A Fighting Faith

The incursions on service members’ religious freedom range from the seemingly trivial—“Jesus Candy” sold on base stores (but not “Mohamed Munchies”)—to matters of life and death: veterans denied life-saving care by bigoted Veterans Affairs doctors. And while religious minorities suffer the most direct attacks, the vast majority of those he represents are Christians.

On June 24, days after President Donald Trump ordered the American military to drop multiple bombs on key nuclear sites in Iran, risking wider regional war by entering the conflict between Israel and Iran, Weinstein reported how MRFF was being flooded with calls from military members who said their commanders, under the influence of Christian dominionism, started celebrating the attacks as a sign of the end times.

“Why were these military superiors gleefully observing so fervently?” Weinstein wrote in an article for Daily Kos.

For the same reason they rejoiced at the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. It is because such sudden warfare … substantiates and adds credibility to the lubrication of the exigent return of their wretched version of AR-15 carrying “Weaponized Jesus” and the infamous Battle of Armageddon.

Soon after the strikes on Iran, Weinstein received a call from an active duty, junior military officer serving in a combat unit. In an email later shared by Weinstein, the officer, a Christian who asked to remain anonymous, wrote how his unit commander—an evangelical Christian who, according the officer, “proselytizes everyone under his command”—and his wife both made remarks to the command unit with “excessive and extreme glorification and overall celebration of the sudden attack on Iran by American forces and all of the other matters connected to the Israeli attacks on Iran.”

According to the officer, this happened during the unit’s weekend Bible study, hosted by the commander and his wife, which the officer had “succumbed” to unwilling attendance after the commanders had repeatedly asked him to attend. “If you don’t show up he notices it,” the officer wrote. “It’s obvious to all combat unit members that if you don’t [attend], you’re going to jack up your career and that is exactly what has happened to so many who don’t fall in line with the Commander’s Christian religious desires.”

The officer added that his commander and his wife’s celebration extended to the Israeli war against Palestinians in Gaza, the Ukrainian-Russian war, as well as the tensions between North Korea and China, India and Pakistan and others. “They had big fat grins on their faces as they assured us that the ‘End Times’ were now here just as heralded and predicted in the New Testament Book of Revelation.”

From “parents of those afflicted” to worldwide network

Weinstein, who is Jewish, began his fight over 20 years ago when his own children faced antisemitic harassment at the United States Air Force Academy—just as he had a generation before. His oldest son and daughter-in-law went on to graduate from the Air Force Academy in 2004, and his second oldest son graduated from the academy in 2007. “We started off with being the parents of those afflicted and then we began to realize that this was a systemic aspect not just of the Air Force Academy, but all the academies, all the service branches,” as well as the broader family of national security agencies, Weinstein says.

Weinstein himself answers the phone if you call MRFF. At 70, he’s a no-nonsense frontline warrior who has amassed an impressive network of on-the-ground volunteers. Even as the foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, Weinstein is still looking ahead. “We have representatives now on a very good number of the 1,000 military installations all over the globe,” he says. “We’re at the point now where we help the children, and soon the grandchildren, of our original folks” that helped start the foundation in 2005.

There’s blowback: Weinstein’s family lives with private security, cameras that use artificial intelligence for facial recognition and license plates, infrared cameras and “a very close relationship with our local sheriff department.” They get so much hate mail—and respond so vigorously—that Weinstein’s wife, Bonnie, has compiled them into two full books, turning lemons into lemonade.

The tenacity of Weinstein’s and MRFF’s advocacy has taken on new urgency in Trump’s second term, especially after the January confirmation of Trump’s Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, whose own Christian Nationalist ideology has made him an advocate for a revolutionary theocratic vision for the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States.

In recent weeks, MRFF has been inundated with calls after Hegseth began holding mid-day worship services at the Pentagon, announced via a mass email—first in May, then again on June 17.

“This completely destroys, crushes, eviscerates the separation of church and state in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by our species,” Weinstein said in a June 16 video response to what is ostensibly a voluntary event. “We use the term ‘voluntold’ ” he says, reflecting the fact that there are significant consequences when subordinates don’t “volunteer” to respond. In the military, the power relationship “is nowhere near the same as your shift manager at Starbucks,” he tells Barn Raiser. “When your superior ‘suggests’ something that is the same as an order.”

The problem isn’t just violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment, says MRFF board member General Martin France. “Also there’s Article 6 in the Constitution that says that there should be no religious test for holding public office, and that should include being a commissioned officer in the U.S. military.” France had been an instructor at the Air Force Academy and got to know Weinstein when both had children enrolled there.

