A Crusade and a Holy War in the US Military

Jason Leopold

Miller enlisted the help of the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose founder, Mikey Weinstein, a former White House counsel who defended the Reagan administration during the Iran-Contra probe, has been waging a one-man war against the Department of Defense for what he says is a blatant disregard of the Constitution. He recently published a book on the issue: "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military."

Since he launched his watchdog organization 18 months ago, Weinstein said he has been contacted by more than 4,000 active duty and retired soldiers, many of whom served or serve in Iraq, who told Weinstein that they were pressured by their commanding officers to convert to Christianity.

Weinstein said Miller's case is just the latest example of how the military has been hijacked by a right-wing fundamentalist Christian agenda, in what appears to be a clear-cut violation of the constitutional separation between church and state, which has rippled across all four branches of the military under President Bush.

"The rise of evangelical Christianity inside the military went on steroids after 9/11 under this administration and this White House," Weinstein said in an interview. "This administration has turned the entire Department of Defense into a faith-based initiative."

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VA chaplains "are not supposed to view the VA hospitals as their own personal mission field, or the veterans as low-hanging fruit," Weinstein said. "The VA is not the Southern Baptist Convention. In this country, we have a separation between church and state. The religious right views the separation of church and state as a myth. There is no difference between the VA hospital and a US Air Force fighter squadron. They're both part of the federal government. It doesn't matter if you're an Orthodox Jew, a Buddhist or an atheist."

Didn't they take an oath to defend the Constitution?

Something has got to be done about Christians spreading false information about American history, and we've got to get back to the point where two people can observe the same thing and see the same thing - not this crap where views are based on ideology before reality.