Air Force Chaplain Says She Was Fired

DENVER — A top Air Force Academy chaplain said Thursday she was fired for speaking up about anti-Semitism and other reports of religious intolerance among cadets and staff, including allegations that evangelical Christians wielded too much influence.

Capt. Melinda Morton said she was fired last week by her boss, Col. Michael Whittington, after he pressured her to deny a professor’s account of a religious service for new cadets last year.

Both chaplains had been scheduled to leave the school this year, with Whittington, the academy’s chief chaplain, retiring and Morton, his executive officer, scheduled for an overseas assignment. She called that an excuse to get rid of her.

“I believe I was fired and I believe the other staff would say I was fired and that was the point of doing it,” she said in a telephone interview.

The Air Force’s chief chaplain, Maj. Gen. Charles C. Baldwin, said Morton was not fired. Her duties have changed, however, because Whittington will retire in June, rather than in July as originally planned. Morton has been scheduled for reassignment to an Air Force base in Japan for some time, he said.

The academy said Whittington was unavailable because he was being interviewed for a Pentagon investigation into more than 50 complaints of religious intolerance in the last several years, including cases in which one Jewish cadet was reportedly told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

Morton said she was pressured to deny a report by Yale Divinity School professor Kristen Leslie that a chaplain told 600 cadets during basic training last year “to go back to their tents and tell their fellow cadets that those who are not born again will burn in the fires of hell.”

“I was told by Chaplain Whittington that if someone was going to be loyal to the chaplaincy and the Air Force, then someone would take a certain view of the Yale report and view Dr. Leslie as disloyal,” Morton said.

Morton also said a religious tolerance training program she helped create was watered down after Air Force officials screened it last fall. She said Baldwin ordered the removal of several video clips, including one from the Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List” and another about American Indian religion.

She said he also objected to dramatizations of interactions between cadets of different religions, saying they were unfair to Christians.

Morton recalled him asking: “I would just like to know why in your presentation Christians never win.”

“Our mouths fell open,” she said.

Baldwin said Thursday he believed Christians were portrayed too often as being at fault.

“I wanted it to be more representative of the religious scenarios that exist there,” he said. “I wanted more diverse scenarios, perhaps a Buddhist cadet asking about permission to get their religious needs met.”

He said the movie clip, which showed Nazi soldiers shooting Jews, was too extreme, and that the Indian religion clip was superfluous.

Academy officials said the tolerance program would evolve as officials study cadets’ reactions. The school recently started requiring staff members and all 4,300 cadets to take the class.

“We believe the class is teaching what we want it to teach, and that is: respect others’ beliefs,” an academy spokesman said.