Crusading Crackpots Taking Over the Military

Mikey Weinstein Tackles the Evangelical Coup in America's Military

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Wed, 06/13/2007 - 5:00pm. Interviews
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW


Whenever a virulent form of any religion has engaged the machinery of the state -– and by that, I’m talking about the armed forces, where the sticks and stones are that break our bones -- we end up with oceans and oceans of blood. And it’s happening again now.
-- Michael "Mikey" L. Weinstein, President, Military Religious Freedom Foundation

Michael "Mikey" Weinstein represents an extended family of graduates from the U.S. Air Force Academy. As his biography proudly notes: "Mikey comes from a family that has dedicated itself to the service of the United States. One indication of the family’s commitment is its multi-generational association with the nation’s military academies, in particular, the United States Air Force Academy. His father graduated from the United States Naval Academy. Mikey is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, as are his brother-in-law, eldest son and daughter-in-law. His youngest son is currently a cadet at the Air Force Academy.

"Weinstein served for ten years on active duty in the United States Air Force as a Judge Advocate, stationed at military installations in California, New Mexico, Illinois, and Washington, DC. He also served as the Air Force’s first Chief of Telecommunications and Information Systems Procurement Law."


His love of the Air Force and the military is equal to his passion for the Constitution. That is why he is now a man with a mission: to stop the growing evangelical takeover of our military, particularly at the academy level.

Weinstein founded and heads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Its mission is to ensure the separation of church and state in our military -- and the right of academy and military members to be free from religious coercion and harassment.
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

But under the Bush Administration, the phrase "Onward Christian soldiers" has been taken literally by many in the Pentagon, our military training centers, and the VA system.
Weinstein recently wrote a compelling book, With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military, describing the growing evangelical threat to cadets, GIs and veterans who are not fundamentalists.

We talked with Weinstein recently about the dangerous trend of our armed forces becoming shock troops for Jesus, with the missionary zeal coming from the highest levels.
* * *
BuzzFlash: Can you tell us about the personal history that you and your family have with the Air Force Academy and in the Reagan administration?


Michael L. Weinstein: Certainly. My family is a Jewish-American family, so a little bit unique in that we have three consecutive generations of military academy graduates. My youngest son was the sixth member of my family to attend the Academy, including myself. My father is an Annapolis graduate. In my immediate family, we have over 120 years of combined military service to the country, in pretty much every major combat engagement America’s been in from World War I to the current so-called global war on terror.

I am a registered Republican, and I spent over three years in the West Wing of the Reagan White House, initially working for the Office of Management and Budget. Then I moved over to become Assistant General Counsel for the entire White House Office of Administration. There, I was named the committee management officer for the Iran-Contra investigation. The family has a very, very strong military history, and obviously three generations of military academy graduates.

BuzzFlash: Are you an attorney, too?

Michael L. Weinstein: Yes. And I guess for the last 41 months, I’ve become this thing called a civil libertarian/political activist.

BuzzFlash: You wrote a book which we are offering on BuzzFlash.com as a premium. It’s called With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military. Clearly, you speak from first-hand experience. Why did you write the book?

Michael L. Weinstein: As the new governor in the State of New York, Elliot Spitzer, has stated, you cannot change the world by whispering. The book was an attempt at a private scream.
What I found at the Air Force Academy was nothing short of something that could destroy the republic. An essentially evangelical, fundamentalist, Christian perspective was being imposed on those that were not evangelical fundamentalist Christians, in complete and total disregard of the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, where the separation of church and state clearly resides.

I know that the religious right fundamentalists believe that separation of church and state is just a myth, like Paul Bunyan or Bigfoot. But we also can go to the body of the Constitution, to Clause 3, Article 6, where the Founding Fathers were so prescient. The framers were careful to make sure that we didn’t have what had befallen Europe, where men of the cloth had been men in political power. Clause 3, Article 6, basically says we’ll never have a religion test for any position in the federal government.

But I guess that didn’t mean the Air Force Academy, or the Air Force, the Marine Corps, Navy, or Army. Indeed, they have prepared Geiger counters that they hold up to all of their members, up and down the chain of command.

We are not at war at all with Christianity, or even Evangelical Christianity. Half of my own family is Christian. We are, however, at war with a small subset of Evangelical Christians who go by the long technical name -- premillenial, dispensational, reconstructionist, dominionist, evangelical, fundamentalist Christians.

The leaders are well known: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, John Hagee, and the list used to include Ted Haggard, before he had some career issues. Basically, they believe that it’s their inalienable right to push this weaponized gospel of Jesus Christ. Either you’re with us, or if you’re not with us, we or our version of Jesus will eradicate you.