While religious minorities might be the most obvious targets, Weinstein notes that 95% of MRFF’s clients—almost 100,000—are “Protestants and Roman Catholics that were being oppressed because they were not ‘Christian’ enough,” as in the case of the command unit officer and countless others MRFF has served.  Although the foundation does not keep specific geographic statistics, rural service members and veterans likely make up a significant portion of its clients. One in five military installations in America are located in rural areas, while approximately 4 million veterans live in rural communities, including Native Americans who serve in the U.S. military at higher rates than any other group.

MRFF’s staff and volunteers are similar: 80% are Christian, including Brig. Gen. (Ret.) John Compere, who serves on MRFF’s board and has taught Methodist bible history for almost 20 years. Compere, now a fourth-generation West Texas rancher outside Abelene, also served Chief Judge of the U.S. Army Court of Military Review. Other notable board members are Brig. Gen. Marty France, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell’s long-time chief of staff) and actor Mike Farrell, best known for his role as Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H, all of whom spoke with Barn Raiser for this story.

“I’m a civil libertarian and certainly very deeply concerned about the Christian Nationalist movement and the dangers that I think all this nonsense carries with it,” Farrell says. Two things inspire his support for Weinstein: “His direct, overt exposition of what of the danger is” and the fact that “he goes to bat for particular people who are suffering.”

What lit the fuse

Weinstein is an Air Force Academy graduate—one of six in his family—who served for seven years as a military lawyer with the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps. His family has served in every major U.S. combat engagement from World War I to the still ongoing “war on terror.” The antisemitism he experienced as an Air Force cadet in 1970s didn’t turn him against the military. It just made him more determined not to be driven out.

“I got beaten twice. My roommates and I got notes under the door with swastikas on them, threatening me and my family,” he recalls. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life.” But his way of fighting back “was by staying one more day, one more day, one more day.”

A generation later, as his children followed in his footsteps, he assumed he’d be able to help correct things.  He was well respected in the Air Force Academy, had been a major donor, a Reagan White House lawyer and was at the time H. Ross Perot’s General Counsel. In 2004, Weinstein put together a package of “I put together a package to give to Academy leadership, thought something was gonna change. It didn’t,” he says. Instead, as things unfolded he discovered the problem was much larger than he’d imagined.

What lit the fuse was Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ. “Or as we refer to it here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, ‘The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre,’ ” Weinstein says. The movie provoked intense controversy for perpetuating the anti-Jewish depiction of Jews as hateful “Christ killers” responsible for Jesus’ death; after its release, the film reportedly led to an upsurge in antisemitic attacks. The Air Force Academy promoted the film relentlessly. “You couldn’t see the walls because there were posters everywhere.” At meals, “every plate had a poster for it.” Things came to a head for Weinstein when his youngest son warned him in distress, “Dad I think I’m going to be getting in trouble, because I’m going to beat the shit out of the next person that calls me a fucking Jew or accuses me or our family of total complicity in the execution of Jesus Christ.”

One pivotal case early on when the foundation was still in the process of getting its nonprofit 501(c)(3) status involved a Navajo sailor on an aircraft carrier “like a city” with a crew of 5,500. “He was being mercilessly proselytized by a chief petty officer,” Weinstein says. “We were able to use our contacts and get the chief petty officer not only disciplined but moved to a far side of the ship.” It was done lightening quick, taking barely a day to correct. A week later they got a message from the sailor through his family, thanking them “for being voices that we’re not allowed to speak with.”

France underscored the broader point. “MRFF’s role is to give a voice consistent with our constitutional rights to especially junior members of our military who don’t have that voice,” he says.

Most cases are resolved quickly and quietly like that one, because the Constitution, the law and military regulations themselves are quite clear. For example, an entire section of the Air Force Instruction manual devoted to the “Balance of Free Exercise of Religion and Establishment Clause” states that “Leaders at all levels … must ensure their words and actions cannot reasonably be construed to be officially endorsing or disapproving of, or extending preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief.”

Fighting the new culture of fundamentalism

As Hegseth’s example makes clear, the culture of rightwing fundamentalist Christianity has grown dramatically more intense within the military in recent decades. When that culture blocks swift resolution, there are two ways forward: the courts and the media.

“I remember having some problem with what I would call radical Christians in the military but not to the extent that I couldn’t handle them as a commander,” Wilkerson recalls. But he says things have changed considerably since then. “The problem has just metastasized. It’s grown and grown and grown, and with the MAGA folks. Now it’s become gargantuan,” he says. “If they do try another January 6, [Christian fundamentalism] will be a huge component of it.”

France agrees that the problem had “become much more overt over the years,” while at the same time gaining strength covertly. “What is particularly troubling for many of us is that the opportunity for bias in the military in terms of promotions and assignments,” a form of discrimination that can remain highly untraceable, France says. “Any bias for or against someone’s religious beliefs can cause a great deal of problems.”

