I Cogitate

On evangelicals in the military
Fiona Morgan
The Independent Weekly
August 8, 2007

U.S. Air Force veteran Michael Weinstein says the American military is being undermined from within by fundamentalist Christians who are coercing soldiers into their brand of faith. A Republican who worked for President Ronald Reagan before becoming general counsel to Texas billionaire and presidential candidate Ross Perot, Weinstein is foremost a military man. His recent book, With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military, presents what he sees as a grave threat to the nation's security.

How many people have contacted your group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, with stories of being proselytized to by military commanders?

We've had just under 5,000 members of the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force. Of the troops who have come to us, including some civilians and veterans, roughly 96 percent of them are Christians themselves. The remaining 4 percent are the minority faiths, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs or atheists.

What sorts of stories do they tell you?

An army private from Fort Bragg contacted me when he was going through basic training. When he signed up, they asked him his religious denomination and he said Christian, but they identified him as not being fundamentalist enough Christian, and they punished him by putting 'none' on his dog tags. When he got to Afghanistan, the commander said that the blessings of the Lord Jesus would not be on the unit unless everyone were evangelical, and since he would not convert, this 20-year-old private would be responsible for the deaths and injuries the unit might suffer.

In another case, we caught a three-star general who ordered his staff to put together a PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the direct parallel between the Book of Revelation and all of our combat movements in Tikrit, Mosul, Fallujah, Sadr City and farther east in Afghanistan. We were able to stop it after it got to 2,500 troops.

What group inside the military is doing this?

What we're fighting here is a subset of evangelical Christianity that goes by a long name: pre-millennial dispensational reconstructionist dominionist fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. There's an organization for officers called the Officers Christian Fellowship, and for the enlisted folks called the Christian Military Fellowship. The first goal is a 'spiritually transformed' U.S. military. The second goal is [to be] ambassadors for Christ in uniform—by the way, if you check the last 2,000 years, that hasn't worked out too well. Thirdly, [they are] empowered by the Holy Spirit.

In the private sector this would last about three seconds. It would be a killer lawsuit under Title 7 of the U.S. Code. Those serving in the military have to give up many constitutional rights. 'Get the hell out of my face, sir or ma'am' is not an option for you if you're being even gently evangelized. Because they're second-class citizens by design, they're very vulnerable, and the military knows this.

When people come to you with these complaints, what do you do?

Our job is to kick ass and to take names. We lay down a withering field of fire and leave chest wounds on those who would bring constitutional darkness to our military. I usually call commanders and tell them that we're here and we're going public. But making phone calls and doing interviews is at best weed whacking; that keeps them at bay for only a short time. The best thing we can do is to go into federal court, which we will do in a few days with a massive federal lawsuit directly confronting this.

We are not trying to take anyone's religious faith away; we are simply saying you can't use the machinery of the state, the awesome power of our military, to force religion on your subordinates up and down the chain of command. Must we become the Christian Taliban to defeat this Taliban and Al Qaeda?

An Evangelical Coup in America's Military
August 03 2007

Tikkun's managing editor Dave Belden interviews Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, on the Evangelical coup in America's Military.

With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military.
Tikkun Online Exclusive

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein is Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He was Assistant General Counsel in the Reagan White House and later served as General Counsel for H. Ross Perot. For ten years, he was a Judge Advocate General in the U.S. Air Force. Tikkun does not endorse the violent imagery Mr. Weinstein uses in his struggle, but presents this interview to highlight the courage of this man and his family in combating a major threat to the United States.

Tikkun (Dave Belden, managing editor): The title of your book is With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military. Coup is a very strong word.

Michael Weinstein: We are facing a national security threat in this country that is every bit as significant in magnitude, width and breadth internally as that presented externally by the now-resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda. And it is the destruction of the U.S. constitutionally mandated wall separating church and state, in the technologically most lethal organization every created by humankind, which is our honorable and noble military. I’m here to report to you today that that wall is nothing but smoke and debris. We are facing an absolute fundamentalist Christianization—a Talibanization—of the U.S. Marine Corps, Army, Navy, and Air Force.

I’m aware of how it sounds. I know that the religious right would love it if I was a Northern California, Chardonnay sipping, tree hugging, bleeding heart Democrat, a Sierra Club Democrat. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I’m a Republican. My family has a very long history of military tradition—a little bit unusual, a little bit—for a Jewish American family. We have three consecutive generations of military academy graduates. My youngest son graduated a month ago from the Air Force Academy.

Tikkun: So he made it?