BuzzFlash: How did you become aware of what’s happening there now?

Michael L. Weinstein: I really have to thank Mel Gibson. When Mel came out with his wonderful movie in February of 2004 -- I forget the name -– it was called the "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre," or "Freddie Versus Jesus" -– when that movie came out ["The Passion of the Christ"], I was not contacted by my three children who were at that time at the Academy. I was contacted by non-evangelical Christian members of the faculty. They knew that my wife and I had given a lot of blood, sweat, tears, money, and effort over the years, because we loved the Academy. They wanted to know if I was aware of just how profoundly, how comprehensively, the Academy as an entity was coming down on the cadets and staff to go see this movie.

I was stunned. For three straight days, the cadets were marched into Mitchell Hall, this huge, two-acre dining facility, and General Myers was exhorting them, pressuring them, to go see this thing.

I’m sure there are lots of people that loved the movie. I found it to be a wretched piece of crap, of garbage, and incredibly anti-Semitic, and it deviated from the gospels in so many ways, it had everything in it except for a car chase.

At that point, I thought it was just an anomaly. But as I dug deeper into it, more and more people came to me with evidence and things that were shocking.

For example, it was routine to have brown-bag lunches at the Academy, promoted by flyers that went out saying, “Do not take this flyer down; this is an officially sponsored U.S. Air Force Academy activity in conjunction with the Christian Leadership Ministries.”

Case in point: January of 2005 -- and I know this sounds unbelievable, but I can’t make this stuff up -- a flyer said: "Today’s luncheon topic: Why we cannot let you have your God while we have ours. Our other luncheon topics: Dangerous to the followers of Jesus -- pluralism and secularism." And they go on and on.

The most common joke at the Air Force Academy of 2004 and 2005: "Why do Jews make the best magicians?" Have you heard that one?

BuzzFlash: No, I haven’t.

Michael L. Weinstein: Apparently because Jews have the magical ability to walk into a red brick building and come out the smokestack in a puff of smoke. And then on top of everything, July 12th, 2005, on the front page of the newspaper most reviled by the Pentagon –- and that newspaper would be, of course, The New York Times –- the number-two ranking general in the entire chaplains corp of thousands in the U.S. Air Force, makes the unbelievable statement to the American public and the world, that it is now the U.S. Air Force’s official policy to reserve its right to evangelize anyone it determines to be unchurched. Those are your Geiger counters. If you’re unchurched, we reserve the right to evangelize you.

Well, my wife and I raised our hands and said: Excuse me, Air Force. Having three children within the Air Force, we demand to know, do our children fall in that Richard Nixon-era enemies list of being "unchurched"? And if so, are you or are you not, we demanded, going to exercise your "right" to evangelize our children? Not getting an answer after beating them up in the media for 88 days, we sued them on the 89th day.

BuzzFlash: Is that lawsuit still active?

Michael L. Weinstein: The lawsuit is not active. We lasted well over a year until the judge dismissed the case on technicalities. He said he was not at all reaching any sort of opinion on the merits, and he showed us exactly how to come back in again. We’re very close to going back into federal court again. This time, it’ll be against the entire Pentagon.

BuzzFlash: Is the Evangelical attempt to shape the Air Force Academy cadets into dominionists continuing?

Michael L. Weinstein: I would best describe it as following the flying donkey theory. Have you heard of that one?

BuzzFlash: No.

Michael L. Weinstein: When a donkey flies, you don’t expect it to stay up very long.
We now have about seventeen active cases going on at the Academy. Over forty-two hundred members of the U.S. military -– Marines, sailors, soldiers, airmen, veterans –- have come talk to us, and roughly 96% of them are Christians. About three-fourths would be traditional Protestants such as Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Church of Christ, and Baptists. The other one-fourth are primarily Roman Catholic, with the balance being Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or Wicken.

Basically you have dominionist evangelical Christians pray/preying [P-R-A-Y and P-R-E-Y] -– on non-Evangelical Christians, telling them: You know what? You may think you’re a Christian, but you’re not actually Christian enough. And as a result, you’re going to burn eternally in the fires of hell along with the Jews.

BuzzFlash: On a day-to-day basis, how does this manifest itself?

Michael L. Weinstein: It’s extremely insidious. For the readers of BuzzFlash, the true numbers to remember from this interview are 737 and 132.

We currently have 737 U.S. military installations that the Pentagon acknowledges. It’s actually closer to a thousand military installations scattered around the globe -- in 132 countries. On every one of those military installations, we have something called the Officers' Christian Fellowship, for the officers, and for the enlisted folks, the Christian Military Fellowship.

