C Street

by Jeff Sharlet

  According to a recent OCF executive director, retired air force lieutenant general Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror” is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War. But another OCF Bible study, “Mission Accomplished,” warns that victory abroad does not mean the war is won at home. “If Satan cannot succeed with threats from the outside, he will seek to destroy from within,” asserts the study, a reference to “fellow countrymen” in biblical times and today who practice “spiritual adultery,” disloyalty to Christ. “Mission Accomplished” identifies as a particular problem in biblical times the Jews responsible for taxing their fellow Jews, a two-step meant to redeem fundamentalism’s tradition of anti-Semitism by drawing distinctions between good Jews (overtaxed forebears of Christianity) and bad Jews (tax collectors). Sometimes even that dubious line is not clearly drawn, as in a sermon published in 2008 in the base paper of U.S. Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia, which promises forgiveness even for “tax collectors (aka the Jewish Mafia).”

  “Mission Accomplished” takes as its text Nehemiah 1–6, the story of the “wallbuilder” who reconstructed the fortifications around Jerusalem. An outsider might take the wall metaphor as a sign of respect for separation of church and state. But in contemporary fundamentalist thinking, the story stands for just the opposite, a wall within which church and state are one. “With the wall completed the people could live an integrated life,” the study argues. “God was to be Lord of all or not Lord at all.” So it is today, “Mission Accomplished” continues; before OCF Christians can complete their wall, they must bring this “Lord of all” to the entire military. “We will need to press ahead obediently,” the study ends, “not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to keep us from the mission of reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.”

  Every man and woman in the military swears an oath to defend the Constitution. To most of them, evangelicals included, that oath is as sacred as scripture. For the fundamentalist front, though, the Constitution is itself a blueprint for a Christian nation. “The idea of separation of church and state?” an Air Force Academy senior named Bruce Hrabak told me when I visited. “Dude, there’s this whole idea in America that it’s in the Constitution, but it’s not.”* Hrabak is broad-shouldered and has a wide smile. There is high color in his cheeks, and he has excitable blue eyes. The Constitution, he explained, was based on the Bible. “The idea is that God sets up a system in creation and that a lot of it revolves around a concept of a trinity.” He rattled off the patterns—God, Holy Ghost, Jesus; father, mother, child—ticking them off on his fingers as though he were keeping a beat: one-two-three. “Church, family, government. Executive branch, legislative branch, judicial.” Where was the air force in these orders? He grinned. Didn’t I know angels have wings?

  If the fundamentalist front were to have a seminary, it would be the U.S. Air Force Academy, a campus of steel and white marble wedged into the right angle formed by the Great Plains and the Rockies. In 2005, the academy became the subject of scandal due to a culture of Christian proselytization that led the Princeton Review to rank it the fourteenth most pious school in the nation, ahead of Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Professors preached from the front of the class, coaches instructed Division 1 athletes to win one for Christ, Major Warren “Chappie” Watties, the 2004 Air Force Chaplain of the Year, took up a bullhorn during basic training to warn that those not “born again will burn in the fires of hell,” and those who still refused the savior were condemned to a “Heathen Flight”—that is, they were marched around camp to ponder their sins. A 2004 study conducted by scholars from the Yale Divinity School had concluded that the academy had adopted a command climate of evangelicalism. The air force responded by adding a course on religious diversity. Today, the air force touts the academy as a model of tolerance. But after the school brought in as speakers for a mandatory assembly three Christian evangelists who proclaimed that the only solution to terrorism was to “kill Islam,” I decided to see what had changed. Not much, several Christian cadets told me. “Now,” Hrabak said, “we’re underground.” He winked.

  “There’s a spiritual world, and oftentimes what happens in the physical world is representative of what’s happening in the spiritual,” a “firstie” (senior) named Jon Butcher told me one night at New Life, a nearby megachurch that sends buses for cadets. Butcher is wiry and laconic, a sandy-haired former ski bum from Toledo who went to the academy to be closer to the slopes. “For me, it was always like a little bit of God, a little bit of drinking, a little bit of girls,” Butcher said of his past. He prayed for admission to the academy, though, pledging to God that he’d change his ways if he got in. As far as he was concerned, God delivered; so Butcher did, too, quitting alcohol and committing himself to chastity. “God,” he said cryptically, “is the creator of fun.”

