Respect for Soldiers
Art Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Special to United Methodist Insight | June 13, 2025
I do not make this statement lightly: this past week, fascism arrived in America. The moment came when Trump mobilized the Marines to put down protests against the ICE raids in Los Angeles. It was bad enough that he took over the state Guard for this purpose, but it is absolutely unacceptable for our outward-facing armed forces to be used against our own civilians, as is common in authoritarian regimes. All of us, across the spectrum of political opinion, must protest this with vigor.
Jim Burklo Ident 2023
On Tuesday, Roberta and I went to downtown LA to participate in an interfaith vigil against mass deportation. For miles, we drove through the heart of the city to Grand Park, without incident and without any sign of trouble or damage. It was a big, peaceful, spiritually-uplifting event. I stood on the platform with a big and diverse group of faith leaders. The mayor spoke and prayed calmly and eloquently. In the crowd there were a few young folks dressed in black with black head coverings. But they were surrounded by peaceful people: there was no trouble for them to exploit. The prayers and messages stirred our souls. The churches and temples and mosques and gurdwaras of LA are united in defense of our immigrant neighbors. There have been pockets of violence and destruction in the city, which LAPD has managed without need of outside help.
The people of LA, the people of California, will not be subjugated by Trump, will not be intimidated, and will not stop showing up in support of long-term, law-abiding migrants when ICE barges in. And we won't let our brothers and sisters in uniform be manipulated for political purposes.
We must speak with one voice against turning our men and women in uniform into partisan pawns of an oligarch. They did not sign up for this when they took their oath to defend the Constitution. Trump recently spoke to soldiers at Ft Bragg and whipped them up to boo against the Democrats – a grotesque violation of military rules against the politicization of our armed forces, whose job it is to defend all of us, regardless of our political orientations. MAGA swag was on sale at the event, on the Army base property.
Nor did our soldiers assent to a religious dogma when they volunteered for service. But that is what is now being imposed on them. On May 21, the Secretary of Defense convened a fundamentalist Christian worship in the Pentagon during work hours. The pastor of Pete Hegseth's church led the service. The church belongs to a network led by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who advocates for theocratic domination of government and society. (Read all about him here... he wants voting to be by household, with the male head casting the vote.) Hegseth offered no alternative worship or prayer service to include the very many other faiths represented in our nation's military.
The message is loud and clear: if you want to get ahead in Trump's military, you'll need to at least pay lip service to fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. This has been implicit in many quarters of the military for a long time. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been struggling to assure true religious pluralism in the armed forces for decades. But the Trump administration is taking the country backwards. Hegseth is making the implicit illegal presumption explicit.
The best way we can show respect to the people in uniform by whom we may be confronted on Saturday, June 14 is to protest the fascist regime that is now giving them orders. Wave the US flag, smile at them, and speak truth to the power that is abusing them, just as it abuses women, trans and queer folks, immigrants, and the rest of us!