Meet the man who's trying to purge evangelical Christianity from the Pentagon

Ari · May 26, 2010

Keep fighting the good fight, Mr. Weinstein. We need to rid the military of these Bible-thumbing neo-Nazis, and it may just take a Jew to do it

Mikey Weinstein's Crusade

Meet the man who's trying to purge evangelical Christianity from the Pentagon

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/25/mikey_weinsteins_crusade

"Good morning Mikey, you f***ing Jew. Let me be the first to call you a f*** Jew today."

Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein shares his hate mail with both friends and strangers the way elderly people show off photos of their grandkids. He has plenty of it to share. For the past four years, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been doing battle with a Christian subculture that, he believes, is trying to Christianize the U.S. armed forces with the help of a complicit Pentagon brass. He calls it the "fundamentalist Christian parachurch-military-corporate-proselytizing complex," a mouthful by which he means holy warriors in contempt of the constitutional barrier between church and state.

"The scary thing about all this," Weinstein says, "is it's going on not with the blind eye of the Pentagon but with its full and totally enthusiastic support. And those who are not directly involved are passive about it. As the Talmud says, 'silence is consent.'"

You may recall the headlines in January, when a company called Trijicon, the lead supplier of rifle scopes to the U.S. military, was found to have inscribed them with coded references to passages in the New Testament. That was Weinstein -- his organization threatened to sue Trijicon, which eventually agreed to discontinue the practice and distribute kits that would enable troops to retroactively secularize their scopes. Weinstein grabbed headlines again last month by pressuring the Pentagon to withdraw an invitation to the Rev. Franklin Graham, known for his Islamophobic oratory, to speak at a National Day of Prayer Task Force service. That provoked a stiff rebuke of Weinstein and his group from Shirley Dobson, wife of conservative Christian leader James Dobson and the task force chairwoman.

Built like a cinder block, with a bare cranium shaped like a howitzer round, Weinstein -- a former Air Force judge advocate general -- has the air of a born fighter. This battle is personal for him: Nearly 30 years ago, as a Jewish cadet at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, he was twice beaten unconscious in anti-Semitic attacks. (There wouldn't have been much of a choice of targets -- only 0.3 percent of the members of the U.S. military identify themselves as Jewish. Ninety-four percent are Christian.) Visiting his son, Curtis, on the eve of his own second year at the academy in the summer of 2004, Weinstein was stunned to learn little had changed; over lunch at McDonald's, Curtis told his father that he had been verbally abused eight or nine times by officers and fellow cadets on account of his religion. Weinstein filed a complaint, in response to which the Air Force launched an investigation that revealed a top-down, invasive evangelicalism in the academy. Among other things, it revealed that the commandant of cadets taught the entire incoming class a "J for Jesus" hand signal, that the football coach had draped a "Team Jesus" banner across the academy locker room, and that more than 250 faculty members and senior officers signed a campus newspaper advertisement that proclaimed: "We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world." Weinstein has been a First Amendment vigilante ever since.

Although he is frequently attacked for waging a war on Christianity, all but a fraction of Weinstein's clients are practicing Catholics and Protestants of mainline denominations who claim to be targeted by proselytizing evangelical superiors. The root of the problem, Weinstein believes, is a cluster of well-funded groups dedicated to Christianizing the military and proselytizing abroad. They include the Navigators, which, according to their website, command "thousands of courageous men and women passionately following Christ, representing Him in advancing the Gospel through relationships where they live, work, train for war, and deploy." There is Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry, which has a permanent staff presence at U.S. military academies and whose directors have referred publicly to U.S. soldiers and Marines as "government-paid missionaries." Such groups, Weinstein argues, "are the flip side of the Taliban. They're like Islamic officers exercising Quranic leadership to raise a jihadi army." (A spokesman for the Navigators said the group had had no interaction with Weinstein and no comment on his activities. Military Ministry representatives didn't immediately respond to inquiries on the subject.)

Although Weinstein's past lawsuits have garnered plenty of attention, they were just a warm-up for his next battle. Last week, he announced his group was preparing a lawsuit on behalf of Zachari Klawonn, a Muslim U.S. Army specialist at Fort Hood, Texas, who claims he was harassed and threatened after a Muslim psychiatrist's deadly shooting spree there last fall claimed the lives of 13 people on the base. "The way [Klawonn's] commanders have dealt with this is either incompetence or it's intentional," Weinstein told the Washington Post. "But either way, it's just wrong." The subtext to Klawonn's case -- that the November assault by Maj. Nidal M. Hasan may have been provoked by an entrenched Islamophobia in the ranks, rather than the product of an isolated pathology or a terrorist conspiracy -- makes this among Weinstein's most controversial legal adventures.