They have a three-part goal that they are completely unabashed about –- it’s right on their website -– a goal they view as much higher than following the oath they have sworn, to support, defend, protect and preserve the Constitution. Their goals are, A, they want to see a spiritually transformed U.S. military; B, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform; and C, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

How does this manifest itself? It’s everywhere. It’s like gravity. To quote a senior official at West Point who told me the other day that they’re terrified to come forward, it’s like radio and TV waves. It bathes everything.

BuzzFlash: Clearly, this could not happen without approval from the hierarchy in the Pentagon.

Michael L. Weinstein: Actually, it’s happening top-down, I think. And it’s been going on for quite awhile. We think it started in 1972 when the draft ended.

The theory for having a draft was that we were pulling from what we now call blue and red states, conscripting people into the military. Of course, a lot of them were pissed off coming in, and when you’re pissed off, even a spoonful of sugar doesn’t make the Jesus go down. But since we ended the draft, going to the full volunteer force in 1972, now we’re pulling mostly from what we call red states, where there’s a lot of this blending of a virulent form of dominionist Christianity –- essentially predatory Christianity -– with patriotism.

Then, in 1994, with the Gingrich revolution taking over, two years into the Clinton presidency, the politics of polarization really reared its ugly head. Either you’re with us or you don’t really deserve to be an American.

Then, after 9/11, with this complete idiot in the White House, this whole thing went into overdrive. My wife and I have had right-wing talk-show hosts indicate that we’re an embarrassment to the state we live in, New Mexico, and probably don’t even deserve to be Americans.

Do you know that in this country in 1970, we only had ten mega-Evangelical churches, meaning those with 2,000 or more members? But after 9/11, a new mega-Evangelical church has opened up in our country every 48 hours.

That is their right. That’s fine. But when they engage the machinery of the state and the people in the government, that’s when we have a terrible, hideous problem.


And this is coming right down from the Oval Office, up and down the chain of command. And let’s remember, at the Pentagon, we actually have regulations that prohibit military members from even pushing Tupperware, Mary Kay cosmetics, or Amway, for fear of what the Draconian spectre of command influence could force a subordinate to do.

BuzzFlash: They do allow for an atmosphere in which anyone who is not Evangelical is intimidated.

Michael L. Weinstein: The Air Force is saying: Here’s our policy. If we have a religion test, of course, it does violate man’s law, which is just the Constitution, which is clearly subordinated to the higher law of our recognized version of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But if we determine you’re unchurched, and that’s our determination, we do in fact reserve the right to evangelize you.

A couple years ago, the ranking chaplain at the Air Force Academy was exhorting the cadets in his fire-and-brimstone Evangelical dominionist service to go out at the end of the service and seek out the other members of their incoming basic class of 700 who were in the remote combat training area called Jack Valley at the Academy -- which is enormous -- it’s 18,000 acres. Half the class agreed to come to his service. The other half was bivouacked about 40 yards away in camps. He orders his young charges get in the face of their classmates in their tents, demanding of their religious faiths. They were ordered to evangelize the unbelievers on the spot. And if the unbelievers still refused to accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior, they were to be told to their faces that they would burn eternally in the fires of hell.

BuzzFlash: Going back to your credentials, you’re a patriarch. Your family has served for three generations. Your children are following in your footsteps in terms of military careers and military college training. And yet you’re saying that right-wing talk-show hosts attack you as
unpatriotic?

Michael L. Weinstein: Yes. In fact, Rush Limbaugh, who I would say is a complete coward, attacked me a couple months ago as being a pacifist, and an aider and abetter to al Qaeda, which I thought was amazing. Of course, he hasn’t spent one second in the military. I don’t know how many exemptions he got. And between Rove and Cheney, they got eleven exemptions, so they never served one second in the military, either.

BuzzFlash: I believe Rush Limbaugh got out of serving in Vietnam by having a doctor certify that he had anal cysts.

Michael L. Weinstein: Exactly -- that complete and total coward. And I hope he reads BuzzFlash, because I would like to challenge him again. I’ll meet him anywhere in a boxing match for three rounds. And I’ll go blindfolded.

BuzzFlash: This is an extremely important point, because you and your family have proven both your commitment to a military education, and military service, and combat, and shown complete loyalty and patriotism to the concept of democracy.

Michael L. Weinstein: Of course.

BuzzFlash: But someone like Rush Limbaugh says you’re unpatriotic because you’re trying to uphold the Constitution.

Michael L. Weinstein: Exactly. This is not a Christian-Jewish issue at all. This is a dominionist Christian versus the Constitution issue.

