Wiccans in the Military
For Gods and Country
The Army Chaplain Who Wanted to Switch to Wicca? Transfer Denied.
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 19, 2007; C01
SCHERTZ, Tex.
The night wind pushes Don Larsen's green robe against his lanky
frame. A circle of torches lights his face.
"The old gods are standing near!" calls a retired Army
intelligence officer.
"To watch the turning of the year!" replies the wife of a soldier
wounded in Iraq.
"What night is this?" calls a former fighter pilot.
"It is the night of Imbolc," responds Larsen, a former Army
chaplain.
Of the 16 self-described witches who have gathered on this Texas
plain to celebrate a late-winter pagan festival with dancing,
chanting, chili and beer, all but two are current or former
military personnel. Each has a story. None can compete with
Larsen's.
A year ago, he was a Pentecostal Christian minister at Camp
Anaconda, the largest U.S. support base in Iraq. He sent home
reports on the number of "decisions" -- soldiers committing their
lives to Christ -- that he inspired in the base's Freedom Chapel.
But inwardly, he says, he was torn between Christianity's
exclusive claims about salvation and a "universalist streak" in
his thinking. The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in
Samarra, which collapsed the dome of a 1,200-year-old holy site
and triggered a widening spiral of revenge attacks between Shiite
and Sunni militants, prompted a decision of his own.
"I realized so many innocent people are dying again in the name of
God," Larsen says. "When you think back over the
Catholic-Protestant conflict, how the Jews have suffered, how some
Christians justified slavery, the Crusades, and now the fighting
between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, I just decided I'm done. . . . I
will not be part of any church that unleashes its clergy to preach
that particular individuals or faith groups are damned."
Larsen's private crisis of faith might have remained just that,
but for one other fateful choice. He decided the religion that
best matched his universalist vision was Wicca, a blend of
witchcraft, feminism and nature worship that has ancient pagan
roots.
On July 6, he applied to become the first Wiccan chaplain in the
U.S. armed forces, setting off an extraordinary chain of
events. By year's end, his superiors not only denied his request
but also withdrew him from Iraq and removed him from the chaplain
corps, despite an unblemished service record.
Adherents of Wicca, one of the nation's fastest-growing religions,
contend that Larsen is a victim of unconstitutional
discrimination. They say that Wicca, though recognized as a
religion by federal courts and the Internal Revenue Service, is
often falsely equated with devil worship.
"Institutionalized bigotry and discriminatory actions . . . have
crossed the line this time," says David L. Oringderff, a retired
Army intelligence officer who is an elder in the Sacred Well
Congregation, the Texas-based Wiccan group that Larsen joined.
Larsen, 44, blames only himself. He said he was naive to think he
could switch from Pentecostalism to Wicca in the same way that
chaplains routinely change from one Christian denomination to
another.
Chaplain Kevin L. McGhee, Larsen's superior at Camp Anaconda,
believes a "grave injustice" was done. McGhee, a Methodist,
supervised 26 chaplains on the giant base near Balad, 50 miles
north of Baghdad. He says Larsen was the best.
"I could go on and on about how well he preached, the care he
gave," McGhee says. "What happened to Chaplain Larsen -- to be
honest, I think it's political. A lot of people think Wiccans are
un-American, because they are ignorant about what Wiccans do."
What Larsen does is eclectic, to say the least. Some spiritual
seekers perpetually try new things, never finding one they
like. Larsen has sampled many faiths, and liked them all.
Raised as a Catholic, he became a born-again Christian at a Billy
Graham crusade and began preaching at a Baptist church in
Garrison, Mont., while still in high school. Later, he pastored
two messianic congregations, which blend Jewish traditions with a
belief in the divinity of Jesus.
In church, he spoke in tongues. In private, he read heavily in
Buddhism.
He learned about Wicca, ironically, from the Army, in an overview
of various faiths at the Chaplain's Basic Training Course at Fort
Jackson, S.C., in 2005.
