religious intolerance pervades the school, a report has claimed.

Instructors have been ordered to keep quiet about their faith and cadets have been told not to use government e-mail to send religious messages after a secularist advocacy group sent a report, highly critical of the Academy, to the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State claimed: “There is a general climate of religious coercion and official hostility toward those who do not practise evangelical Christianity”.

Christian leaders reject this premise, seeing the assault on public professions of faith as an attempt to drive Christianity from public life.

In a letter to Mr Rumsfeld, the group’s executive director, Barry Lynn wrote: “There is a clear preference for Christianity at the academy, so that everyone else feels like a second-class citizen.”

Acting Secretary of the Air Force Michael Dominguez responded to the report last week by creating a commission of inquiry to review the charges. Cadets and instructors have since been ordered to attend a 50-minute sensitivity training class entitled Respecting the Spiritual Values of all People. Cadets have been warned not to use academy bulletin boards to advertise their faith.

Complaints in the report include incidents of Jew-baiting and taunting of non-Christian students by other students. “Cadets [who] declined to attend chapel after dinner during Basic Cadet Training were made to suffer humiliation by being placed by upper-class cadet staff into a ‘Heathen Flight’ and marched back to their dormitories.”

The report said that the use of grace before meals and Christian invocations at awards ceremonies coerced religion. Commandant of Cadets, Brig Gen John Weida, was attacked for telling cadets their first responsibility “is to their God”.

It accused General Weida of mingling character development with Christianity. During a chapel service, he reportedly lectured from Christ’s parable of building a house on a rock, stressing the importance of a solid foundation for one’s faith.

“Gen Weida then instructed cadets that, whenever he uses the phrase ‘Airpower!’ they should respond with the phrase ‘Rock Sir!’ thus invoking the parable,” the report said. “Gen Weida advised the cadets that, when asked by their classmates about the meaning of the call and response, the cadets should use the opportunity to discuss their Christian faith.”

The report was based upon interviews with 15 cadets and staff, who spoke to a Yale Divinity School group invited by the academy over one week in 2003.

The Air Force Academy has forbidden cadets and staff to speak to the press during the investigation. However, members of the Air Force Academy community contacted by The Church of England Newspaper see the investigation as part of an on-going assault on Christianity by secularists and a denial of free-speech rights.

One instructor told us the investigations were “payback” by liberals enraged with the Bush Administration—a survey of 4,000 full-time and part-time troops shortly before the November election found 73 per cent supporting President Bush and 18 per cent Senator Kerry. Military officers and evangelical Christians were among those constituencies who gave the President his highest level of support.

The Rev Don Armstrong, rector of the 2,400-member Grace & St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs, the home parish for a number of Academy’s instructors, was sceptical of claims of institutionalised religious bigotry.

“This is an intrusion from an outside group who looks at any vulnerable operation to terrorise its leadership with secularist standards that religion is private and only permissible when doing social work and blessing the unblessable.”