Weinstein: Yeah, he made it. And he’s the sixth member of my family to go there. I’m an honor graduate there. My daughter in law, who’s a Christian, went there. My older son, who’s Jewish, went there. My brother went there. My brother in law went there. My father graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy as a distinguished graduate. We have over 128 years of combined active duty, military service, in just my immediate family, and every major combat engagement this country’s been in since World War I until the current so-called global war on terror. My nephew just got back with a chest full of medals from Iraq, and he’ll probably be going back again.

I take no pleasure in having to attack, initially, my school, then my branch of service, and then eventually the entire DoD. But at this point our Pentagon has been turned into a Pentecostagon and our Department of Defense has been turned into a unconstitutional faith-based initiative.

Tikkun: A pivotal moment in your book is when your son Curtis, your second son who’s just graduated, tells you that he wants to talk to you privately and that he’s got something to say to you.

Weinstein: Curtis is a tough kid—he was the city wrestling champ here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has a lot of what I would call, I don’t know, juvenile impetuosity—he’s always up, he’s always happy. When he walked in with the other cadets [to a 2004 event at the school which Mikey was attending]—by the way, I’m a cusser and I can’t change that for this interview—I knew immediately that something was f*cking wrong. He didn’t look right at all.
He took one look at me and said “I wanna get outa here. I’ve got something I need to tell you and I can’t talk here.” So I said alright, said my goodbyes, threw him the keys to the car, my Dodge Viper. He didn’t want to drive it. Curtis not wanting to drive the Viper is impossible to imagine.

The Academy is huge; it’s 18,000 acres. We drove off it to a McDonald’s and we walked in there—he didn’t say a word. At this point I’m thinking, “For the love of God, did you get somebody pregnant, did you violate the honor code by using drugs, did you get an alcohol hit or something?” We walked in and I said: “OK, I can’t take this any more, what the hell have you done?” And I’ll never forget what he said. He said: “It’s not what I’ve done, Dad, it’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be getting in some very serious trouble here. I’m going to beat the shit out of the next person who calls me a f*cking Jew or accuses me or our people of murdering Jesus Christ.” My reaction: I don’t remember. I was in a state of shock. [Later in the book Mikey writes for the first time about his own severe beatings by anti-Semites when he was at the Academy, which at the time were hushed up].

Tikkun: And everything has unraveled from that moment, because you discovered that anti-Semitism and proselytizing for evangelical Christianity was not just going on in the Academy among the cadets, but was being promoted from on top.

Weinstein: There’s a problem with nomenclature, and Jewish people have to be careful. I am at war today—as I say, I am a man coming to you today with gunsmoke in my face as a man at war—but not with Christianity. Half my family’s Christian—my wife is a Presbyterian girl who converted to Judaism at the age of 19, she’ll turn 50 this year. She’s been on our synagogue board, she runs our Judaica shop at our big synagogue in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Half the Christians in my family are evangelicals whose last name is “Christian”. So I’m not at war with Christianity, and I’m not at war with evangelical Christianity. I am at war with a small subset of evangelical Christianity that has a very long technical name, and it’s called Premillennial Dispensational Reconstructionist Dominionist Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity, or just Dominionist Christianity.

About 12.6 percent of the American public are Dominionist Christians. It’s still a chunk—38 million. And they are represented very well now on all 737 U.S. military instillations that the Pentagon acknowledges that we have. It’s really closer to 1000. In 132 countries around the world, as we garrison the globe.

They are represented in a group called the Officers Christian Fellowship, for the officers, and for the enlisted folks, the Christian Military Fellowship. These groups have a tripartite goal, a goal they believe is much more critically important than the oath they all swore out: to protect, defend, support and serve the constitution of the United States. They are unabashed and unapologetic about it. It’s right on their web site. Goal number one: they want to see a spiritually transformed U.S. military. Goal number two: with ambassadors for Christ in uniform. Let me say that one again, and think back over history. That hasn’t worked out too well in the last 2000 years. Ambassadors for Christ in uniform. At least they didn’t have nuclear weapons and laser guided weapons before. Third, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

They work assiduously up and down the chain of command, using, in fact, the draconian specter of command influence to push this weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s very digital, one and zero. Either you accept our view or we or our version of Jesus will have to kill you.

They often quote Luke 19:27 when I speak to them. That’s the Parable of the Pounds in which Jesus says: “go out among the people, and bring back to me those who refuse to accept me as King over them, and slaughter them.”

The Pentagon is so concerned about the specter of command influence that they’ve actually issued regulations that prohibit military superiors from pushing Amway, Mary Kay cosmetics and Tupperware on subordinates. But not Dominionist Christianity. We have been approached by over 4,500 members of the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, Army, and Air Force, coming to us not as claimants, but as tormentees. And here’s the amazing fact: 96 percent of them are Christians.