Sporting a military high-top haircut and Converse high-top
sneakers, Larsen appears closer to 24 than 44, and it is easy to
see why he was popular with the troops. Earnest without appearing
pious, he tears up when he describes a chaplain's duty to ensure
the dignified handling of soldiers' remains.
In a single sentence, he links Native American sweat lodges, Saint
Francis of Assisi and the Hindu leader Amma -- the common thread
being his reverence for each. When he mentions the late
Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, he quickly adds the
traditional honorific "of blessed memory."
He cites Dr. Seuss as readily as the Bible.
"If these guys," he says, referring to Wiccans, "had told me that
'We are the one path, the Star-bellied Sneetches, the true vessels
of enlightenment for the lost world' -- I'm so tired of all that,
I would not even have slowed down to take a second look."
He says he understands why strangers might think "a mortar round
must have landed too close to this guy." He recalls, with a
chuckle, that a friend once gave him a diagnosis of "multiple
religions disorder."
But the struggle between his ardent Christianity and his
willingness to see equal value in other faiths was no joke -- it
was a painful, internal conflict that came to a head after he
arrived in Iraq in early 2006.
"In Iraq, I saw what was happening in the name of Allah and I
thought, 'This has got to stop.' . . . The common core of all
religions, we're saying the same stuff," he says. "I just decided
that the rest of my life I will encourage people to seek out the
light however they see fit, through the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah,
the writings of prophets and sages -- whatever path propels them
to be good and honorable and upright."
Larsen now draws freely from all those traditions. He meditates
daily, concentrating on the seven chakras that Hindus believe are
the body's centers of energy.
At times, he tries to free his mind from his physical being, a New
Age practice he calls "astral travel." With his 19-year-old
daughter and 14-year-old son, he reads the Hebrew scriptures and
the New Testament. Following the Wiccan calendar, he observes
eight major holidays tied to the seasons and the right times to
plant, harvest and tend a flock. Imbolc, for example, is when
gestating ewes begin producing milk, signaling that winter is
almost over.
Wearing the kind of fanciful robes you might see at a Renaissance
fair, Larsen and other members of the Sacred Well Congregation
greeted Imbolc this year in a circle of stones behind Oringderff's
ranch house in Schertz, near San Antonio. Under a pair of gnarled
mesquite trees was an altar; in the middle of the circle, a
bonfire.
Eight women and eight men, mostly middle-aged couples, held
hands. They danced in circles and figure eights, passed a large
goblet of wine and pressed closer to the flames as the night grew
chilly.
There was no nudity. No blood. No mention of the devil.
But there was a ceremonial dagger, a dish of salt, burning incense
and a 35-minute service full of abstruse allusions to Celtic and
Norse gods and goddesses. The part assigned to Larsen included
such lines as: "Hail Sudri, and the Spirits and Creatures of Fire!
Guardians of the Southern Gates of Gorias. We call upon
you. . . . Salamanders of Fire, join us here!"
Some Wiccans believe these rites are truly ancient. Academic
experts think they were invented in the 20th century, chiefly by
Gerald Gardner, a British novelist and folklorist who claimed he
was initiated into a secret coven in the Hampshire woods in 1939.
Larsen shares the scholars' skepticism. But he also contends that
Wicca is "as close as you can get to the standing stones and
sacred wells and river spirits" of pre-Christian Europe.
The Sacred Well Congregation, which has about 950 members across
the country, prides itself on being an intellectual group. Ron
Schaefer, a retired lieutenant colonel who flew F-4s and F-16s
during a 26-year Air Force career, says Wicca "meshes perfectly
with string theory." Dea Mikeworth, wife of an Army sergeant
wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, says it reflects "archetypes
in the collective unconscious."
But Larsen is unabashed about the faith's central appeal.
"You can't intellectually talk about witchcraft. You gotta show
up," he says. "What Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a lot of us
universalists think is, people need the magical side, the
mythological side, of religion.