Klawonn says he turned to MRFF for the same reason thousands (by Weinstein's count) of other service members have contacted the organization: It was the only group that was willing to help him. "I reach out today in a desperate and final last ditch attempt in search of answers, guidance and quite frankly, justice," Klawonn emailed Weinstein on May 8. He detailed how, since he joined the U.S. Army two years ago -- before Hasan's massacre -- he had been exposed to "a constant blast of the most degrading, humiliating and dehumanizing religious and cultural discrimination." Klawonn has accused his superiors of fostering a "blatantly false, propagandized" idea of Islam that conflates its minority radical elements with the Islamic faith generally. "This is outright bigotry," Klawonn wrote in his email, "officially sanctioned and taught by the U.S. Army itself."

Commanders at Fort Hood rejected Klawonn's allegations, insisting they had responded swiftly to claims of anti-Islamic bigotry since the killings. "This base takes the concerns of its Muslim soldiers and all its soldiers very seriously," spokesman Christopher Haug told the Washington Post. "His commanders are really trying to help him."

Is Weinstein mad? To his enemies, he is demonic and hell-bound. "The joy I get when i realize you are put away for eternity in the Red Hot Hotel and the rest of the Muslims [sic]...keeps me going," reads one of the many digital turds in Weinstein's in-box. Others take a more proactive approach to Weinstein's soul. "Lots of people prayed to Jesus for Mikey today," says another email Weinstein received on May 6, the National Day of Prayer. "Spiritual struggle going on my friend - Praise God."

Barack Obama's administration, Weinstein says, is apparently less interested in his work than some Christians are in his spiritual well-being. He has made several requests for a meeting at the White House to plead his case for presidential action, just as he did during the Bush years, but to no avail. Asked about Weinstein's work, Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith declined via email to comment on it directly but said that the Defense Department "places a high value on the rights of military members to observe the tenets of their respective religions. [It] does not endorse any one religion or religious organization, and provides free access of religion for all members of the military services." In fiscal year 2009, she said, the Pentagon fielded just 15 formal complaints from its 1.4 million active-duty members relating to religious matters.

Weinstein, however, is not inclined to accept such assurances. "Fundamentalist Christianity in the military is like magma," he says, "and every hour or so it bursts up like a little volcano and you have to beat it down."
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rhadamanthus · May 26, 2010

Thanks for posting this - great story. He deserves serious thanks for his efforts.

LScolaDominates · May 26, 2010

Haven't read the article yet, but I look forward to it. I first heard of this guy when he was on Democracy Now last year:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/6/the_crusade_for_a_christian_military

Ari · May 26, 2010

rhadamanthus said:

Thanks for posting this - great story. He deserves serious thanks for his efforts.
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He really does, unfortunately it will take a lot more than just one man to help purge the latter day Crusaders in the ranks of the military. As this article mentions, some of the top people in the military are pushing this stuff and creating an intimidating atmosphere for other recruits. Frankly, this stuff has to be publicized and the agenda has to be set from the very top, but for political expediency I doubt Obama or anyone else will come out and publicly admonish those in the military who promote this stuff within the ranks. They probably say it behind closed doors, but I doubt they would publicize it. If they did, Christian fanatics everywhere would claim that their religion is under attack by the progressive agenda (because the preservation of the secular institutions, as we all know, is a progressive agenda!

MadMax · May 27, 2010

http://blog.sojo.net/2009/05/06/the-two-futures-project-who-would-jesus-bomb/

Forgive the background noise …. I’m sitting in an airport coming back from Taylor University, a typical Christian liberal arts college in the Midwest. But last night hundreds of students built a cardboard shantytown in the middle of the campus quad and slept out in the rain to remember the homeless, undocumented, and displaced people in the world. They will continue to sleep out as part of an entire week of faith and social justice, bringing attention to issues like nuclear weapons, immigration, and poverty.

It was one more sign of the changing face of evangelicalism in post-religious right America, where young Christians are not limited to the hot-button issues and stale debates of the past — but are convinced that our faith has to connect to the world we live in, that we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

And we are aware of the glaring contradictions – that the U.S. continues to try to be a credible voice for peace while maintaining the largest weapons arsenal in the world, with a military budget larger than the combined military budgets of the next 30 countries…

We are convinced that Dr.King was right when he said, “A country that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

We have seen the mistakes. Harry Truman thanked God for the atomic bomb and prayed God would help us use it wisely, as he dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A new generation in the church is saying our God does not bless bombs. Our God is the One who lived in Jesus and said if we pick up the sword we will die by the sword… if we trust in the bomb we will die by it.