  But that only took him so far. He needed direction, and he found it in Romans 13: “There is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” It was like a blessing on the academy’s hierarchical system. He turned his body and spirit over to the guidance of Christian cadets, and God rewarded him with a set of specific instructions. “God told me to join the track team.” God, he realized, wanted him to spread the Gospel in the athletic world. As he approached graduation, he received new orders. “God has told me to become an infantry officer,” Butcher said, explaining his plan to transfer from the air force to the army upon graduation. A pilot has only his plane to talk to, but an infantry officer, explained Butcher, has men to mold and, if overseas, natives to lead to the Lord. “Everything is a form of ministry for me,” Butcher said. “There is no separation. A Christian is someone who chooses to be a slave. I’m doing what God has called me to do, to know him and to make him known.”

  At the academy, Butcher made God known by leading an all-male prayer group. The night I attended, two dozen cadets spoke about sex and the Orient, the girlfriends whose unchaste touch they feared and the Christ-approved lies required for missionary work in China, where foreign evangelism is illegal. Sex—not having any, that is—was as central to the mission as saving souls. Or perhaps the men’s abstinence should be understood as a form of self-evangelism, since they relied on one another to stay pure, which is to say, to avoid masturbation—“every man’s battle,” in the language of evangelicalism. Hrabak explained this outside the meeting: “Call me at two AM. I’ll give you accountability. A guy will call me, two AM: ‘Oh, man, I really blew it, got on my computer.’ You’re like, ‘Okay.’ First you just love ’em about it. ‘Look, dude, we need to beat this.’ For lack of a better term.”

  Butcher said I couldn’t disclose the prayer group’s name; there were some, he said, who wouldn’t understand its goal of making the world’s most elite war college its most holy one: a seminary with courses in carpet bombing. To him, religion and war were necessarily intertwined. “How,” he asked, “in the midst of pulling a trigger and watching somebody die, in that instant are you going to be confident that that’s something God told you to do?” His answer was stark. “In this world, there are forces of good and evil. There’s angels and there’s demons, you know? And Satan hates what’s holy.”

  Following the 2005 religion scandal, Lt. Gen. John Rosa, the academy’s superintendent, confessed to a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League that his “whole organization” had religion problems. “It keeps me awake at night,” he said, predicting that restoring constitutional principles to the academy would take at least six years. Then he retired. To address the problems, the air force brought in Lt. Gen. John Regni. I spent a week at the academy, but Regni agreed to speak with me only by phone. I began our conversation with what I thought
was a softball, an opportunity for the general to wax constitutional about First Amendment freedoms. “How do you see the balance between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause?” I asked.

  There was a long pause. Civilians might reasonably plead ignorance, but not a general who has sworn on his life to defend these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

  “I have to write those things down,” Regni finally answered. “What did you say those constitutional things were again?”

  “The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.”

  “ ‘Establishment’?” There was another pause. Then: “I’m deferring to some of my folks here.” He consulted his top chaplain at the academy, an active-duty colonel, and his public relations man, a blustering old retired colonel named Johnny Whitaker, who’d welcomed me to the academy with a bizarre bit of demographics: “We reflect society,” he’d told me as cadets streamed by for an assembly. “About 80 percent Protestant.” (About 50 percent of America is Protestant.) There was also, he said, “a small Jewish population.” He stopped as if considering what he was about to say, then decided to forge ahead, a big man leaning in close with a voice suddenly soft. “At least, who claim to be Jews.”

  At the other end of the phone line, Whitaker and the chaplain couldn’t offer the general a lifeline. “Um,” said Regni, “would you be a little more specific?”