There are four specific stenches that are attended to Dominionist Christians, particularly in the military. It’s much like walking into a ditch, or in my native New Mexico we would call it an arroyo, on a hot summer day, and walking upon the diseased corpses of 10,000 swine, and having that malodorous stench invade your nose. The first of the four stenches is virulent anti-Semitism. Virulent. Second, virulent homophobia. The third is virulent misogyny, basically the idea that women should be consigned to collecting food, preparing food, serving food, cleaning up after meals, spreading their legs, getting pregnant, and raising children. The last is the massive subordination of flawed man—you know, when humans pop out of their mothers’ wombs they are of course bearing Original Sin—so therefore, the massive subordination of man’s law, by which they mean the Constitution, to this weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This situation is in the very air conditioning in the U.S. military. It is everywhere. The stories are astonishing, and it’s changed my whole life. I never thought, coming from a conservative military Republican family filled with Academy graduates and people that have been in so much combat, that at this point in my life, after being a White House lawyer, a lawyer for a Texas billionare, a businessman, that I’d suddenly become this political activist.

Michael L. Weinstein
The former White House counsel on dominionists in the military and the threat to our Constitution
LA CITY BEAT
5/24/07

Here’s the part of Michael L. Weinstein’s new book, With God on Our Side (co-authored with Davin Seay), he didn’t want to write: When he was in his first year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in 1973, someone shoved notes under his door attacking him for being a Jew. Within eight days, he was physically attacked twice, and knocked unconscious both times. The Air Force investigated, and then accused him of attacking himself, and asked him to sign a confession. He slugged the officer who said this and stormed out, waiting to be court-martialed. They never came after him, and he never told anyone, graduating magna cum laude.

Until it happened to his kids at the same academy. Then Weinstein, a former Air Force Judge Advocate General, or JAG, and White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan and to two-time presidential candidate Ross Perot, “went to fuckin’ war,” as he says, against the institution he loved. What he found was not just anti-Semitism. He found an unconstitutional infiltration of the entire U.S. armed forces by believers of “dominionist Christianity,” who reserve the right to either convert or kill anyone, including American soldiers, who doesn’t believe in what Weinstein calls a “weaponized Jesus Christ” ­ and use your tax money to do it. Held at bay in many other branches of government, Weinstein finds the dominionists are given full sway in the military, and now they are threatening his life because of his book and federal lawsuits. A successful Republican businessman and veteran, Weinstein is fighting back by founding Militaryreligiousfreedom.org to defend the constitution and religious rights.

CityBeat: Your book finds that American servicemembers are being forcibly evangelized by an aggressive new Christian presence in the military. How have these evangelists responded?

Michael L. Weinstein: We’ve had dead animals on our front door. We’ve had feces and beer bottles thrown at our house. Our tires have been slashed. They burned a church down when the head of a church came out to support me when I spoke in Kansas. We had a synagogue that was desecrated. There’s a group of Christian women who call me and chant “Mikey Weinstein, bullet in the head, praise the lord he’s finally dead.” They call my wife up and say they’re going to blow her head off.

I’m not a Jewish leader. I’m a civil libertarian. We’re telling the military: Look, you’re going to be at least as constrained as the shift manager at McDonald’s or KFC or Starbucks. If you want to see a Fortune 500 CEO brought to his or her knees, just have the most junior person at the mailroom claim, “Hey, I’m being evangelized in the workplace.” That’s a killer lawsuit under Title 7 of the U.S. Code. But in the U.S. military, that’s not just your shift manager; that’s your military superior.

CityBeat: What was your reaction when your son, Curtis, told you that he was attacked for being a Jew at the academy?

Michael L. Weinstein: My immediate family has three consecutive generations of military academy graduates in it, and over 120 years of combined active duty military service from WWI to the current global war on terror. The religious right would love it if they could cast me as a Northern California, chardonnay-sipping, tree-hugging, bleeding heart, Sierra Club-member, liberal Democrat. Not that there’d be anything wrong with that. But I’m not. And my reaction was, it was time to go to fuckin’ war. To see the look on my kid’s face. It wasn’t a look of fear; he was the city wrestling champ. It was that look of “Why?”

