Last week, Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network, released a video that showed evangelical Christian military chaplains and soldiers in Afghanistan discussing what to do with a shipment of Bibles printed in local Afghan languages. At one point in the video, a chaplain could be heard calling on the soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus.”

Al-Jazeera accuses the soldiers of proselytizing, or attempting to convert locals, but it is unclear if any of the Bibles were even distributed. The soldier responsible for the comments was reprimanded, and the Bibles were eventually confiscated, but the event raises a larger question: Why does the military have chaplains?

I mean, is there really a reason taxpayer dollars should be spent paying chaplains? Is it not true that their very presence violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment? Is there not the potential danger that chaplains could, at the very least, isolate atheists and agnostics in the military, and at the very worst, promote a tyranny of the majority? Military officers standing in uniform next to their commander and saying a prayer at a required military function is an endorsement of religion by the government.

James Madison, in his Detached Memoranda, said, “Better also to disarm in the same way, the precedent of Chaplainships for the army and navy, than erect them into a political authority in matters of religion.”

Besides discrimination, military chaplains can present problems like the one described by Al-Jazeera. They may disturb local populations, and therefore harm military efforts. Persian and Pashto Bibles could easily turn from religious books into pieces of Taliban propaganda.

Secondly, the military has regular psychologists who can perform the same function as chaplains, but without the religious price. And if this does not suffice, the military should be mandated to create a service that can provide psychological help that does not involve religion.

Chaplains should be banned from the military–or, at the very least, should not be paid by the government. This must be done to preserve the fundamental American value of the separation of Church and State, and to ensure the success of our armed forces.