  I read the First Amendment to him. Regni pondered. “Uh, okay,” he said. He decided to pass.

  Not long after I spoke to Regni, a general named Mike Gould succeeded him as head of the academy. A former football player there, Gould granted himself the nickname “Coach” after a brief stint in that capacity early in his career. Coach Gould enjoys public speaking, and he’s famous for his 3-F mantra: Faith, Family, Fitness. At the Pentagon, a former senior officer who served under Gould told me, the general was so impressed by a special presentation Pastor Rick Warren gave to senior officers that he e-mailed his 104 subordinates, advising them to read and live by Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life.

  “People thought it was weird,” recalls the former officer, a defense contractor, who requested anonymity for fear of losing government business. “But no one wants to show their ass to the general.”

  Warren’s bestseller sometimes displaces scripture itself among military evangelicals. In 2008, a chaplain at Lakenheath, a U.S. Air Force–operated base in England, used a mandatory assembly under Lt. Gen. Rod Bishop as an opportunity to promote the principles of The Purpose-Driven Life to roughly a thousand airmen. In a PowerPoint presentation titled “Developing Purpose-Driven Airmen,” Chaplain Christian Biscotti, a graduate of Regent University, contrasts “3 Levels of Purpose.” On top is “God Given.” Down the scale is “Man Given,” an ideology of “philanthropy” represented by Karl Marx. At the bottom of the heap there’s “Self Given” purpose, supposedly championed by Darwin, despite the fact that the biologist, a devout believer, taught a science of random mutation.

  The “Big Idea,” the presentation continues, can be seen by contrasting the United States with the USSR, an evil empire defunct since some of the airmen in the audience were a year old. The USSR, according to the presentation, was led by a triumvirate of Stalin, Lenin, and Darwin. (Zombie Darwin, that is, since the scientist died forty years before the advent of the Soviet Union.) Evolution, from the creationist point of view of the presentation, is nearly synonymous with communism. The former suggests that God’s plan is under constant revision, while the latter proposes we take up the editor’s red pencil ourselves, imagining ourselves little gods, “social engineers.” But even Chaplain Biscotti can’t resist drawing on a little social Darwinism to make his case that “FAITH is foremost.” In a diagram depicting two family trees, Biscotti contrasts the likely futures of a nonreligious family, characterized by “Hopelessness” and “Death,” and a religious one. The secular family will, according to the diagram, spawn 300 convicts, 190 prostitutes, and 680 alcoholics. Purpose-driven breeding, meanwhile, will result in at least 430 ministers, 7 congressmen, and a vice president. “The Palin prophecy,” one skeptical airman dubbed the scheme, which, it turns out, was borrowed from a nineteenth-century eugenics chart used to support the idea of mandatory sterilization for criminals and the “feeble-minded.”

  Biscotti’s “Big Idea,” of course, was never simply the election of someone like Sarah Palin. Were it so, American fundamentalism would be as dead as the McCain-Palin ticket was. But Christian fundamentalism, like all fundamentalisms, thrives on defeat. It is a narcissistic faith, concerned most of all with the wrongs suffered by the righteous and the purification of their ranks. “Under the rubric of free speech and the twisted idea of separation of church and state,” reads a promotion for a book called Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, by air force Lt. Col. William McCoy, “there has evolved more and more an anti-Christian bias in this country.” McCoy seeks to counter that alleged bias by making the case for the necessity of religion—preferably Christian—for a properly functioning military unit. Lack of belief or the wrong beliefs, he writes, will “bring havoc to what needs cohesion and team confidence.”

  McCoy’s manifesto comes with an impressive endorsement: “Under Orders should be in every rucksack for those moments when Soldiers need spiritual energy,” reads a blurb from General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq until he moved to the top spot at U.S. Central Command, a position from which he ran U.S. operations from Egypt to Pakistan; he subsequently was named the top Afghanistan war commander. When the Military Religious Freedom Foundation demanded an investigation of Petraeus’s endorsement—an apparent violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not to mention the Bill of Rights—Petraeus claimed that his recommendation was supposed to be private, a communication from one Christian officer to another.