It is this Jesus who said we are to love our enemies, and we are convinced that it is impossible to simultaneously love them and prepare to kill them en masse. When I was a teenager we wore bracelets that said WWJD — What Would Jesus Do? Now young people in the church are taking that a step further, wearing T-shirts like the one I saw last night — WWJB — Who Would Jesus Bomb? And the answer is clear. It is time to imagine another future than the one doomed to us by nuclear arms — one that the prophets foretold where people beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, one where we turn the instruments of death into things that bring life. That is why I am excited to endorse and champion the Two Future’s Project… because I think it gets us one step closer to God’s dream for the world.

--- Shane Claiborne

MadMax · May 27, 2010

...consider this story from Jesus' campaign trail.

The "country of the Gerasenses" consisted of the ten federated cities of the Decapolis, east of the Sea of Galilee, under Roman occupation. It was a hub for much of the Roman military, and Gerasenes was known as a place where many Roman veterans with benefits were given land to dwll in; a veteran's settlement of sorts. As Jesus passed through the militarized zone, he met a man who could not be subdued because he was occupied (a word loaded with meaning, espeically to a Galilean whose land was occupied by the Roman military, also a force that folks said no one could subdue) by an evil spirit. (Mark 5:1-20). The evil spirit had made the man unclean by forcing him to live among the graves of the casualties of wars and riots, which violated the Hebrews' strict holiness codes (consider Isaiah 65:4). He could not get the spirit out of his mind or body. The demon occupation led him to hurt himself, beating himself with hands possessed by violence.

Jesus asked the man his name, and he replied, "Legion." The same word for a division of Roman soliders. Scholars note that a legion consisted of around 2000 troops, and there would have been several legions around the Decapollis. It's interested that in the story, the demons beg to stay in the area. Nearby was a "band" of pigs, band also being the same word used for a group of military cadets (the pig was also the mascot of Rome's Tenth Fretensis Legion stationed in Antioch. Its' interesting to note the places were Jesus drove demons out of people: often in the temple and militarized zones.) The demons asked to be sent among the pigs, another symbol of uncleanliness (Jews did not touch pigs). Jesus invited the Legion to enter the pigs. And the pigs, specifically numbered at 2,000, "charged" into the sea to their deaths.

And none of the listeners could have missed the subversive poetry, remembering the legion of Pharaoh's amry that charged into the sea, where they were swallowed up and drowned (Exodus 14). Jesus healed people who had been made sick by the imperial system. They got the message. Imperial power is bad for your health.

--- "Jesus for President"

MadMax · May 27, 2010

[Origen quoting Celsus:] If everyone were to act the same as you Christians, the national government would soon be left utterly deserted and without any help, and affairs on earth would soon pass into the hands of the most savage and wretched barbarians."

[Origen in reply:] Celsus exhorts us to hel the Emperor and his fellow soldiers. To this we reply, "You cannot demand military service of Christians any more than you can of priests." We do not go forth as soldiers with the Emperor even if he demands this. [Origen goes on to say that if the Roman soliders followed the teachings of Jesus, there would be no barbarians].

"We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools...now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the crucified one...the more we are persecuted and martyred, the more do others in ever increasing numbers become believers." -- Justin, martyred in 165 AD

"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death." - Martin Luther King

"Emperors could only believe in Christ if they were not emperors...as if Christians could ever be emperors." - Tertullian

"Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference -- so side that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt and wicked. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ. I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason by the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land, Christianity" -- Frederick Douglass

"Now this was the sin of your sister, Sodom (city-state of Sodom - as in Sodom and Gomorrah): She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned: they did not help the poor and needy." (Ezekiel 16:49)

"The divine banner and the human banner do not go together, nor the standard of Christ and the standard of the Devil. Only without the sword can the Christian wage war: the Lord has abolished the sword." - Tertullian

