by Jeff Sharlet
Mikey’s work has a similarly quixotic quality. He has won some victories, such as when he forced the Department of Defense to investigate the Christian Embassy video, or intimidated the Air Force Academy into adopting classes in religious diversity, or harassed any number of base commanders into reining in subordinates who view their authority as a license to proselytize. But every time he wins a battle or takes to the television to plead his cause, more troops learn about his foundation and seek its help. “We needed this fuse lit by Mikey to get everybody going,” says Lt. Gen. Bill Lord, one of the few flag officers to acknowledge the problem. Mikey keeps his cell phone on vibrate while he’s exercising on his elliptical machine; he likes to say that he’ll interrupt sex to take a call from any one of the 11,400 active-duty military members he describes as the foundation’s clients. For perspective, I called the Pentagon to ask how many religion-related incidents they typically deal with in a year. One spokeswoman said three. Another said there had been fifty total during a period of several years.
I interviewed more of Mikey’s clients than that myself: soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who spoke of being forced to pray to Jesus in Iraq and at home, of combat deaths made occasions for evangelical sermons by senior officers, of Christian apocalypse video games and seminars in the “biblical” stewardship of their finances. They spoke, too, of lectures for marine recruits on creationism, and briefings for air force officers on the correlation of the global war on terror, or GWOT, to the Book of Revelation; of exorcisms designed to drive out “unclean spirits” from military bases; and of beatings of Wiccan troops winked at by the chain of command.
The most absurd case I came across was that of an atheist military policeman, Jeremy Hall, who was sent home from Iraq after the army concluded that it couldn’t protect him from fundamentalist extremists—that is, his fellow soldiers who threatened to kill him lest he bring God’s wrath on them all.
The saddest was that of a Muslim soldier, Eli Agee, who ignored a constant drumbeat of insults—“hajji,” “terrorist”—until his eight-month-old son died and his command refused to allow the infant an Islamic burial.
But the most awful was that of a deeply disturbed young man named David Winters, who was allowed to enlist despite a history of institutionalization because the Marine Corps needed bodies. He snapped after intense anti-Semitic hazing. He’d ignored it for a while, but the spit got to him. People were always spitting on him. Spit and blood, he told me, that was what bothered him.
“Hell, yeah, the kid was bashed,” a Marine from Winters’s platoon, 3101, Third Battalion, told me when I asked if Winters’s story was true. By whom? “Everybody! All his peers and shit.” Because he was Jewish? “Hell, yeah.” And the marine with the swastika tattoo Winters said tortured him in the bathroom? “I had to hold that dude back once.” And the noncommissioned officers (NCOs)? “All the people.” How bad? “Well, it was the physical aspect that really pushed him there.” Over the edge? “Definitely.”
Winters was a skinny Marine, thin in the chest. The episode he remembered most was this: a drill instructor squaring his boot on the back of his head while he was doing push-ups—and smashing his face into the concrete. Winters lay there, blood in his eyes, his elbows wedged above him like chicken wings, waiting for laughter. This time there wasn’t any. “Sir,” he heard someone close by saying, “this recruit’s bleeding.” “I don’t give a fuck!” snapped the drill instructor. “Keep pushing up!” Winters pushed up, his face split open and dripping and his mind cracking.
I reached him by phone at a psychiatric hospital. “I have a scar from the push-ups,” he said. His voice was shy, puzzled, apologetic. “On my chin.” He wanted to talk about Yom Kippur. He’s observant; he reads Hebrew and he spells God “G–d,” in the traditional style. On Yom Kippur, he claims—there are no witnesses—an NCO tasked with escorting him across base to services turned to him as they walked past some woods and said, “You Jewish motherfucker. I should leave you bloody, bleeding in the woods.”
“At the end of boot camp, or towards the end,” Winters wrote in a letter from the psychiatric hospital, “I was confused. A recruit gave me a New Testament to read and said, ‘You see how bad the Jews are?’ ” Winters studied; he did see. You belong to your father, the devil, Winters read, words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel According to John. “I became pretty good friends with some other recruits,” he wrote, “but this guy would tell me I am going to hell and my family, all Jews too.” But there was a way he could save himself, if not his family. “I started saying I was going to convert.” At home on break, he found a little fundamentalist church to pray in. He brought his family presents, a Semper Fi blanket for his grandmother, a marine sweatshirt for his father, Andrew. Andrew Winters, a successful architect who’d long worried about his hapless boy, was terribly proud, boasting to neighbors about his son the Jewish marine. He was wearing the sweatshirt on Christmas Day when his son proposed that they take a walk in the woods to talk about what he’d learned in the Marine Corps. He didn’t tell Andrew Winters that he had a new father, Jesus, and that he had received orders, which he believed came from his drill instructor, transmitted via television waves. Take him into the woods, the voice in his head told him. Leave him there.
