In what is--sadly--yet another case of the extent of which blatant prosyletisation is tolerated in the modern US military, a recent incident where members of the US Marine Corps were handing out coins to persons in Fallujah with John 3:16 on one side and "where will you spend eternity?" on the other shows that dominionism can even be potentially a risk to national security.

One thing that has not yet been revealed in this incident--which has already led to the suspension of at least one Marine--is the source of the coins, a fundamentalist "Bible church" which increasingly has embraced both war imagery--and America's fighting men.

The group behind the incident--one of a series of incidents of blatant dominionist prosyletisation of Iraqis--is a disturbing example of both targeting of the military and the increasing military imagery of certain "Christian Nationalist" groups.

A good friend of mine (and incidentially, one of the folks who first convinced me to write about what I'd seen "behind the lines" in the Joel's Army movement) is probably the first to have noted the actual source of the coins in the latest scandal. Suprisingly, this hasn't been brought up before--so feel free to distribute thsi and distribute it widely.

As it turns out, one group of folks promoting these "bible coins" specifically to Marines are a group calling themselves Basic Training Bible Ministries and specifically a group calling itself Osborne Coinage:

The Rest of the Story

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/1...2429/260/526548

One of the first groups on the ground--and one of the more notorious offenders in regard to the use of "bait and switch" evangelism, especially in regards to relief efforts--was Frank Graham's Samaritan's Purse (which made plans as soon as 2003 to enter the country). The SBC, the Assemblies of God, and other groups also moved in quite rapidly after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

Samaritan's Purse's actions have been especially odious. Among other things, the group literally described the attempted genocide of Iraq's Kurdish population as a "missionary opportunity"; nevermind that Kurdish people are already a marginalised people and that one of the more heavily demonised religious minorities in Iraq exists among the Kurdish people. As it is, Samaritan's Purse's leader stated that Islam was a "wicked and violent" religion in such terms that even George W. Bush didn't want to touch that statement with a 40-foot barge pole.

Samaritan's Purse also has a well-documented history of forcing people to be prosyletised to as a condition of disaster aid and especially targeting children to do so--including gift boxes given to children with religious toys. In fact, the "bait and switch" extended to adults as well; Samaritan's Purse ended up wearing out its welcome with the Red Cross during Gulf War I (by pulling stunts where it required people to watch "The Jesus Film" to receive aid at a Jordanian refugee center) and even even managed to wear out the welcome of none other than Dear Abby when the group essentially spammed a service Abby had set up to mail soldiers on base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia--spamming them with prosyletisation materials in Arabic, which could have gotten our soldiers in serious trouble with their host country:

read it all here -

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/2/165645/5878