The "Pentacle" of Barry Lynn's Faith
2 May 2007
Hold the phones and stop the presses, the so-called Reverend, Barry Lynn, has come out in favor of a religious symbol on veterans’ gravestones purchased by the Department of Veterans Affairs. That’s right; the executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has found a religious symbol he deems worthy of federal dollars. What is Lynn’s pet religious icon? It is the Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star, inside a circle, which is used by witches in magical evocation.
Last week, the Department of Veterans Affairs agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to the list of religious symbols it’s willing to engrave on veterans’ headstones. A spokesman for the department, Matt Burns, explained that the decision was made in order to settle a lawsuit brought against the Pentagon on behalf of Wiccans by Barry Lynn’s Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. According to Burns, the government decided to settle the lawsuit in order “to spare taxpayers the expense of further litigation.”
A recent Pentagon survey suggests that there are as many as 1,800 Wiccans (witches) currently serving in the United States Armed Forces. The Wiccan faith, better known as witchcraft, is not only addressed in the official handbooks for military chaplains, but also noted on Wiccan soldiers’ dog tags.
Last November, Barry Lynn’s Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon on behalf of Wiccan families. The suit alleged that the Pentagon practiced religious discrimination against witches by refusing to add the pentacle to the 38 religious symbols being engraved on veterans’ gravestones. In explanation of their representation of occultists, Rev. Lynn explained that Americans United believed Wiccans deserved “precisely the same treatment that dozens of other religions already received” from the Pentagon. Furthermore, Lynn insisted upon the Pentagon’s “acknowledgment that [Wiccans’] spiritual beliefs were on par with those of everyone else.”
Where is Lynn’s famed insistence upon government neutrality in all matters of religion? Why does he insist that our government endorse occultism but remain completely indifferent toward Christianity? And how can he, a so-called Christian minister, fight for the equivalence of witches’ cauldrons to Christian convictions? Such questions inevitably lead all true Christians to concur with a prominent evangelical leader who recently asserted on Fox News that the Reverend Barry Lynn “is about as reverend as an oak tree.”
According to Ann Coulter, Barry Lynn is a “mail-order minister” whose organization, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, is “curiously devoid of both Americans and churchgoers.” Although Ann is being satirical, her satire has the ring of truth. Truth is; Barry Lynn is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ—the modern-day equivalent of Rev. Leroy’s (Flip Wilson’s) Church of What’s Happening Now. Apart from holding ordination papers from a church that believes anything goes; that is, anything but Christian orthodoxy, Barry Lynn has no other claim to the title of “Reverend.” Still, he brazenly uses it to cloak his anti-Christian agenda and to lend respectability to his left-wing organization.
If you ask me, Barry Lynn’s “Wiccan whacky.” But make no mistake about it; Lynn is crazy like a fox. There’s definitely a method to his madness. He uses the title of Reverend the same way the Greeks used the Trojan horse; namely, to feign friendship in order to work his mischief. Don’t be fooled by Greeks bearing gifts, gifts bearing Greeks, or by this Barry bearing the title of “Reverend.”
Don Walton
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