“They say I killed my father,” he later wrote from the hospital, a maximum-security institution. “All I know is I never wanted to do anything wrong.”
As night fell across the bare trees on Christmas Day 2007, Winters stabbed and hacked his father sixty-five times. He left the Jew’s body there, bloody, bleeding.
What is the meaning of Winters’s case? Winters hadn’t converted, he’d gone crazy. His drill instructor didn’t make him do it, and neither did the devil; Winters was the agent of his own tragedy. Mikey took his case not because there was any possibility he was innocent, but because his public defenders had ignored the hazing and the marines had claimed he’d been guided by Islam. Winters wanted help not because he didn’t think he was guilty but because he was afraid he’d be transferred to prison. He makes a persuasive case that he belongs in an insane asylum. His story is not representative; it’s not a case for reform, for new regulations. It’s not data, a point on a graph charting a problem. It’s a rank, blistering tumor. A veiny knot of blood and spit wrapped in pages torn from scripture. The nightmare within the fundamentalist dream: the barrel of the Jesus tank of Samarra bent and twisted round to point inward, ready, aim, fire. The fundamentalist threat to democracy isn’t ultimately a problem of laws, or of amendments and clauses. It’s the psychosis of self-eradication: the mythic belief that whether through the Great Commission or GWOT or a knife in the woods we can become pure, the body of Christ, singular: the roaring hallucination of one nation under one God.
Most of Mikey’s clients are Christians themselves, coerced into Bible study to win promotion, bused to fundamentalist churches on the military’s dime, told by commanders that women weren’t made by God to be warriors, or that Mormons aren’t really Christians, that Catholics aren’t really Christians, that Methodists aren’t really Christians. Mikey pulls strings, bullies their commanders, tells them they’re heroes, hires lawyers for them when necessary. But as Mikey’s client base grows, so do the ranks of his enemies. The picture window in his living room has been shot out twice, and last summer he woke to find a swastika and a cross scrawled on his door. Since he launched MRFF in 2005, he has accumulated an impressive collection of hate mail, grotesque amplifications of the polite disdain expressed publicly by senior officers. Some of it is earnest: “You are costing lives by dividing military personnel and undermining troops,” reads one missive. “Their blood is on your hands.” Much of it is juvenile: “you little bald-headed fag,” read an e-mail Mikey received after an appearance on CNN, “what the fuck are you doing with an organization of this title when the purpose of your group is not to encourage religious freedom, but to DENY religious freedom? What a fuck-head cock sucker you turned out to be.” Quite a bit of it
is anti-Semitic. When Mikey made public a solicitation by air force general Jack Catton for campaign donations to put “more Christian men” in Congress, someone wrote: “Once again, the Oy Vey! crowd whines. This jew used to be an Air Force lawyer and got the email… just one more example of why filthy, hook-nosed jews should be purged from our society.” The worst are those directed at his wife, Bonnie. He recites one over lunch as Bonnie grimaces, a phone call he received in 2007. Bonnie had driven ahead to a football game at the academy; the caller described her car, and then told Mikey: “ ‘We’re gonna stick a shotgun up her Jewish whore’s cunt and blow her clit through the top of your head.’ ”
The abuse has become a regular part of Mikey’s routine in public appearances. There’s a sense in which he likes it—not the threats, but the proof. “We’ve had dead animals on the porch, beer bottles, feces thrown at the house. I don’t even think about it. I view it as if I was Barry Bonds about to go to bat in Dodger Stadium and people are booing. You want a piece of me? Get in line, buddy, pack a lunch.” Mikey thinks in terms of enemies, and he likes to know he’s rattling his. “The level of antagonism toward Mikey is off the charts,” a senior air force officer at the academy, who keeps his support for Mikey under wraps, told me. “Off. The. Fucking. Charts.”