  “He doesn’t deny that he wrote it,” says Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. “It’s just, ‘Oops, I didn’t mean for the public to find out.’ And what about our enemies? He’s promoting this unconstitutional Christian exceptionalism at precisely the same time we’re fighting Islamic fundamentalists who are telling their soldiers that America is waging a modern-day crusade. That is a crusade.”

  “If I was the bad guys, that’s the stuff I’d use as my proof, as my evidence that this is a holy war,” says an air force general who requested anonymity. “Don’t these guys get it? Don’t they understand the perception they’re creating?”

  The answer, in some cases, at least, is yes. Petraeus’s most vigorous defense came from the recently retired three-star general William “Jerry” Boykin—a founding member of the army’s Delta Force and an ordained minister—during an event held at Fort Bragg to promote his own book, Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom. After 9/11, Boykin went on the Prayer Breakfast circuit to boast, in uniform, that his God was “bigger” than the Islamic divine of Somali warlord Osman Atto, whom Boykin had hunted. “I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” he declared, displaying as proof photographs of black clouds over Mogadishu, the “demonic spirit” he said U.S. troops had been fighting: “a guy called Satan.” Boykin came under congressional fire for such comments, but that didn’t stop Bush from promoting him to deputy undersecretary of defense, in which capacity he sent General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, to “Gitmo-ize” the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib, in Iraq.

  When I put the First Amendment question I had posed to General Regni to Boykin, he told my researcher that the real issue is “that there is less and less acceptance of the Christian faith on which our nation was founded.” Exhibit A, he believes, is the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). “Here comes a guy named Mikey Weinstein trashing Petraeus,” he told a crowd of 150 at Fort Bragg’s Airborne & Special Operations Museum, �
��because he endorsed a book that’s just trying to help soldiers. And this makes clear what [Weinstein’s] real agenda is, which is not to help this country win a war on terror.”

  “It’s satanic,” called out a member of the audience.

  “Yes,” agreed Boykin. “It’s demonic.”

  Mikey—nobody, not even his many enemies, calls him Weinstein—likes fighting. Fifty-five years old, he’s built like a pit bull: short legs, big shoulders, an oversized bald head like a cannonball, and a crinkled brow between dark, darting eyes. In 1973, as a “doolie”—a freshman at the Air Force Academy—he punched an officer who accused him of fabricating anti-Semitic threats he’d received. In 2005, after the then head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, declared that people like Mikey made it hard for him to defend Jewish causes, Mikey challenged the pastor to a public boxing match, with proceeds to go to charity. (Haggard didn’t take him up on it.) He relishes a rumor that he’s come to be known by some at the Pentagon as the Joker, after Heath Ledger’s nihilistic embodiment of Batman’s nemesis. But he draws a distinction: “Don’t confuse my description of chaos with advocacy of chaos.”

  Mikey did ten years’ active duty as a JAG (a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps) before becoming assistant general counsel in the Reagan White House. He helped defend the administration during the Iran-Contra scandal, then became general counsel for the billionaire Ross Perot. Mikey made his money with a company that tracked down deadbeat dads. Now he has become the constitutional conscience of the military, an unsubtle man determined to force its fundamentalist front to account for itself through legal assaults and media strafing. He embarked upon his crusade—a loaded term, but more accurate than any other—in 2005, with plans for a speedy victory. But his war has consumed him. He works an endless succession of eighteen-hour days, both on the road and at the foundation’s headquarters: his sprawling adobe ranch house, now guarded by two oversize German shepherds, Ginger Honey Bear and Crystal Baby Blue Bear, and a five foot six former marine bomb tech called Shorty. MRFF draws on a network of lawyers, publicists, and fund-raisers, but it is at heart mainly Mikey and researcher-director Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus, which, at 532 pages, is only the first entry in a multivolume debunking of Christian Right historical claims; the series is unfinished and potentially infinite.