"We don't need more Calvinist rationalizing. We need mystery. We
need horizons. We need journeys."
Something about Wicca clearly fills a niche. According to the
American Religious Identification Survey, a widely respected
tally, the number of Wiccans in the United States rose 17-fold --
from 8,000 to 134,000 -- between 1990 and 2001.
By the Pentagon's count, there are now 1,511 self-identified
Wiccans in the Air Force and 354 in the Marines. No figures are
available for the much larger Army and Navy. Wiccan groups
estimate they have at least 4,000 followers in uniform, but they
say many active-duty Wiccans hide their beliefs to avoid ridicule
and discrimination. Two incidents may bear them out.
When a Texas newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, reported in
1999 that a circle of Wiccans was meeting regularly at Lackland
Air Force Base near San Antonio, then-Gov. George W. Bush told
ABC's "Good Morning America": "I don't think witchcraft is a
religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this
and decide against it."
Eight years later, the circle at Lackland is still going strong,
and the military permits Wiccans to worship on U.S. bases around
the world. But when Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart was killed in action
in Afghanistan in 2005, the Department of Veterans' Affairs
refused to allow a Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a
circle, to be inscribed on his memorial at the Fernley, Nev.,
veterans' cemetery. Ultimately, Nevada officials approved the
pentacle anyway.
For Wiccans seeking public acceptance, obtaining a military
chaplain is the next major goal. More than 130 religious groups
have endorsed, or certified, chaplains to serve in uniform. But
efforts by Wiccan organizations to join the list have repeatedly
been denied by the Pentagon.
Lt. Col. Randall C. Dolinger, spokesman for the Army's Chief of
Chaplains office, said the Sacred Well Congregation has met all
the requirements to become an endorser, except one: It has not
presented a "viable candidate." The group's previous nominee was
turned away because his eyesight was not correctable to 20-20.
When Larsen came along last spring, Sacred Well's leaders thought
they finally had someone the military could not possibly reject: a
physically fit 6-foot-4 clergyman originally ordained as a
Southern Baptist minister, who holds a master's degree from New
Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Moreover, Larsen had spent
10 years as an officer in the National Guard, finished near the
top of his class in chaplain's training and was already serving as
a chaplain in Iraq.
But Oringderff said that his group, like Larsen, underestimated
the institutional resistance. "Each time we advance to a scoring
position, they change the rules," he said.
Once chaplains are accepted into the military, they are paid,
trained and deployed by the government. But they remain
subservient to their endorsers, who can cancel their endorsements
at any time.
That is what happened to Larsen, according to unclassified
military e-mail messages obtained by The Washington Post.
When the Sacred Well Congregation applied on July 31 to become
Larsen's new endorser, the Army initially cited a minor
bureaucratic obstacle: It could not find a copy of his previous
endorsement from the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, a
Dallas-based association of Pentecostal churches.
The following day, a senior Army chaplain telephoned the Full
Gospel Churches to ask for the form and, in the process, disclosed
Larsen's plan to join Sacred Well.
Within hours, the Pentecostal group sent Larsen an urgent e-mail
saying it had received a "strange call" from the Army Chief of
Chaplains office. The caller "mentioned that a Donald M. Larsen
. . . was requesting a change-over . . . to Wiccans," the e-mail
said. "Please communicate with this office, as we do not believe
it is you."
Larsen pleaded in his reply for the Full Gospel Churches not to
cancel his endorsement until he could complete the switch. "Being
here in Iraq has caused me to reflect on a great many
things. However, as long as CFCG holds my endorsement, I teach and
practice nothing contrary to your faith and practice," he wrote,
adding: "It is all about the soldiers, please help me to continue
to minister to them during this transition."
The Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches immediately severed its
ties to Larsen. The Sacred Well Congregation could not renew his
papers, because it was not yet an official endorser. Lacking an
ecclesiastical endorsement, Larsen was ordered to cease
functioning immediately as a chaplain, and the Pentagon quickly
pulled him out of Iraq.
