Someone once suggested to me that I wear my uniform when I preach. While on occasion, out of necessity (moving from Army responsibilities to church responsibilities or vice-versa), I may don the uniform, it will never be my preference.
Why? Because the Army uniform is not the Christian uniform. When I wear the uniform, I am representing my country and her prerogatives, which consist of securing justice, peace, and liberty for her citizens. Christianity can never, and will never, be promoted with guns--only tarnished.
In fact, to blur the lines between the two institutions is to do a great disservice to the faith. There has been pressure within the chaplaincy, since its inception, to neuter various belief systems of their core teachings (i.e., the deity and exclusive claims of Christ). This is not a new problem. For those who deify our founding, it should be mentioned that George Washington highly favored chaplains who preached good, civic-minded sermons that appealed to all faiths.
Such a sentiment is antithetical to the Christian faith. A Christian sermon is only to be considered "Christian" if it centers on Jesus Christ and salvation through Him alone.
And this tendency to exploit the chaplaincy for pragmatic usefulness has persisted to this day. There is relentless pressure, not to deny one's faith, but to trivialize it in service of a "greater" good of morals and morale. Such an exploitation is more in line with theological Liberalism than with the Christian religion.
Christianity (particularly, the work of the Holy Spirit) informs the conscience--it doesn't coerce the conscience. It should be noted that the fundamentalists were just as bad as the liberals in the early 20th century in seeking to make Christianity a means to a greater societal end (liberals-->social utopia built on human goodness; fundamentalists-->moral America built on human goodness).
There is no such thing as a Christian country. A moral country does not a Christian country make, and a government will never be able propagate the Gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone in accordance with Scripture alone to the glory of God alone. That is the role of the Church.
The Christian government we look forward to will be found in the new heavens and earth, when Christ descends and ends all warfare against the living God and brings a universal peace to all tribes, tongues, peoples, and languages who confess His name and gather before His throne in song.
