Christian Conservative

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Banned Witness

The U.S. military last week made clear that the Great Commission cannot be part of any soldier's mission in Afghanistan. U.S. Central Command reported last week that it had confiscated Bibles in local languages from an evangelical soldier and destroyed them.

Controversy erupted earlier in the week when the Al Jazeera television network showed footage of a Bible study at a U.S. base near Kabul, during which a chaplain encouraged soldiers to witness for Christ. "You can't proselytize, but you can give gifts," said a chaplain's assistant during the discussion. (Centcom's General Order Number One prohibits troops from proselytizing.) A church in the United States had mailed local-language Bibles to a soldier.

Former prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai told the Reuters news service that the footage represented "a direct attack on our religion," and the U.S. military was quick to deny that it allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans. "I can now confirm that the Bibles shown on Al Jazeera's clip were, in fact, collected by the chaplains and later destroyed," Centcom spokeswoman Major Jennifer Willis told Reuters. "They were never distributed."

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15387?CFID=4445274&CFTOKEN=63535607

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