Flunking the Army's spirituality test.

• Author: Gaylor, Annie Laurie

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THE FREEDOM FROM RELIGION Foundation received a complaint in late 2010 from a dismayed soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that immediately made us stand at attention. Justin Griffith e-mailed us that he had been required to take a "spiritual inventory," which he had flunked. "I'm a bit furious about a mandatory survey that I just took," he wrote. "This 'Soldier Fitness Tracker' says that I'm unfit as a soldier simply because I'm a nonbeliever. It's basically like being told that I'm not fit for duty, without quite being kicked out."

We soon confirmed that the Army was, indeed, making all soldiers take a mandatory spiritual inventory as part of an annual online test, the Global Assessment Tool. The results go into a database and are used to grade "spiritual fitness," among other things. Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, a $125 million Army assessment and development program that includes psychological testing.

The Army describes it as "training of five dimensions: physical, social, emotional, family, and spiritual." The Pentagon established it in October 2008 to purportedly "increase the resilience of soldiers and families." The stated intention is to make all soldiers undergo this assessment when they begin their military service and periodically thereafter.

Current practice appears to require annual tests except of deployed soldiers. More than 1.1 million soldiers have had the mental assessments. The army incorporates these spiritual inventories in basic combat and leadership training, and distributes the results to the entire training base.

A parallel program is being developed for spouses and Army civilians. The Global Assessment Tool's "spiritual" section asks soldiers to rate how strongly they agree with statements such as "I am a spiritual person." Soldiers are evaluated by how they rank statements on a spectrum of 1 through 5, with 1 being "not like me at all" and 5 being "very much like me."

Although the Army tries to define "spiritual" in ways that nonreligious soldiers could agree to, its accepted definitions include "corporeal, pertaining to the spirit or soul, as distinguished from the physical nature"; "pertaining to supernatural"; "pertaining to sacred things or matters; religious; devotional."

When Griffith truthfully responded to the assessment tool's questions, he naturally scored low and was deemed to be in need of a "spiritual fitness training...