Dolinger, the Army Chief of Chaplains spokesman, denied that any
discrimination was involved. "What you're really dealing with is
more of a personal drama, what one person has been through and the
choices he's made. Plus, the fact that the military does have
Catch-22s," he said.
Jim Ammerman, a retired Army colonel who is president and founder
of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, acknowledges that there
is a longstanding agreement among endorsers not to summarily pull
the papers of a chaplain who wants to make a valid switch.
"But if it's not a valid thing, all bets are off," Ammerman says,
adding that Wiccans "run around naked in the woods" and "draw
blood with a dagger" in their ceremonies. "You can't do that in
the military. It's against good order and discipline."
That description drew a laugh from Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson,
the Air Force's deputy chief of chaplains. "He's right, we can't
have that in the military, but I don't think we've had any of that
in the military," Richardson says.
Richardson says there are simply too few Wiccans in the military
to justify a full-time chaplain.
According to Pentagon figures, however, some faiths with similarly
small numbers in the ranks do have chaplains. Among the nearly
2,900 clergy on active duty are 41 Mormon chaplains for 17,513
Mormons in uniform, 22 rabbis for 4,038 Jews, 11 imams for 3,386
Muslims, six teachers for 636 Christian Scientists, and one
Buddhist chaplain for 4,546 Buddhists.
Since returning from Iraq and visiting Texas, Larsen has gone home
to Melba, Idaho. Divorced since 2004, he is living with his
teenage children and serving as an artillery officer in the Idaho
Army National Guard.
He said he knew from the start that converting to Wicca would
raise questions but never expected the reaction to be so fierce.
"It's not my place as a little captain to challenge the decisions
or policies or motives or actions of my superiors," he says. "I
got to come home and resume my career in the Guard. I'm very
thankful for that. Understand, it's all I've got left. . . . This
was a big blunder. I barely survived it. I don't have another one
in me."
The Army Chaplain Who Wanted to Switch to Wicca? Transfer Denied.
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 19, 2007; C01
SCHERTZ, Tex.
The night wind pushes Don Larsen's green robe against his lanky
frame. A circle of torches lights his face.
"The old gods are standing near!" calls a retired Army
intelligence officer.
"To watch the turning of the year!" replies the wife of a soldier
wounded in Iraq.
"What night is this?" calls a former fighter pilot.
"It is the night of Imbolc," responds Larsen, a former Army
chaplain.
Of the 16 self-described witches who have gathered on this Texas
plain to celebrate a late-winter pagan festival with dancing,
chanting, chili and beer, all but two are current or former
military personnel. Each has a story. None can compete with
Larsen's.
A year ago, he was a Pentecostal Christian minister at Camp
Anaconda, the largest U.S. support base in Iraq. He sent home
reports on the number of "decisions" -- soldiers committing their
lives to Christ -- that he inspired in the base's Freedom Chapel.
But inwardly, he says, he was torn between Christianity's
exclusive claims about salvation and a "universalist streak" in
his thinking. The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in
Samarra, which collapsed the dome of a 1,200-year-old holy site
and triggered a widening spiral of revenge attacks between Shiite
and Sunni militants, prompted a decision of his own.
"I realized so many innocent people are dying again in the name of
God," Larsen says. "When you think back over the
Catholic-Protestant conflict, how the Jews have suffered, how some
Christians justified slavery, the Crusades, and now the fighting
between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, I just decided I'm done. . . . I
will not be part of any church that unleashes its clergy to preach
that particular individuals or faith groups are damned."
Larsen's private crisis of faith might have remained just that,
but for one other fateful choice. He decided the religion that
best matched his universalist vision was Wicca, a blend of
witchcraft, feminism and nature worship that has ancient pagan
roots.