We have a social contract in our society. In America, if you’re angry at your neighbor next door, you’re not allowed to pick up your fellow citizen and crush their head in. We have laws that are all derived from our U.S. Constitution. When you look at the Bill of Rights, which was passed in December of 1791, it was not at all created for the convenience of the majority. Quite to the contrary –- it was created to prevent the tyranny of the majority over the minority –- an amazing social experiment in America.

Whenever a virulent form of any religion has engaged the machinery of the state -– and by that, I’m talking about the armed forces, where the sticks and stones are that break our bones -- we end up with oceans and oceans of blood. And it’s happening again now. Right now, we have the nuclear weapons.

The train has left the station many times over and over and over again, and it always goes to one town, Slaughterville. Average Americans, docile and supine, need to get off their asses and realize that this is happening. We have to take our country back, which means simply following our Constitution of 200 years -- and Constitutional U.S. Supreme Court case law.

BuzzFlash: Obviously at BuzzFlash, we read reams of links from news coverage every day. We have encountered, in the past couple of years, some coverage about the Air Force Academy and the controversy over the evangelizing of recruits. But there really hasn’t been a lot of mainstream coverage about this. There was a little dust-up, with General Boykin and his crusade for Christ in the military.

Michael L. Weinstein: Right.

BuzzFlash: Why do you think the story is pretty much uncovered by the mainsteam media?

Michael L. Weinstein: Good question, simple answer. We have the illusion of democracy in America. What we really have is an auction, where the most money gets out there.
My wife and I have pretty much self-funded our foundation. I hope your readers know that. Please go to our website, which is www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org. And we probably have about 45 people involved in this fight. We’re a recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Everything that’s donated to us is completely tax deductible.

But that’s what it is. We have the illusion of democracy. We really have an auction. Or as the Machiavellians would say, when you aim at the prince, you’d better kill the prince. Don’t get in his sight. So, there is a war going on. They know it –- the dominionist Christians. And they know that I know it.

You know, they’re making money off of me. They’re saying I’m the big bad wolf. We got to get money to go after Mikey. They’re sending out communications, raising money among their 12.6 percent of the American public who are dominionist Christians. It’s 36 to 38 million people.

BuzzFlash: Just to repeat, because I think this is an important point that gets lost -- you’re of the Jewish faith.

Michael L. Weinstein: Yes, just half my family, and half my family is Christian.

BuzzFlash: And in the Air Force Academy, there are people of many faiths. Ironically, they've just decided to allow Wickens to have grave markers that represent their Wicken faith.

Michael L. Weinstein: Yes.

BuzzFlash: You’re speaking out on behalf of anyone who has a faith that’s other than the dominionist variety of the Evangelical Christian movement. What I think is key, if I’m hearing it right, is that in the United States, we swear allegiance to our nation. What is happening here, if I’m understanding this, is that the dominionists, with the approval of the hierarchy at the Pentagon, are saying that their allegiance to their view of Christianity comes before loyalty to the nation.

Michael L. Weinstein: Absolutely. Their first loyalty is to their lord, which they view as, of course, Jesus Christ. Secondly, their loyalty is to the family, and third to the Constitution.
But we have our democracy because we have our Constitution. What has happened is is that from Bush all the way down the line, we hear this new mantra -– your first loyalty is to the lord, and then comes your family, and then comes your Constitution.

The problem is that in the military, we do not put our hands on the Constitution of the United States to swear to support, defend, protect and preserve a particular Biblical world view of the New Testament. Some people do actually put their hands on a Bible, or a Koran, for that matter, to swear to support, defend, protect and preserve the U.S. Constitution. This is why this country was here.

If you don’t want to have separation of church and state –- and I say this to everyone in the military, all the dominionist Christians in the military and those who are outside it -– I suggest you move to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, because they have no separation there. Perhaps you’ll be happier. Or maybe join Kim Jong-il of North Korea. And please move quickly.

BuzzFlash: We have a Constitution which says the United States is founded as a nation that allows the freedom of worship for anyone. And the defense of that relgious freedom is one reason why people serve in the military, with the patriotism your family has shown over three generations. But you go to the Air Force Academy now and there’s an attempt to impose a faith upon individuals with other faiths.

Michael L. Weinstein: Anyone who’s ever been in the military knows it’s a very Spartan environment – very Spartan. Many of the Constitutional rights of our sailors, soldiers, marines and airmen, noble and honorable as they are, are deliberately truncated and limited so that we can preserve and protect the concept of good order and discipline, which is necessary to have a lethally effective military.

