News Intelligence Analysis
Tikkun
An Evangelical Coup in America's
Military
Posted Friday, August 03 2007 @ 08:08 AM PDT
Tikkun's managing editor Dave Belden interviews Mikey Weinstein,
president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, on the
Evangelical coup in America's Military.
Click here to see a CNN interview with
Mikey Weinstein
on the violation
of the military rules; raises constitutional questions on the
role
of religion in the 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 ever 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*ing 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*ing 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 once 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.” [Yurica Report Note: If Luke 19:27 is used in this way by military personnel, it indicates the ignorance of the proselytizers. Since this was a parable--that is a fictious story stated to illustrate a point--and Jesus was quoting the words of a "nobleman" and not himself, a statement identifying the speaker as Jesus puts words in his mouth and misrepresents the reading of the text.]
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.
Tikkun: And the reason that it is you and not someone else is your upbringing as a Jew and your response to the Holocaust?
Weinstein: When I see anti-Semitism, I don’t f*ing care if I live or die, someone’s going to get a f*ing beating. And that’s it. I look at people like Abe Foxman and I just shake my head in disgust, because I don’t know who in the middle of the night robbed him of his backbone. I look at AIPAC and the others who think that I’m getting in the way of their nice, cushy deal with the money they get from the evangelicals.
But this is not a Christian-Jewish issue. This is a Dominionist
Christian versus the Constitution issue. It’s not a political
spectrum, Left or Right issue, it’s a Constitutional right
or wrong issue.
I speak to many of them who are Dominionist Christians—they
reach out saying Mikey, what are you doing? You’re from
a military family, you’re a Republican, why are you fighting
us? Mikey, if you had the cure for cancer, you’d want to
give it to our troops as well. They don’t even think—and
I want to reach out to them, I do—I want to reach out and
feel the lobotomy scars. These people, when they make that statement,
don’t even stop to think that they’re calling every
other religious faith—including still the majority of Christendom—that
their views are cancer.
And they’ll say to me, “Mikey, Jack Benny, Dr. Seuss,
Einstein, Gandhi, Anne Frank, those two million children that
you talk about, Mikey, that were under the age of twelve, that
died in the Holocuast—don’t you understand, Mikey,
they’re all burning eternally in the fires of Hell and we
don’t want this to happen to you, you and your family, and
the members of our Marine Corps, Navy, Army, and Air Force.”
My response to them is, very simply, this: I, Mikey Weinstein,
would give my last drop of blood and my last breath to support
your right to believe that. Moreover, my three children who wear
the uniform of the U.S. Armed Forces, all of them lieutenants,
all of them Air Force Academy Grads, one of them Christian, my
daughter-in-law, my two sons Jewish, I would commend them to
give their last drop of blood and their last breath to support
your belief that those two million children are lit up like Fourth
of July Roman candles in Hell perpetually. Because that’s
your right as an American to believe that.
But I will NOT do that when my government tells me who are the
children of the greater God, and who are the children of a lesser
God, been there, done that, seen the train leave the station,
over and over and over and over again. It goes to one town—Slaughterville.
Because we don’t end up with little creeks, rivers, streams,
ponds and lakes, we end up with oceans and oceans of blood, generally
beginning with Jewish blood. I don’t care if they’re
the most assiduously religious, Orthodox Jew, or you’re
a completely atheistic Jew. Jews, whether we like it or not,
tend to be the miner’s canaries for the morality of the
communities in which we live. That is to say, that when we begin
to asphyxiate, there is a serious problem, Houston.
And that’s happening now. I am not on this call today
as Al Gore talking about global warming at a tipping point. Oh
no no, we’ve tipped. We’ve tipped where all the nukes
are.
The stories are legion that I can tell you about. Legion. I don’t
know if it’s too late.
Tikkun: So are you seeing strong parallels to Nazi Germany?
Weinstein: It’s June 26, 2007. I can make an extraordinarily strong case that it’s really June 26, 1937.
The Religious Right, or as I refer to them, the Religious Wrong, they think that the separation of church and state is a myth, like Bigfoot, Popeye, and Paul Bunyan. In fact, in the Republican Party, God’s Own Party in Texas, for the last several years they’ve had an official plank in their platform to “dispel the myth of separation of church and state.” In December of 1789, the body of the Constitution went into affect, and our founding fathers were so prescient, they were so worried about the mixing of church and state, they stuck in Clause 3, Article 6, saying we will never have a religion test for any position in our federal government.