I am at war, but not with Christianity ­ but with a small subset of evangelical Christianity called dominionist Christians. Ted Haggard. Falwell’s dead. Pat Robertson. Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family. What I found was that it wasn’t just the Air Force. We now have 737 U.S. military installations scattered around the world as we garrison the globe in 132 countries. And in every one of them, we have this Christian Taliban. It’s the Officers Christian Fellowship for the officers, and the Christian Military Fellowship for the enlisted. And they have a tripartite goal ­ a goal that they view as much more critically important than merely the oath that they all swore to protect and to serve the Constitution: Number one, they want to see a “spiritually transformed military”; number two, with “ambassadors for Christ in uniform”; and number three, “empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

CityBeat: What’s wrong with them practicing their faith in uniform?

Michael L. Weinstein: On Tuesday, July 12, 2005, on the front page of The New York Times, the number two ranking general in the Air Force Chaplain’s Corps, Brigadier General Cecil R. Richardson, makes the un-fucking-believable statement that “We reserve the right to evangelize the un-churched.”

Our founding fathers were well aware that, in Europe, most of the tyrannies had been conducted by men of the cloth who were also men in political power, so in Clause 3 of Article 6 of the Constitution, they stuck in the phrase that we will never have a religion test for any position in the federal government. Oh, I guess except the U.S. Air force, the Marines, the Navy and the Army, which will hold a Geiger counter up to anyone on planet earth and if it says, “Oh, we think you’re unchurched,” then you better be prepared to be evangelized. There’s no difference between them and Sharia ­ Islamic law ­ or Wahabiist Islam.

I’ve had senior members of the military confidentially reach out to me and say, “C’mon, Mikey, you’re one of us. What are you doing? If you had the cure for cancer, you’d want to give it to our sailors and soldiers and marines and airmen, right?” They don’t realize that, by saying this, anybody who doesn’t have their particular worldview is the cancer.

They’ve told me that John F. Kennedy and Einstein and Gandhi and Dr. Seuss and Jack Benny, to say nothing of Anne Frank and the two million children under the age of 12 who were killed in the Holocaust ­ they’ve told me, “Mikey, they’re all burning eternally in the fires of hell. We don’t want that to happen to your family or the members of our military.” I tell them: I would actually give my last breath to defend their right to believe that. But I will not do that [shouting] when the government tells me who are the children of the greater god and who are the children of the lesser god! Right now, in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humanity, which is our noble U.S. military, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris.

CityBeat: So you’re saying that the dominionists are touting theirs as the only god?

Michael L. Weinstein: This all started when Mel Gibson’s movie came out in February 2004, The Passion of the Christ. I was contacted by Christian members of the faculty at the academy, saying, “Do you know what’s happening here with this movie?” [Students were being urged by school officials to see the film as a sanctioned event.] My wife and I have given a lot of money, blood, sweat, and children to the academy. My kids said, “Well, dad, this is just the way it is, here.”

There’s over 100 of the largest evangelical organizations in Colorado Springs. It’s like the Vatican. I saw the flyer for one of their brown-bag lunches. It said, “Do not take this flyer down. This is an officially sponsored Air Force Academy activity in conjunction with the Christian Leadership Ministries.” This was attended by scores of senior officers and senior civilian people. Today’s luncheon topic, and I quote: “Why we cannot let you have your God while we have ours.”

When Focus on the Family opened up in 1993, right across the street from the academy, the Pentagon thought it would be a great idea to have the Air Force Academy’s heralded academy jump team, the Wings of Blue ­ I can’t make this shit up ­ parachute down carrying the keys of heaven. They landed on the front lawn of Focus, marched in formation, and turned over to Dr. Dobson the keys of heaven. Hello James Madison! Hello Thomas Jefferson!

Birth of the Christian Soldier: How Evangelicals Infiltrated the American Military
Michael L. Weinstein and David Seay, Thomas Dunne Books
April 21, 2007

Despite the church-state scandals that have plagued the US military in recent years, religious practice in the armed forces is hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1846 Mexican War, Roman Catholics were incorporated into the hitherto all-Protestant chaplaincy for the first time, as much to blunt implications of a sectarian war with Catholic Mexico as for any effort to address the actual religious demographics of the fighting force.

In 1862, President Lincoln, at the request of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, struck the word Christian from all regulations relating to the chaplaincy appointments, and during World War II, Greek Orthodox chaplains were allowed to minister to their flock in uniform for the first time. The Buddhist Churches of America were registered as an official endorsing agency for the first time in 1987, and six years later the Army saw its first Muslim chaplain.

These earnest attempts at pluralism were often contrasted with unsanctioned attempts to bring sanctity to the armed forces, from the revivalist fervor that swept both Union and Confederate camps during the Civil War, to various hectoring attempts to stiffen the moral fiber of troops during and immediately after World War II. GIs were returning from combat, according to a 1946 report from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "physical, mental, moral and social wrecks, having been infected with venereal disease" and "coddled by a complacent service attitude which encourages promiscuity."