On July 6, he applied to become the first Wiccan chaplain in the
U.S. armed forces, setting off an extraordinary chain of
events. By year's end, his superiors not only denied his request
but also withdrew him from Iraq and removed him from the chaplain
corps, despite an unblemished service record.
Adherents of Wicca, one of the nation's fastest-growing religions,
contend that Larsen is a victim of unconstitutional
discrimination. They say that Wicca, though recognized as a
religion by federal courts and the Internal Revenue Service, is
often falsely equated with devil worship.
"Institutionalized bigotry and discriminatory actions . . . have
crossed the line this time," says David L. Oringderff, a retired
Army intelligence officer who is an elder in the Sacred Well
Congregation, the Texas-based Wiccan group that Larsen joined.
Larsen, 44, blames only himself. He said he was naive to think he
could switch from Pentecostalism to Wicca in the same way that
chaplains routinely change from one Christian denomination to
another.
Chaplain Kevin L. McGhee, Larsen's superior at Camp Anaconda,
believes a "grave injustice" was done. McGhee, a Methodist,
supervised 26 chaplains on the giant base near Balad, 50 miles
north of Baghdad. He says Larsen was the best.
"I could go on and on about how well he preached, the care he
gave," McGhee says. "What happened to Chaplain Larsen -- to be
honest, I think it's political. A lot of people think Wiccans are
un-American, because they are ignorant about what Wiccans do."
What Larsen does is eclectic, to say the least. Some spiritual
seekers perpetually try new things, never finding one they
like. Larsen has sampled many faiths, and liked them all.
Raised as a Catholic, he became a born-again Christian at a Billy
Graham crusade and began preaching at a Baptist church in
Garrison, Mont., while still in high school. Later, he pastored
two messianic congregations, which blend Jewish traditions with a
belief in the divinity of Jesus.
In church, he spoke in tongues. In private, he read heavily in
Buddhism.
He learned about Wicca, ironically, from the Army, in an overview
of various faiths at the Chaplain's Basic Training Course at Fort
Jackson, S.C., in 2005.
Sporting a military high-top haircut and Converse high-top
sneakers, Larsen appears closer to 24 than 44, and it is easy to
see why he was popular with the troops. Earnest without appearing
pious, he tears up when he describes a chaplain's duty to ensure
the dignified handling of soldiers' remains.
In a single sentence, he links Native American sweat lodges, Saint
Francis of Assisi and the Hindu leader Amma -- the common thread
being his reverence for each. When he mentions the late
Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, he quickly adds the
traditional honorific "of blessed memory."
He cites Dr. Seuss as readily as the Bible.
"If these guys," he says, referring to Wiccans, "had told me that
'We are the one path, the Star-bellied Sneetches, the true vessels
of enlightenment for the lost world' -- I'm so tired of all that,
I would not even have slowed down to take a second look."
He says he understands why strangers might think "a mortar round
must have landed too close to this guy." He recalls, with a
chuckle, that a friend once gave him a diagnosis of "multiple
religions disorder."
But the struggle between his ardent Christianity and his
willingness to see equal value in other faiths was no joke -- it
was a painful, internal conflict that came to a head after he
arrived in Iraq in early 2006.
"In Iraq, I saw what was happening in the name of Allah and I
thought, 'This has got to stop.' . . . The common core of all
religions, we're saying the same stuff," he says. "I just decided
that the rest of my life I will encourage people to seek out the
light however they see fit, through the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah,
the writings of prophets and sages -- whatever path propels them
to be good and honorable and upright."
Larsen now draws freely from all those traditions. He meditates
daily, concentrating on the seven chakras that Hindus believe are
the body's centers of energy.
At times, he tries to free his mind from his physical being, a New
Age practice he calls "astral travel." With his 19-year-old
daughter and 14-year-old son, he reads the Hebrew scriptures and
the New Testament. Following the Wiccan calendar, he observes
eight major holidays tied to the seasons and the right times to
plant, harvest and tend a flock. Imbolc, for example, is when
gestating ewes begin producing milk, signaling that winter is
almost over.
Wearing the kind of fanciful robes you might see at a Renaissance
fair, Larsen and other members of the Sacred Well Congregation
greeted Imbolc this year in a circle of stones behind Oringderff's
ranch house in Schertz, near San Antonio. Under a pair of gnarled
mesquite trees was an altar; in the middle of the circle, a
bonfire.
Eight women and eight men, mostly middle-aged couples, held
hands. They danced in circles and figure eights, passed a large
goblet of wine and pressed closer to the flames as the night grew
chilly.
There was no nudity. No blood. No mention of the devil.
But there was a ceremonial dagger, a dish of salt, burning incense
and a 35-minute service full of abstruse allusions to Celtic and
Norse gods and goddesses. The part assigned to Larsen included
such lines as: "Hail Sudri, and the Spirits and Creatures of Fire!
Guardians of the Southern Gates of Gorias. We call upon
you. . . . Salamanders of Fire, join us here!"
Some Wiccans believe these rites are truly ancient. Academic
experts think they were invented in the 20th century, chiefly by
Gerald Gardner, a British novelist and folklorist who claimed he
was initiated into a secret coven in the Hampshire woods in 1939.
Larsen shares the scholars' skepticism. But he also contends that
Wicca is "as close as you can get to the standing stones and
sacred wells and river spirits" of pre-Christian Europe.
The Sacred Well Congregation, which has about 950 members across
the country, prides itself on being an intellectual group. Ron
Schaefer, a retired lieutenant colonel who flew F-4s and F-16s
during a 26-year Air Force career, says Wicca "meshes perfectly
with string theory." Dea Mikeworth, wife of an Army sergeant
wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, says it reflects "archetypes
in the collective unconscious."
But Larsen is unabashed about the faith's central appeal.
"You can't intellectually talk about witchcraft. You gotta show
up," he says. "What Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a lot of us
universalists think is, people need the magical side, the
mythological side, of religion.
"We don't need more Calvinist rationalizing. We need mystery. We
need horizons. We need journeys."
Something about Wicca clearly fills a niche. According to the
American Religious Identification Survey, a widely respected
tally, the number of Wiccans in the United States rose 17-fold --
from 8,000 to 134,000 -- between 1990 and 2001.
By the Pentagon's count, there are now 1,511 self-identified
Wiccans in the Air Force and 354 in the Marines. No figures are
available for the much larger Army and Navy. Wiccan groups
estimate they have at least 4,000 followers in uniform, but they
say many active-duty Wiccans hide their beliefs to avoid ridicule
and discrimination. Two incidents may bear them out.
When a Texas newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, reported in
1999 that a circle of Wiccans was meeting regularly at Lackland
Air Force Base near San Antonio, then-Gov. George W. Bush told
ABC's "Good Morning America": "I don't think witchcraft is a
religion, and I wish the military would take another look at this
and decide against it."
Eight years later, the circle at Lackland is still going strong,
and the military permits Wiccans to worship on U.S. bases around
the world. But when Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart was killed in action
in Afghanistan in 2005, the Department of Veterans' Affairs
refused to allow a Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a
circle, to be inscribed on his memorial at the Fernley, Nev.,
veterans' cemetery. Ultimately, Nevada officials approved the
pentacle anyway.
For Wiccans seeking public acceptance, obtaining a military
chaplain is the next major goal. More than 130 religious groups
have endorsed, or certified, chaplains to serve in uniform. But
efforts by Wiccan organizations to join the list have repeatedly
been denied by the Pentagon.
Lt. Col. Randall C. Dolinger, spokesman for the Army's Chief of
Chaplains office, said the Sacred Well Congregation has met all
the requirements to become an endorser, except one: It has not
presented a "viable candidate." The group's previous nominee was
turned away because his eyesight was not correctable to 20-20.
