Saving Our Troops

News: Evangelical singer Eric Horner is the darling of the American military, and the bane of non-Christian soldiers everywhere.

By Josh Harkinson

November 20, 2007

TOOLS E-mail article Print article BACKTALK E-mail the editor RELATED ARTICLES RE:ACTION

Early this month, Eric Horner, a Christian country-western singer, was preparing for a concert in North Carolina's Outer Banks when he received a phone call from the United States military. President George W. Bush had just announced that he would deliver a speech to graduating Army recruits at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in three days; the military wanted to know if Horner could play the gig.

Though Horner had an obligation to perform elsewhere a few hours later, a member of his church, determined that he meet the president, paid $6,000 to fly him to South Carolina on a charter jet. He sang a 90-minute set of hits from his Motivation CD, which includes songs such as "God Bless My Soldier Too" and "God Bless the USA." Afterward, says Horner, he, his wife, and the couple who chartered the plane were the only non-officers allowed to meet with the president. The singer, whose religion-infused performances have previously been part of boot camps at Fort Jackson, the largest Army basic-training base, thinks the general there most likely "pulled some strings."

The military has expressed rules against religious coercion, rooted in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Yet Horner, whose stated goal is to "introduce the lost to Christ ... in every worship service or concert presentation we do," has been lauded by top military commanders such as General David Petraeus and paid to perform at military events attended by thousands of troops. (Some officers dub the shows "combat multipliers" for their ability to boost morale, Horner says.) Horner insists that these shows have been secular in nature, but photographs, Internet message-board postings, and archived pages of the Eric Horner Ministries website indicate otherwise.

Many of his songs, such as, "United We’ll Stand When Together We Kneel," espouse a militant brand of fundamentalist Christianity that has rapidly been adopted by the military since 9/11. "We no longer have a Pentagon; it has become a Pentecostalgon," says Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is suing the military over what the organization deems the force-feeding of religion. "Our Department of Defense has become a contagion of unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian fascism," he says.

Horner generally wears a frizzy mullet, a sculpted red moustache, and a suit jacket over a T-shirt. He started out as a touring musician, and for the better part of a decade played guitar for the country star Lee Greenwood. But, according to his website, "God wouldn't leave him alone." Convinced that the lord wished him to minister with his music, in 2003 he recorded a gospel album called Prayer Warrior, which included a new rendition of his radio hit, "We Will Stand," a defiant, post-9/11 paean.

Later that year, the president of the USO, Edward A. Powell Jr., invited Horner to perform at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. As wounded troops were rolled on beds and wheelchairs into an open courtyard, Horner grew nervous about how they would receive some of the Prayer Warrior songs. In one track he sings that "Jesus came into this world to die for me and you" and that "those who will not hear his word" will be left behind while the chosen will ascend to heaven. "In D.C., you have to really be careful or you'll get shown the door if you start preaching," Horner later wrote in a letter published on a fan site. But, he added, "It was totally cool here. The Colonel never flinched when I started talking about the Lord and singing songs from the Prayer Warrior c.d. The troops reacted more to the message music than anything else."

It's no surprise that Horner takes a dim view of the separation of church and state. "It's a shame to me that all these rules are in place, that there are places where you just can't talk very much about God without getting somebody in trouble," he told me. Still, outside of chapel performances, Horner claims to limit the music performed at military shows—such as at Fort Jackson, Fort Benning, and Fort Gordon in Georgia—to more secular fare. "I've done my job well if I never mention God's name in one of those motivation concerts," he says.

But sometimes he can't resist. On September 29, Horner delved into his religious repertoire during a POW/MIA commemoration service attended by 5,000 troops at Fort Benning. The day after the show, a posting by Horner's wife on GoArmyParents.com listed among the songs Horner played the track "Press On," in which Horner exhorts troops to "press on in the name of Jesus." (In response to this story Horner asserted that the version of "Press On" sung to troops does not reference Jesus, and denied singing either version of the song at the show). Though Horner claimed on a listserv that attendance at the event was mandatory, Fort Benning spokesperson Elsie Jackson told me that it was strictly optional. She declined to say whether troops were notified in advance of its Christian content or whether playing "Press On" in the context of a POW/MIA commemoration was appropriate.

