The Catholic Church has 252 active-duty chaplains; the Southern Baptist Convention has 448, the most in the military.

In many religious circles, the repeal of a military ban on openly gay members is considered practically a done deal. But Southern Baptists, who have many more active-duty military chaplains than any other denomination, are not giving up without a fight.

The Southern Baptist Convention is battling the expected repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell on a number of fronts: its agencies are contacting Congress and the Pentagon, retired chaplains are sending letters to President Obama, and a resolution likely to be adopted at the denomination’s annual meeting in Orlando, FL, this week (June 15-16), condemns allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

”If a policy makes it more difficult, in fact, discourages, one of the groups that provides one of the largest numbers of chaplains to the military from continuing to engage in chaplaincy ministry, that should raise significant concerns for them about the … spiritual well-being of our men and women in uniform,” said Barrett Duke, vice president of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

With about 16 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the country’s largest Protestant denomination, but falls well short of the Catholic Church’s 68 million members.
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The number of active-duty personnel who say they are Southern Baptist is far smaller than the number of Roman Catholics, but there is no quota system for chaplains. Chaplains serve members of all faiths, rather than solely troops of their denomination.

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