Our U.S. military is technologically the most lethal organization ever created by humankind. And that’s necessary so that they can protect the full panoply of Constitutional rights for the rest of us. When you’re in that Draconian system, up and down, there’s this command structure, and there’s this formidable specter of command influence. If you’re being told by your superiors that the fastest way in their eyes you can go from zero to hero is to accept their dominionist Biblical world view, it’s very hard to say no. And it was George Orwell who said, when you face universal defeat, speaking the truth itself can be a revolutionary act. We just don’t teach our young sailors to be revolutionaries.

BuzzFlash: Here's a quotation from your foundation: “The United States is a nation rooted in respect for religious pluralism, a cherished principle that springs from our democratic ideals. As the United States becomes increasingly religiously diverse, respect for minority beliefs takes on even greater importance in a nation’s ability to withstand assaults on our freedom launched by religious totalitarians.” End of quote from your brochure. Is that the mission of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation?

Michael L. Weinstein: Yes. Our mission is really two-fold. It’s educate, and also litigate. Our mission is to educate both the media and the members of the military on all those far-flung bases around the world and domestically, as to what their Constitutional rights are. Not just the Bill of Rights, but as we mentioned earlier, Clause three, Article 6 –- no religion test.

Some other organizations out there -– the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Americans United –- they’re all good organizations, but none of them focuses with laser-like precision exactly on where all the weapons are.

And you've got to be able to be nimble. You have to be very quick. If somebody calls the Foundation, they get me live, then, and there. It takes a lot of ocean to turn an aircraft carrier, and at a lot of these organizations, you cannot get through. It took me a year to get through to one of them. We are like a PT boat. We maneuver very quickly. We can turn. We move very quickly. We get to the media quickly.

So our job is to educate and litigate for our active duty and our veterans, because they deserve it. They’re the cherished entities out there that allow us to sit down and even have a great interview like this today on BuzzFlash.

BuzzFlash: Just the other day you went out on short notice to meet a veteran who says that he was denied Kosher food. He was then cut off from prescriptions. He was told that he didn’t need them because his Orthodox faith should take care of his disease. Your book focuses mostly on the Air Force Academy, but according to this veteran, it’s even impacting veterans’ health care.

Michael L. Weinstein: The book focuses on the Air Force Academy because that’s where we found the liver spot that turned out to be malignant for the entire body. We, at that time, did not know that as we pulled the string of the sweater, the whole sweater would come off. It covers the entire hierarchy of the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corp, Navy, Army, and the Veterans’ Administration.

David Miller is a very courageous veteran. We’ve been approached by many, but only one so far has had the guts to come forward publically. Imagine being evangelized when you’re hooked up.

You’re in terrible chronic angina heart pain and with kidney stones. Repeatedly you’re being evangelized by the VA chaplain.

BuzzFlash: This was in Iowa?

Michael L. Weinstein: In Iowa City at the VA Hospital, when he had told them, and filled out the paperwork, and made it clear to them repeatedly, he did not want them in there. At one point, he had to scream for the nurses to get the chaplain out of there. Ultimately when he complains, the hospital management says, you know, you just haven’t been strenuous enough in your complaints. What? You’re supposed to bring Tony Soprano in?

Well, let me tell you something. It’ll be strenuous enough now, because we’re going to file a federal lawsuit. At the end of the day, they told him they were not going to give him pain meds because they decided that they found five new stones in his body, four on the left and one on the right. They looked too small to be really causing him this pain.

By the way, he’s a 100% disabled vet, and he’s had kidney stones for 27 years that are directly attributable to his honorable service in the U.S. Navy. They scarcely looked at him and said, “Well, you’re a religious Jew. We suggest you go home and pray and meditate.” So I guess it’s, "take two Jewish prayers and call me in the morning."

BuzzFlash: What are your next steps?

Michael L. Weinstein: Our next steps include our fund raisng, and we are coming out with a movie at the LA Film Festival on June 24th – a wonderful movie with an Oscar-nominated director named Oren Jacoby, the Hollywood documentary version of the runaway bestseller on The New York Times called Constantine’s Sword, that documented the very bloody 2000-year history between the church and the Jews. My family and I are in that movie significantly.
There’s also a movie based on my book that we’re in the process of shooting. We are just trying to do our best to fund raise. Anyone who reads this, please consider going to www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org. Every dollar you give us is probably worth 15,000 on the other side. And there’s talk now of a second book, with the prospective title, Taking God to Court. But our current book, With God on Our Side, One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military is in Border’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon. It’s certainly available there at BuzzFlash.

BuzzFlash: Mikey, thank you so much for your service to the country, your family’s service to your country, and fighting on behalf of America. And best of luck in keeping the Constitution and the American dream alive.

Michael L. Weinstein: Thank you so much, Mark.

BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.


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