"It's not so much that what Horner is doing is wrong," Rutgers military law professor Beth Hillman said when I described his various events, "but if the military leadership is signed up only behind him [and not representatives of other religions], then it certainly creates the impression that they are endorsing a religion, and it's that endorsement that is really the problem." Other legal scholars call Horner's performances straightforward violations of the First Amendment. "You cannot use the military as religious experience and a religious environment," said American University law professor Eugene Fidell, who coauthored a textbook on military law with Hillman. "[Religion] is there to meet people's pastoral needs, period. And not to infuse the entire base and places other than the chapel with a religious aura." He added, "I think somebody should be chewed out for it."

It's hard to tell how many other "secular" Horner concerts have included religious songs, but evidence suggests that he has difficulty drawing a firm line. A promotional video shows him playing before a crowd of troops, flanked by an enlargement of his 2006 For God and Country album cover. Photos show concert booths offering Bibles and "United We'll Stand When Together We Kneel" T-shirts, which feature a cross superimposed over an American flag. "We have the opportunity to encourage and share the Gospel with about 10,000 troops at one time with this one," he told the Paducah Sun last year before a concert in Fort Jackson. In an April 2007 interview with a Christian website, he said, "We go in as a patriotic concert most of the time, but we are allowed by song to share our faith with them."

Horner has found military training bases to be fertile grounds for soul saving. "The enemy is raging on, we're under full attack / But we have the power in Jesus' name to bring our country back," he sings on his For God and Country CD. There's little doubt that the message resonates. "What an emotional morning," Horner's wife wrote on GoArmyParents.com after he held a chapel service at Fort Benning following the POW/MIA show. "We had a lot of tears and I am pleased to tell you that we had 37 salvations this morning!"

Despite Horner's evangelism—or because of it—he has received endorsements from a star-studded cast of military officers. After General Petraeus was appointed commander of U.S. military forces in Iraq, he sent Horner a letter of appreciation; it now appears on Horner’s website next to a photo of the general in uniform. On the same web page Colonel Tomas Hayden writes, "I agree with your assessment on how to impact these soldiers." Colonel Christopher Fulton adds, "The rest of America needs to hear your message—it would do them good!" And Colonel Lori Sussman calls Horner's work an exemplar of "our highest professional and patriotic traditions."

Military law prohibits soldiers (even generals) from endorsing political or religious organizations while in uniform, and Fidell, who sits on the board of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said Petraeus should "ask that they take the photograph down, because it looks like an endorsement." SPC Charles Espie, spokesman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq, which Petraeus leads, declined to comment on whether the use of the photograph by Horner was appropriate.

A stamp of approval for a militant Christian group by the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq will only fuel the assumptions of many people in the Islamic world that the United States is involved in a crusade, Mikey Weinstein says. Weinstein, who served as White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, has savaged Bush for describing the war in Iraq just that way and for failing to censure generals such as Jerry Boykin, who in 2002 told a congregation of Baptists in Oklahoma that America's enemies "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

Weinstein estimates that 30 percent of military personnel now ascribe to fundamentalist, dominionist Christianity, up from almost none in the 1980s. Since he founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in 2005, he has received more than 6,000 calls from military personnel whom he describes as "spiritual rape victims" of evangelicals. The military has mostly ignored their complaints of harassment and discrimination, he says, and he doubts it will take significant action to reign in Horner and other evangelicals unless forced to by a lawsuit, such as the one his foundation filed in September against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In fact, Espie, the Iraq Coalition spokesman, didn't see any problem with Horner's "United We Stand When Together We Kneel" track. "Is there something extreme or controversial with this guy Horner?" he asked. "I am just seeing an evangelical preacher that is really into 'supporting the troops.'"

Josh Harkinson is a reporter for Mother Jones.

Comments: