Evangelical ministries deliberately infiltrated the military to convert cadets

Evidence

It was precisely this evangelical warrior rhetoric that made Antoon’s skin crawl. He found this attitude “diametrically opposed” to the values instilled in him decades earlier. Then, fighting and killing had been spoken of “soberly and with humility”—killing was accepted as a fact of war, not exalted. But “somehow that had all been transformed into a kind of holy bloodlust.” Antoon identified a source of this infiltration. He’d seen cadets and families at the Cadet Chapel welcomed by “a phalanx of enthusiastic pastors” and recruited to Monday night Bible studies taught by members of New Life Church and Focus on the Family staff bused in for that purpose. The academy, Antoon realized, had become “a giant Trojan horse for evangelicals to get inside the military.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 481

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Trojan horse’ infiltration method parallels the consumer-culture transmission mechanism central to the book’s argument about cultural apparatus.