The situation was subsequently exacerbated at the dawn of the Cold War when, in 1945, President Truman proposed a one-year program of universal military training for all males over eighteen, a move vigorously resisted by evangelical churches. "We began to wonder what might happen to our youth removed from home and church influences," fretted the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), "and subjected to the temptations for which military training camps are notorious."

The proliferating paranoia of the Red Scare, however, radically altered such attitudes by the early fifties, when the world, according to literature distributed by the Nazarene Service Men's Commission, was neatly divided between "the Communist dictatorships and the Christian democracies." The Nazarenes concluded, "The stricken nations are looking to the free world ... we are our 'brother's keeper.'"

Aside from being a bulwark against godless communism, the military was perceived as a target-rich environment for missionary outreach. In 1959, the NAE asserted, "Fifty percent of all who pass through the military service have no religious background or church connection." The implication was clear. "This is the ripe harvest field in which our chaplains are working."

They weren't the only ones intent on reaping the souls of unsuspecting soldiers. Early in the decade, mainline Protestant denominations aggressively promoted annual "preaching missions" on U.S. military bases, and in 1952, the year the campaign was initiated, nearly a hundred weeklong events were launched around the theme "Christ Is the Answer."

Competition between liberal Protestantism and fundamentalist evangelicals for influence within the military was fierce, focused primarily on inserting as many chaplains as possible into all available postings. A battle quickly shaped up between the rival commissioning arms of various denominations, with the evangelicals fighting on two fronts against both mainline Protestants and Catholics. "Evangelicals must not fail the proportionately large number of men in the armed forces who are anxious that the New Testament gospel be preached," warned the NAE. "... Real evangelistic work must be carried on by our chaplains."

Evangelicals were also at the forefront of what author Anne C. Loveland in her pioneering study, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993, calls "an unprecedented religious and moral welfare program" instituted by the Truman administration, largely in response to a widespread outcry against drunkenness and immorality among Korean War conscripts. Dubbed Character Guidance, the program was in force throughout the fifties, and while ostensibly nonsectarian, the curriculum reveals a rigorous religious agenda, bristling with exhortations that "service to the nation is most effective only when religion becomes part of individual life," and that in the "covenant nation" of America, "public institutions and official thinking reflect a faith in the existence and importance of divine providence," with God as "the final source of authority."

The most effective wedge for the insertion of evangelicals into every rung of military life was the NAE and its influential chaplain-endorsing agency, the Commission on Chaplains, which worked tirelessly as a liaison for a wide array of fundamentalist denominations, from the Assemblies of God to the Southern Baptist Convention to the full index of offshoot and splinter congregations. Notwithstanding the military's policy of allotting chaplaincies on a quota system designed to roughly reflect the religious affiliations of society as a whole, by the late '60s evangelical denominations were regularly exceeding their allotments.

The phenomenon mirrored, in part, the explosive growth of fundamentalist Christianity in America and, in part, the assiduous efforts of the NAE and its Commission on Chaplains to fill posts left empty by the Catholics, Jews, Orthodox, and others who were regularly failing to meet their allocations. In what Loveland terms a "quota juggling act," the NAE and others aggressively lobbied to fill chaplaincies left vacant by other denominations, resulting in a marked shift in the selection process weighted more and more to religious demographics within the military itself, where evangelical numbers continued to swell. This consolidation of power would result, by the late eighties, in the NAE Chaplains Commission's acting as the endorsing agent not only for established denominations but for hundreds of nonaligned individual churches.

By the mid sixties nearly all the forty evangelical denominations listed by the Armed Forces Chaplains Board had met or exceeded their assigned postings. This influx of evangelizing chaplains would have an extraordinary effect on the spiritual tenor of the armed forces, especially in the wake of such mandatory programs as Character Guidance, which had imbued chaplains with hitherto unimagined authority. Loveland cites a glowing article in a 1952 issue of Chaplain, the official publication of the Navy Chaplaincy, that focuses on religious instruction at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, where recruits regularly attended lectures designed to "reinforce the moral and spiritual strength of Navy men during the most impressionable period of their Naval career."

The "thorough, dynamic program of evangelism," concluded the story, presented "a vital religion that may never have been available to them in civilian life." "Faith," another article in Chaplain asserted, "is an integral part of being a good solider," and it was to that end that chaplains were provided extensive contact and increased influence at every level of the military hierarchy.

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