With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an 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 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 —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. .

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.”

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.

continued....
http://www.yuricareport.com/ChurchState/ReligiousCoupInMilitary.html

This is why i think Pat Tillman was murdered by the "Christians". They think they have the right to do anything they want!

going on, but you don't have names and insight like this, you hope it's not true. I thank Mr. Weinstein for his bravery. He is my new hero. And Wesley Clark has gone up some more notches.

This is a powerful interview and story - now we know the results of all the grooming to get these people in all levels of government, schools, science, the book and media world - all the deals done, the trades of favors.

This country is so messed up. If only we could give the hate and death minded christians and moslems some land some place and let them have at each other and NOT INVOLVE US. Make the despicable leaders who allowed this to happen prisoners in a colisseum to watch the battles to the death.

Each day we are learning how far our government leaders have proceeded with this agenda. From the traitorous all-Israel Pentagon employees who didn't get in much trouble for their crimes against the country to the death squads in Iraq, to the plain bigotry. That is what surprises me the most - the Pat Robertson followers are supposed to love Jews and promote whatever Israel needs do to survive. I had no idea they were double-dealing. Continuing the bigotry and pretending they are partners. Or are Pat Robertson types not dominionists?

I will not capitalize christian, moslem, for anything dominionist if their purpose is killing. That incudes the white house and especially the pentagon and all the departments of government who aid and assist the crimes of theft and murder - the senate and house of representatives.

I DEMAND AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT FROM EVERY ONE OF THESE TRAITORS TO THE CONSTITUTION.

Now we know which of the military are going to come down on us when Dick pronounces martial law.

Thank you Mr. Weinstein. I'm sorry this is happening to your family. Thanks for the guts to tell us. I wish you and your family safe passage.

exists in this country - what are the divisions and who are the leaders?

Has anyone put it in a visual?


We have religious nuts fighting religious nuts and we are all in their battle zone.
We have a despicable administration who facilitates death, deception, destruction, theft, torment, torture. They are managing 500 wars within one big one - to own and control us. - playing everyone against each other.

They want to push their Armaggedon on us, so that Jesus will come back.

and whatever decent officers remain, and leave the rest to continue their "crusade."

http://www.tnmilitary.org/familyreadiness/chaplin.htm

Check out the pics at the bottom.

Via Chicago Tribune: A religious rite of passage on the battlefield - Marine Sgt. Andrew Jones, 25, of Sullivan, Ind., is baptized Wednesday in Fallujah, Iraq, by Lt. Scott Radetski, a Navy chaplain, in an improvised pool of cardboard boxes containing Meals Ready to Eat. Jones and three others asked for the rite after three comrades died, including two in the courtyard--"the middle of hell," as one of the GIs called it--where the ceremony took place. (Los Angeles Times photo by Rick Loomis)
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2004/04/bringing_heaven.html

Do they say about the Muslims?? Nothingin the O.P. covers this aspect.

"true" Christians were told to expect faster promotion in their careers. All political movements need the military sooner or later -- Nazi's, Confederacy, French Revolution.