James Yee: a chaplain in danger

James Yee, the Guantanamo Bay chaplain who has been in jail for over seventy days following preposterous charges of mutiny and conspiracy, has now published his shocking memoir, For God and Country. Yee, whose first encounter with Islam began with a conversation with another serviceman at the Pentagon, details his loyalty to Islam out of the very same values of diversity, tolerance, respect, and responsibility that led him to West Point. He also details a shift in administrative ethos in the armed forces, which he witnessed vividly between his deployment in Desert Storm and the current debacle at Guantanamo Bay. The armed forces went from a position of encouraging diversity and tolerance -- even bussing Muslim American servicemen to Mecca -- to using religion as a tool with which to bludgeon the believer. Yee makes clear that Newsweek's account of flushing the Koran down the toilet was false, but more shockingly, he unveils a mass suicide attempt in 2003 in which prisoners hung themselves by their bedsheets in their cells, in order to protest the kicking of the Koran.

The shift in attitude that Yee witnessed is part of a larger trend. We understand that the culture of civic pluralism and public morality founded upon the mutual respect of the three "cultures of the book" -- Islam, Christianity, and Judaism -- flourished out of the combined efforts of Protestant and Jewish intellectuals in mid-twentieth-century America. We also understand that in the last ten years, all the generous discourse prompted by that moment of civilization has vanished from the media, replaced by a distorted, militant subsect of fundamentalist Christianity, which has no room to tolerate Islam, either in American institutions or in the world.

Indeed, in the blogosphere itself, it was conservative Christian bloggers who early marshaled public opinion against Yee. Without any evidence other than his faith, these self-chosen representatives of Christianity spread the rumor that a Muslim cleric working at Guantanamo could only represent Al-Qaeda. Allegations of Yee's activities as a spy (now utterly refuted) spread through the media, bolstering opinion against him at his trial.

That the mandate of an American chaplain -- to listen and console prisoners and servicemen, to speak on behalf of their religious values -- should be not only abrogated but deemed insurrection, is as great a broach of America's traditions as can be imagined. It should be an affront to the ideals of every preacher in the nation. If your flock are in danger, you cannot comfort them. If your holy writ is used as an instrument of psychological torture against your flock, you cannot speak out. If you listen to and console your flock, if you encourage them according to their own scripture, you yourself are guilty of treason.

Privacy law, one of the most fundamental freedoms of speech, protects speech between a pastor and his charge in the same way that it protects speech between a doctor and patient and a husband and wife. In Privacy law, the relationship between pastor and charge -- the converse of holy souls -- is protected as intimately as the conversation within a bedroom, or between couples and medical relationships where two people participate as if they were elements of the conscience conferring within fragile circumference of the human body itself. Christians may have utterly specific views about what goes on in that conversation, but they certainly acknowledge the validity, reality, and necessity of the conversation between man and God. They certainly acknowledge the necessity of individuals beginning such a conversation, to right thought and action in the wider social sphere of public life.

Yee's memoir arranges before us an embarrassing list of issues on which the radical fundamentalist Christian subsect has betrayed the most dear values both of progressive Christianity and of American history. The so-called Christian bloggers who damned Yee would give over the most basic protections of privacy law, whose roots lie both in the Christian esteem of the private individual and in the American Bill of Rights' protection of free speech from undue government interference. They implicitly support the disruption of due process and international law. They support the unrestrained vengeance of petty anger, in forms of chemical, martial, and psychological torture, on victims whose guilt remains unproven. The lawyer, the believer in democracy, the free-thinker or educator who accepts such a regime makes a mockery of law, democracy, and free thought. The Christian who tolerates such a public regime makes a mockery of his religion.

CrossLeft has been encouraging clergy, laity, and independent individuals to speak to their neighbors and to the media from the vantage of their Christian values. Yee's memoir sets out clearly how distorted our handling of religion has become. I encourage our readers to familiarize themselves with the text, the interviews, and the account, and to take the opportunity to reflect in some public setting about how endangered the private experience of religion has become in America.

• Video clip of an interview with James Yee on PBS Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
• Video clip of a Democracy Now! interview with James Yee
• CagePrisoners.com is a service compiling the latest news and reports on the Guantanamo Bay abuses