Michigan company putting Bible quotes on military rifle scopes

ABC News has a disturbing report about a Michigan-based defense contractor, Trijicon, that supplies rifle scopes to the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps with inscriptions of Bible verses on them. The company, whose website makes clear the Christian viewpoint of its owners, has a contract to supply 800,000 such scopes to the military. In a press release, Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said the following:

“Obviously, Trijicon, the defense contractor, knew they were doing something wrong and trying to get away with it or they would not have encoded messages that, when used appropriately, need no disguise. The company should be ashamed of its actions, which do no favor either to the United States military or to Christianity; just the opposite. Messages of life and peace should not be prostituted by placing their imprint on instruments designed for death and war. “

In the buildup to the war in Iraq, the Bush administration and the Pentagon brass understood the historical dynamic of the relationship between the predominately Christian West and the predominately Muslim Middle East well enough to know that anything said or done that might send the message that this was a religious war between Christianity and Islam would only through gasoline on the fire and help Muslim extremist groups recruit mercenaries and suicide bombers. One of the first things Gen. Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the U.S. Central Command who oversaw the war in its early days, did was to issue General Order 1A, which forbid all proselytizing by soldiers and contractors in the war zone.

Unfortunately, there have been many violations of that order, including Christian groups in the United States sending tens of thousands of Bibles translated into the local languages to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan for them to hand out to the Muslims in the area. Evangelists were allowed to embed with a unit in Afghanistan, traveling with the soldiers as they made their rounds of the villages, handing out Bibles and preaching to the locals.

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is right when he says that things like this embolden the enemy, allowing “the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles.”

The government and the Pentagon both understand how dangerous such messages can be, but they need to take stronger action to stop them when they do occur. Given that they have a $100 million contract with Trijicon, they certainly have the leverage to make sure this does not happen again and that all future scopes will be religion-free.