With Christian Nationalist leaders increasingly in charge, “You don’t have much choice. Either you ruin your career, you get out, or you go along with it, Wilkerson says. “What Mikey has done is afforded these people another option—they can appeal to him. Then he takes over the fight and more often than not he wins.”

Compere, who served from 1967 to 1992, says that over time, changes in religious freedom and tolerance have been particularly visible in the role of chaplaincy.

“The chaplains that I knew were real friendly and open and flexible and respected other people’s beliefs and let ‘em believe what they want to,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of imposing religious beliefs on the military when I was in there. It just wasn’t. It was just a completely different atmosphere.”

The change was largely driven from outside, by what are known as parachurch organizations, like Campus Crusade for Christ, Cadets for Christ and Officers’ Christian Fellowship. As a 2019 MRFF compilation video explains, “Fundamentalist Evangelical chaplains, officers, and service members work alongside well-funded parachurch organizations to turn the United States military into a new crusade of government paid missionaries.” The first segment featured Maj. Douglas W. Duerksen, an Army chaplain, who makes his intentions clear:

Most of the young people who come into the military are there probably because they’re trying to figure out who they are. They come in, they’re open to talk about anything, they ask all kinds of questions. From an Evangelistic standpoint I always refer to them as ripe as black bananas. And it’s great to be a government-paid missionary.

There are literally dozens of like-minded groups, who see their missions as indoctrination into the right form of Christianity. While there’s nothing wrong with groups like this existing in society at large, there is something profoundly wrong with them subverting the military’s chaplaincy positions to pursue these goals.

As Gen. George Washington made clear almost from the very beginning, chaplains are supposed to serve the spiritual needs of active duty military personnel, not impose their own views. In 1777, when the Continental Congress sought to reduce the number of chaplains from one per regiment to one per brigade, Washington warned that such a move “has a tendency to introduce disputes into the Army, which above all things should be avoided, and in many instances would compel men to a mode of Worship which they do not profess.”

Thus, respect for religious diversity is deeply grounded in America’s military history and traditions, predating the First Amendment. But outside groups have repeatedly tried to meddle.

One such example involves the “Missing Man” table, created by the River Rats, an organization of bomber pilots who wanted to remember their colleagues who had died in in Vietnam. Weinstein notes its similarity to a Jewish Seder table, with various symbolic elements “to memorialize and honor those who died in combat.” But “it never included a Christian Bible or any other book” until 1999, he says, when a script for setting the table was published in a 1999 issue of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Auxiliary magazine, followed shortly afterwards by National League of POW/MIA Families adopting a similar script. Over time the original Bible-free tradition was forgotten, until veterans represented by MRFF began pushing back.

In 2016, a flurry of cases involving the MRFF in 2016 made the news. One case involving the Missing Man Table and the VA in Youngstown, Ohio, was resolved in April 2016. As described by a VA representative the Bible “was replaced with a generic book, one whose symbolism can be individualized by each of our Veterans as they pay their respects to those Prisoners of War and Missing in Action.”

That’s just the sort of respectful commonsense approach MRFF is fighting for.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, in which a number of retired military officers participated, there was some hope for a long-overdue housecleaning, as retired military were dramatically over-represented. Early news accounts citing the participation of Larry Brock, a retired Air Force Lt. Col., led Weinstein to write “Open Letter To The United States Air Force Academy: ‘We told you so.’ ” Brock wasn’t the only prominent Air Force Academy graduate involved, and after detailing a litany of past incidents MRFF had been involved in fighting to redress, Weinstein wrote:

We warned you that this radical, right-wing influence found not only at USAFA, but tolerated or even endorsed by senior officers throughout the Air Force, caused a toxic leadership environment and eroded unit cohesion, good order, morale, and discipline.  We constantly worried and warned that these seemingly (to some) innocuous events would lead to embarrassment for our Air Force Academy or worse—and that’s exactly what’s happened.

But instead, what happened at the academy and throughout the military as a whole reflected a persistent unwillingness to confront the problem head-on. There were certainly gestures of reform at the highest levels, but there was no serious effort to reform the culture at the everyday level where service members suffered.

Fast forward to today, with Hegseth’s full-throated promotion of a Christian Nationalist worldview and things are worse than ever. “The poor military people just are all are scared to death and they’re begging us for help and they’re worried about their careers,” Compere says.

Which only makes MRFF’s mission more vital than ever. Weinstein is fond of the story of Elizabeth Powel’s question to Benjamin Franklin:, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” And his response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

“We are in that part right now,” Weinstein says. “Never more so than we ever have been.”

Paul RosenbergMore by this author →

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer. He's been a columnist for Al Jazeera English and Salon.com, and has written for dozens of daily and weekly papers including the Des Moines Register, the Dallas Morning News and the Christian Science Monitor. He is senior editor at Random Lengths News, an alternative biweekly based in San Pedro, California.