And yet, where were the readers of Tikkun, where we were all, on Tuesday, July 12, 2005, when on the front page of the newspaper most reviled by the Pentagon, the New York Times, the number two ranking general of all the chaplains in the U.S. Air Force, Brigadier General Cecil R. Richardson, makes the un-f*ing-believable statement that it’s now the U.S. Air Force’s official policy to reserve its right to evangelize “anyone it determines to be unchurched,” which is obviously a religion test.
My wife and I raised our hands and said “Excuse me, Air Force, we have three children in you, and we now demand to know, do our kids fall on that enemies list of being “unchurched,” and if so, we demand to know, are you going to recognize your reserved right to evangelize our children?”
For 88 days we beat them up in the media. I’ve been on every radio show, every television show, every magazine. I’m been on everything from Al Jazeera to Fox News, everything from Hustler magazine to Christian Science Monitor. And when they didn’t answer on the 89th day, we sued them. And we lasted for fifty-five weeks before the judge dismissed us without prejudice on a legal technicality, and we’re very close to going back in again with nuclear-tipped missiles to lay down that withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds to protect the right of members of our U.S. Military from not being forced to accept a particular religious faith over all others.
Tikkun: When I think about Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, great campaigners for justice against massive power, they would reject the military metaphors you use.
Weinstein: Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolence, and Martin Luther King’s nonviolence would only work in a civilization that had a conscience. They would have lasted three nanoseconds under Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Stalin, Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler.
Tikkun: So you’re saying…
Weinstein: I’m saying that the Dominionist Christian… it’s an imperious, fascistic contagion without a conscience. You know who General Wesley Clark is. He ran for President, he was the supreme NATO commander, he’s a four-star general. He came to my house for a fundraiser a few months ago. He said, “Mikey, you have a cause worth dying for. Let me assure you, the people you are fighting are the most wretched combination I have ever seen of two terrible human characteristics: heartlessness and zealousness. They have no conscience.” So therefore passivity and a peaceful attitude is going to be as useful as a baseball bat in a football game or a cricket bat in a rugby game.
Tikkun: But Martin Luther King was not trying to win over the hard core racist minority who were totally against civil rights. He was trying to win over the great middle of America. Are you saying that the great middle of America is conscience-less at the moment?
Weinstein: There is a reason that the Simpsons is such a popular TV show. Because most of America is Homer Simpson: docile and supine. They think a great deal of enviable energy is if you’re willing to spend three chilly nights on an air mattress in front of Circuit City to get your goddamn Play Station Three.
Tikkun: If you are so contemptuous of ordinary Americans,
what hope do you see for America?
Weinstein: Our Constitution is our hope. And our Federal Court
system.
Tikkun: But ultimately what happens to the legal system is dependent on whom we elect to the presidency and to congress… Why do you think the Dominionists have become so strong in our country? And not just them—they’re part of a much wider evangelical growth which is not Dominionist.
Weinstein: It appears as though everything changed in 1972. That’s when we ended the draft, mandatory conscription. When we had it, at least in theory, we were pulling uniformly from what we now refer to as blue and red states. But after the end of the draft, mostly the members of our military started coming from what we now know as red states, where they fuse this weaponized gospel with patriotism.
Tikkun: I don’t know if you’re familiar at all with Tikkun’s Editor, Rabbi Michael Lerner.
Weinstein: All I know is that there aren’t enough fighting rabbis, but the fighting rabbis that I know seem to view him in a sense of universal admiration.
Tikkun: His analysis of why the Christian Right has risen so strongly is that there is actually a spiritual crisis in the country, which a lot of secular and left-leaning people don’t even recognize. Very many ordinary people feel a great need for some kind of spiritual help and meaning in their lives that seems to be drained out by consumer society and by the rapidity of change in our country. And only the Christian Right has been talking directly to middle America about those needs.
Weinstein: Can I tell you something that completely backs it up? I’m not sure if you’re aware of this stat, but in 1970 in our country we only had ten mega-evangelical churches, that is a church of two thousand or more active members. But after 9/11, which I’m sure didn’t do much to help the spiritual crisis in this country, maybe just exacerbated it off the scale, after 9/11, with this complete idiot in the White House, a new mega-evangelical church has opened up in our country every 48 hours.
A spiritual crisis, hell yeah, I understand that, there’s probably eight million reasons there, but we have a Constitution in this country.