When Larsen came along last spring, Sacred Well's leaders thought
they finally had someone the military could not possibly reject: a
physically fit 6-foot-4 clergyman originally ordained as a
Southern Baptist minister, who holds a master's degree from New
Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Moreover, Larsen had spent
10 years as an officer in the National Guard, finished near the
top of his class in chaplain's training and was already serving as
a chaplain in Iraq.
But Oringderff said that his group, like Larsen, underestimated
the institutional resistance. "Each time we advance to a scoring
position, they change the rules," he said.
Once chaplains are accepted into the military, they are paid,
trained and deployed by the government. But they remain
subservient to their endorsers, who can cancel their endorsements
at any time.
That is what happened to Larsen, according to unclassified
military e-mail messages obtained by The Washington Post.
When the Sacred Well Congregation applied on July 31 to become
Larsen's new endorser, the Army initially cited a minor
bureaucratic obstacle: It could not find a copy of his previous
endorsement from the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, a
Dallas-based association of Pentecostal churches.
The following day, a senior Army chaplain telephoned the Full
Gospel Churches to ask for the form and, in the process, disclosed
Larsen's plan to join Sacred Well.
Within hours, the Pentecostal group sent Larsen an urgent e-mail
saying it had received a "strange call" from the Army Chief of
Chaplains office. The caller "mentioned that a Donald M. Larsen
. . . was requesting a change-over . . . to Wiccans," the e-mail
said. "Please communicate with this office, as we do not believe
it is you."
Larsen pleaded in his reply for the Full Gospel Churches not to
cancel his endorsement until he could complete the switch. "Being
here in Iraq has caused me to reflect on a great many
things. However, as long as CFCG holds my endorsement, I teach and
practice nothing contrary to your faith and practice," he wrote,
adding: "It is all about the soldiers, please help me to continue
to minister to them during this transition."
The Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches immediately severed its
ties to Larsen. The Sacred Well Congregation could not renew his
papers, because it was not yet an official endorser. Lacking an
ecclesiastical endorsement, Larsen was ordered to cease
functioning immediately as a chaplain, and the Pentagon quickly
pulled him out of Iraq.
Dolinger, the Army Chief of Chaplains spokesman, denied that any
discrimination was involved. "What you're really dealing with is
more of a personal drama, what one person has been through and the
choices he's made. Plus, the fact that the military does have
Catch-22s," he said.
Jim Ammerman, a retired Army colonel who is president and founder
of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, acknowledges that there
is a longstanding agreement among endorsers not to summarily pull
the papers of a chaplain who wants to make a valid switch.
"But if it's not a valid thing, all bets are off," Ammerman says,
adding that Wiccans "run around naked in the woods" and "draw
blood with a dagger" in their ceremonies. "You can't do that in
the military. It's against good order and discipline."
That description drew a laugh from Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson,
the Air Force's deputy chief of chaplains. "He's right, we can't
have that in the military, but I don't think we've had any of that
in the military," Richardson says.
Richardson says there are simply too few Wiccans in the military
to justify a full-time chaplain.
According to Pentagon figures, however, some faiths with similarly
small numbers in the ranks do have chaplains. Among the nearly
2,900 clergy on active duty are 41 Mormon chaplains for 17,513
Mormons in uniform, 22 rabbis for 4,038 Jews, 11 imams for 3,386
Muslims, six teachers for 636 Christian Scientists, and one
Buddhist chaplain for 4,546 Buddhists.
Since returning from Iraq and visiting Texas, Larsen has gone home
to Melba, Idaho. Divorced since 2004, he is living with his
teenage children and serving as an artillery officer in the Idaho
Army National Guard.
He said he knew from the start that converting to Wicca would
raise questions but never expected the reaction to be so fierce.
"It's not my place as a little captain to challenge the decisions
or policies or motives or actions of my superiors," he says. "I
got to come home and resume my career in the Guard. I'm very
thankful for that. Understand, it's all I've got left. . . . This
was a big blunder. I barely survived it. I don't have another one
in me."