Planting Liberally

While the liberal movement is busy trying to figure out what to do about the war in Iraq, the conservative movement is busy exploiting the war to reach out to soldiers. Via Jesus' General, New Life Ministries is selling a set of "sexual purity" kits on its website, Every Soldier's Battle. (The General does a great send-up of the kits and New Life Ministries, as always.) From the website:

Every Soldier's Battle is a campaign of New Life Ministries (NLM) to provide military personnel (soldiers), both home and abroad, with resources that will help those soldiers who choose to maintain sexual integrity and sexual purity.

This campaign is fueled by a certain degree of crassness and plain ideological blindness. What's the number one problem that soldiers in a hot war zone have to face? The temptations of sexual impurity, clearly. New Life Ministries is taking that breathtakingly one-sided view of and giving it a special twist, asking soldiers and their families to buy the kits to prevent unfaithfulness while on duty. Of course, real soldiers in Iraq have real problems, not necessarily those which rigid conservative religious dogma says they have. War is an extreme situation which provides soldiers with a host of theological problems - chief among them, is it right to kill and when? Separation from one's family is indeed a major issue for many soldiers; not because of problems of "sexual purity", but because war puts a tremendous strain on personal relationships. Some soldiers are lucky and have a strong network which will support them through hell or high water; others are less lucky, and find that upon return from Iraq, their friends have fallen out of touch, their partners have left them, family members have died, or worse. There is ample room for the religious left to step in and help soldieers and their families grapple with these issues in a way that's not crass and ideologically blind. How can that be achieved, and who will step up to the plate?