My fight and the fight of my foundation, the Military and Religious Freedom Foundation, is not a complex meal. We are not chateaubriand. We’re a hamburger. We’re basically saying, to the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, and Air Force: Look, you’re going to be at least as constrained as a shift manager at Starbucks, Wendy’s, Burger King, KFC, Costco. Because if you want to see a Fortune 1000 CEO brought to her or his knees, have the most junior employee in the mail room, raise your hand and say, I’m being evangelized during the work day. I’m getting’ me a lawyer. Let me tell you something, brother. I’ve tried those cases. That is a direct violation of Title 7 of the U.S. Code, even without specific intent. It’s disparate impact versus disparate treatment, it’s a killer law suit. This would last three seconds in the private sector.
But in the U.S. Military, it’s a trillion times worse. That isn’t just your shift manager at Starbucks; that’s your military superior. The members of our military are necessarily second-class, constitutional citizens. They’ve given up many of their constitutional rights in order to support the higher goal of good order and discipline, to create the best, most lethal fighting unit we have to protect the full panoply of constitutional rights for the rest of us. But there’s a price to be paid. Because they are second-class constitutional citizens, they are very vulnerable, which is why the Pentagon has those aforementioned regulations about Amway etc. When you are being even gently evangelized by your military superior, “Get the hell out of my damn face, sir or ma’am” is not an option for you.
Tikkun: But here’s my question about this. One goal of the Air Force Academy is to create character of a certain kind. But it seems the military didn’t know how to deal with the rise of feminism, or with women coming into the academy. So you got sexual abuse. And then they were looking around for how to build character to prevent sexual abuse and they latched onto this evangelical ‘solution.’ I understand very clearly that you’re against the way that they did it. What I want to know is what you’re for? In other words, how do you build character in this multi-religious, pluralistic way, that is feminist, that is sensitive to people, and yet is part of this huge, military, dominate-the-world force that seems to be what the American military is up to now.
Weinstein: What I’m for, I’m for the Constitution, and I fell in love with that document during my days as a cadet at the Academy. I took my oath seriously. I recently asked the Air Force Academy and challenged them, show me where you ever teach about the First Amendment. Because we take an oath—you don’t do that at Berkeley or at Stanford, but you swear an oath at West Point and Annapolis and the Air Force Academy to protect, defend, and support the Constitution. We studied it very carefully there. And that helped build my character tremendously, and my classmates’ characters. After two months, they came back to me with their tail tucked firmly between their legs, and they showed me the syllabus for Law for Commanders, Block 4, Lesson 12, to be exact, and it said “Instruction in the First Amendment."
Tikkun: I agree that teaching the Constitution is critical, but teaching character is much more than that. The question is what is the character-building methodology that you think will work?
Weinstein: Character-building… You ask some very good questions. Sometimes I have to say that the answer is… I’m not a professional character-builder. Like I don’t make cakes or bread for a living, but I know that you certainly don’t put nitroglycerin into bread and cake, and you’d better damn well stop putting fundamentalist Dominionist Christian nitroglycerin into whatever recipe you’re using at West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, and the rest of our Armed Forces, to build character. Because unconstitutional nitroglycerin in there is going to kill this country.
Tikkun: All I’m suggesting is that if there isn’t some other sort of powerful and attractive means of character-building, that is religiously neutral and pluralistic, then these proselytizing religious ones will get sucked into the vacuum.
Weinstein: Well, nature abhors the vacuum, so… It’s an excellent, excellent question. I’m actually stoked about it, because I’ve done, I don’t know, a thousand interviews. No one’s ever asked that before. I’ll tell you this: each year the Air Force Academy has a giant Character and Leadership Seminar, and they’ve never invited me. They’ve invited so many Dominionist Christians over the years. So many cadets have called me—most of them Christians, a small amount are Jewish—when these people start off with their character lectures all over a two-day period, all about Jesus-this, Jesus-that, Jesus-everything, so you know what? I’d like to challenge the Air Force Academy: let me come back and I’ll talk for an hour.
Tikkun: If you like we can suggest a bunch of other people who could give great character-building classes for the military. But I’ve taken up an hour of your time…
Weinstein: Of all the journalists, you stand up like a tarantula on a wedding cake. You have wonderful questions, and very thought-provoking.
Dave Belden
Managing Editor
Tikkun Magazine
2342 Shattuck Ave, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510 644 1200
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