A surefire way to stir up outrage is to claim that something is a long-standing tradition and then say that this cherished tradition is being stolen away. And this is exactly what Hiram Sasser and Mike Berry of First Liberty Institute did in their April 17 op-ed titled, “Leave POW remembrance tables alone.”
Regarding the “tradition” of a Bible being included among the items on prisoner-of-war and missing-in-action tables, they wrote:
Now, that would make you think that a Bible has always been included on POW/MIA tables, going all the way back to the Vietnam War era when the tradition of setting these tables first began, right? Wrong.
The original POW/MIA table items did not include a Bible. And neither does the American Legion’s version. The American Legion, which adopted a resolution in 1985 calling for a POW/MIA table at all of its official meetings, includes in its official Chaplain’s Manual a list of the items to be included on the table and a script explaining the meaning of each item. The Bible is not included among the items.
Does this make the American Legion an anti-religious organization? Of course not. The American Legion is a very religious organization. It just didn’t add a Bible to something that a Bible was never a part of.
But, in their op-ed, Sasser and Berry didn’t mention the American Legion. They cited another organization as their sole authority, writing:
But this so-called “tradition” of including a Bible didn’t emerge until three decades after the original tradition of the POW/MIA table was begun.
After an extensive search of newspapers, books, and other sources going back five decades, the earliest appearance that I’ve found of the Bible being added was in a 1999 issue of the VFW Ladies Auxiliary magazine. And, according to the Wayback Machine on archive.org, which archives previous versions of websites, the script including the Bible didn’t appear on the National League of POW/MIA Families website until early 2000.
The VFW Ladies Auxiliary and National League of POW/MIA Families scripts are nearly identical, with one obviously having been copied from the other. So, although it is unclear which organization created it, what is clear is that this “tradition” of adding a Bible is a relatively recent invention of one of these organizations. Prior to this, it was the American Legion’s version that was the standard.
In the military, the inclusion of a Bible on POW/MIA tables has been on and off. According to various Air Force manuals, the Bible was in the script in 2001, taken out by 2007, then back in again by 2012. The current version, issued in 2013, is a variation of the National League of POW/MIA Families script, minus the “founded as one nation under God” wording and making it optional to include a generic “bound text” as an inclusive symbol of a “book of faith” rather than the book specifically being a Bible.
The First Liberty Institute’s claim that the Bible is “a common symbol of faith” is ridiculous. Would they expect Christians to view a Quran or Guru Granth Sahib as “a common symbol of faith”?
But the current Air Force version of using a generic book to represent any book of faith, which was the solution that the Veterans Affairs clinic in Youngstown, Pa., came up with that was completely acceptable to the clients of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation at that facility, should be an acceptable compromise to those on both sides of this issue.
And as for First Liberty’s characterization of MRFF as an “anti-religious liberty outfit,” nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, 96 percent of MRFF’s clients are Christians, as are the overwhelming majority of those who have come to MRFF for assistance in getting Bibles removed from POW/MIA tables.
Chris Rodda is a senior research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and author or “Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History” and “Debunking David Barton’s Jefferson Lies.”