Ari · May 27, 2010

All nice stories, MadMax, and I am sure there are some Evangelicals who share those views, but for now they are far and away the minority in America. Unlike other denominations, the evangelicals in today's America are by and large those who follow the dictates of Jerry Falwell and John Hagee or any of other Super Church leaders who constantly preach hate and politics from the pulpit. They are the people who proudly called themselves George Bush's base supporters, those who cheered on war and bloodlust and wanted more and more of it. They are those who are truly standing in the way of peace in the Holy Land between Israel and its neighbors, insisting on strong support for right-wing Israeli policies and the irresponsible settler movement and actively admonishing any U.S. president who dares question their policies, or help achieve peace in earnest because, you see, peace is not in their interest and does not help to bring back Jesus Christ to earth any faster. I detest these people personally because their apocalyptic cravings have been holding Israel hostage for all of these years, and are directly responsible for the assassination of Israeli liberalism and the peace camp which was, at one time, the dominant force in the Jewish state. These are the guys who view aggressive militarism as the U.S. doing God's work, and vanquishing God's enemies. These are the guys who cannot separate God from the flag, and firmly believe the two have a shared destiny. These are the guys who have turned the U.S. military into a breeding ground for Christian fanatics, and as the article clearly points out, too many of them are in leadership positions.

Unfortunately for you and other honest evangelicals, you are far and away in the minority in this country. The delusional evangelicals have proven a cohesive group over the years, pushing every single destructive policy imaginable to those of us concerned about liberal secularism. They are the Christian Coalition and all those other scary groups who insist that the separation of Church and State is but a fabrication by athiests and godless creatures (among them Thomas Jefferson, of course, whom we need to de-emphasize in our history books). They are the ones who blame gays and lesbians for bringing about Katrina and 9/11. They are in fact so powerful and so cohesive a force in America that they have, effectively, hijacked half of the political process in this country, taking over an entire political party in a country that only has two.

I am hopeful the views you posted will, one day, gain momentum in evangelical circles, but judging by everything I know, it likely won't be in your lifetime, and people like you would probably be denounced and even threatened by mainstream evangelicals if you ever decided to join the political foray and express those views publicly.

MadMax · May 28, 2010

i wasn't posting this to suggest the church in america hasn't adopted a different viewpoint...it was to preach to those in the church...not that there are lots of them here listening. to some degree it's to assure the rest of you that this IS NOT of jesus

i have argued vehemently with church folx...not about politics but about jesus. that's the heart of the discussion, for me.

by the way..your post was kind of a respectful, "cool story, bro" which is awesome!

Ari · May 28, 2010

MadMax said:

i wasn't posting this to suggest the church in america hasn't adopted a different viewpoint...it was to preach to those in the church...not that there are lots of them here listening. to some degree it's to assure the rest of you that this IS NOT of jesus

i have argued vehemently with church folx...not about politics but about jesus. that's the heart of the discussion, for me.

by the way..your post was kind of a respectful, "cool story, bro" which is awesome!
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Max, I would not even begin to assume that I understand what is going on in the American church, but I do appreciate your insight on this issue. I do, by the way, understand that not all Christians in America are for wrapping the flag around the cross, and claiming they are one and the same, that is why I said earlier the most obvious and vocal example of this are evangelicals, and some of the more vocal leaders from that specific movement within the American religious landscape. Frankly, I am not sure those people understand the reason the founders wanted a secular system was not just to protect the state, but actually to protect religion from the corrupting influence of politics and the inevitable grab for power. You only need to look at some of the Muslim states around the world (and unfortunately, Israel as of late) to see the corrupting impact politics has on religion, and vice versa.

I admit I feel strongly about this and I am very protective of our secular order, I won't even attempt to deny that fact. I do hope change comes from within the right-wing Christian community in America, but it looks increasingly likely that things have gone far enough and a more aggressive re-secularization of major institutions in America is called for, starting with the most dangerous of them all: the military.

MadMax · May 29, 2010

Ari said:

I admit I feel strongly about this and I am very protective of our secular order, I won't even attempt to deny that fact.
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I'm in absolute agreement with you. And you should feel strongly about it. While my vote is certainly shaped by how I see the world...which is certainly shaped by my view of God....I do NOT want a theocracy. I do not want Jesus shoved down anyone's throat...that runs counter to everything I know about him.

The twisting of Jesus on the part of "christians" is the part of this that offends me the most. And it's why I stood on my soapbox in here..not that anyone cares!

ChievousFTFace · May 29, 2010

Fight the good fight Mikey!!

rhester · May 29, 2010

MadMax said:

I'm in absolute agreement with you. And you should feel strongly about it. While my vote is certainly shaped by how I see the world...which is certainly shaped by my view of God....I do NOT want a theocracy. I do not want Jesus shoved down anyone's throat...that runs counter to everything I know about him.

The twisting of Jesus on the part of "christians" is the part of this that offends me the most. And it's why I stood on my soapbox in here..not that anyone cares!
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I care

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