Michael L. Weinstein

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

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

Militaryreligiousfreedom.org to defend the constitution and religious rights.

-Dean Kuipers

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

Michael L. Weinstein: We've had dead animals on our front door. We've had feces and beer bottles thrown at our house. Our tires have been slashed. They burned a church down when the head of a church came out to support me when I spoke in Kansas. We had a synagogue that was desecrated. There's a group of Christian women who call me and chant "Mikey

Weinstein, bullet in the head, praise the lord he's finally dead." They call my wife up and say they're going to blow her head off.

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

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

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

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

What's wrong with them practicing their faith in uniform?

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

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

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

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

So you're saying that the dominionists are touting theirs as the only god?

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

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

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

What about our troops in the field?

We've caught four-star generals who were trying to convince their 80,000-person command to give up a weekend to join him at Creation Festival [a popular Christian music festival]. Let me set another scene for you. How many times have you heard Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, the Islamic Jihad - they all refer to Americans as crusaders, right?

Well, the Air Forces's attack F-16 squadron, at Cannon Air Force Base in my home state of New Mexico, they're called the Crusaders. Their official Air Force logo on their F-16s, which are equipped to carry laser-guided conventional and nuclear weapons, is a giant crucifix and a giant crusader's helmet from the year 1096, the year of the first of the nine crusades; the helmet is surrounded by three yellow stars in the shape of a crucifix to represent the trinity, and a giant crusader's broadsword. Is there anything that we could possibly be doing in this administration to act as a greater accelerant for already angry young Islamic men and women in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, to want to join the cause to beat the fuckin' shit out of us?

This is all part of a passion play, now. Commanders in the field are censoring the soldiers' DVD libraries, leaving only the movies that have appropriate Christian content. Battle staff meetings are being diverted into evangelical prayer sessions. I had a Captain JAG tell me that he recently tried to stand up to the colonel to refuse this, but the colonel grabbed him by the lapels of his battledress uniform in front of all the troops, and said, "Boy, we're here to do two things: spread the gospel of American democracy and spread the gospel of our lord Jesus Christ. And if you don't like it, I'll send you home now."

I had another four-star general, he had 75,000 in his command; he was promoting the distribution of leaflets inviting his troops to go to an off-base church and take a class. Ready for the title of the class? "Jesus vs. Mohammad: An Examination of the Life of Both Prophets and Why Jesus Christ is Superior to Mohammed."

What are you doing with this information?

We've been in federal court already, and we're going in again. We're trying to work with Congress, but under Republicans, I'm a RINO [Republican in Name Only] like Schwarzenegger. We will be working with Congress and holding oversight hearings as quickly as we can. Check out the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Tell the people that read your newspaper, I'm not going to be happy until you're unhappy. We actually have to do something now!