After Mikey called out the Air Force Academy’s General Weida for his promotion of Mel Gibson’s Passion—Weida himself performed in The Thorn, a megaspectacle passion play produced by New Life Church—Weida recruited the academy’s rabbi to help him write two letters to Mikey in Hebrew, which Mikey doesn’t read. Mikey wasn’t impressed, not least because Weida had encouraged Mikey’s son Casey’s evangelical girlfriend (both were cadets) to bring him to Weida’s passion play. Mikey’s enemies rejoiced. “Weinstein is steamed because his own son went to Ted Haggard’s church, became a Christian and fell in love with a Christian girl,” wrote a retired air force lieutenant colonel, Hugh Morgan, in an e-mail to the executive director of the International Conference of Evangelical Chaplain Endorsers, Billy Baugham. It wasn’t true—Mikey’s son did fall in love with and marry a young Christian woman, but he’s still Jewish, and now Mikey proudly calls that Christian woman his daughter—but Baugham passed the story along to more chaplain endorsers, followed by a later note declaring Mikey “a very angry Jewish man.”
He got that part right. Mikey loathes Christian Zionism, the evangelical movement that celebrates Jews for the role they’re expected to play in the Rapture. “They love us to the same extent that the Pilgrims loved the turkeys before the first Thanksgiving,” Mikey says. “It’s very much like, ‘Places everyone!’ They want all the Jews happily back in Israel and that’s ground zero, stay within a circle because this will serve as an accelerant and a lubricant to bring Jesus back. And then he’ll fucking kick massive ass! You’ll get your chance to accept him—I mean, surrender—or be lit up like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July forever, in the lake of fire along with Einstein, Anne Frank, and Adam Sandler.”
Central to Mikey’s understanding of himself and his mission are two beatings he received as an eighteen-year-old doolie at the academy, apparent retaliations for notifying his superiors about a series of anti-Semitic notes he’d received. Nobody was held accountable. Mikey graduated with honors and thought he’d put it behind him; but his anger reignited in 2004, when the younger of his two sons, Curtis, then a doolie himself, told Mikey he planned to beat the shit out of the next cadet—or officer—who called him a “fucking Jew.” In 2005, when he created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, he ornamented its board with a galaxy of brass, the dozen stars and eagles on the shoulders of each of the retired generals, admirals, and colonels he recruited meant to make clear that the foundation’s enemy is not the military, and he collects and trumpets endorsements from churches to make clear that the foundation’s enemy is not religion. But the head of the largest Pentecostal chaplain-endorsing agency sums Mikey up in two words, e-mailed to an active-duty army chaplain: “lawyer, Jewish.” Mikey obtained a copy of the e-mail via discovery in a lawsuit MRFF has filed. The author of the e-mail says that Mikey is out to get “any and all Government entities that does anything Christian [sic].” In fact, Mikey defends chaplains, many of whom are his allies; his enemy, he says, is “weaponized Christianity. This country is facing a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the religious rights of our armed forces members.” He calls this “soul rape.”
It’s a strong term that at first sounds like typical over-the-top Mikey, but it’s at the root of America’s First Amendment freedoms, dating from the seventeenth century and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Williams was a devout Christian. But based on his encounters with Native American leaders, whom he deemed honest men, and his dealings with the leaders of the Massachusetts colony, who sent him into exile, he concluded that outward religion—the piety of the Puritans—was no guarantee of inner virtue. “I feel safer down here among the Christian savages along Narragansett Bay than I do among the savage Christians of Massachusetts Bay Colony,” he wrote. He knew the Native Americans he admired were not Christians in any doctrinal sense, but they taught him a nuanced concept of tolerance that would become the bedrock of American religious freedom—and, what’s more, liberty of conscience. What is the distinction? Religion is a set of beliefs, ideas, rituals, or customs. Conscience is more fundamental: the faculty of searching for the beliefs, ideas, rituals, or customs that make up religion or, for that matter, the rejection of religion. What mattered most, Williams thought, was the ability to seek the good. So if the state restricted that search (through mandatory prayer, for instance, or discrimination against minority faiths), it violated the most basic freedom, that of individual conscience. Without the freedom to choose one’s own beliefs, Williams concluded, no other freedom is really possible.
“In the military,” Mikey told me one night in Albuquerque, “rights that we as civilians enjoy are severely abridged in order to serve a higher goal: provide good order and discipline in order to protect the whole panoply of constitutional rights for the rest of us.” One of those rights is free speech. A soldier in uniform can’t endorse a political candidate, advertise a product, or proselytize. That rule is for the good of the public—people don’t want men with guns telling them which way to cast their vote—and for the military itself. An officer can tell a soldier what to do, but not what to believe. Conscience is its own order.
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The evangelical transformation of the military began during the cold war, in a new American Great Awakening that has only accelerated across the decades, making the United States one of the most religious nations in the world. We are also among the most religiously diverse, but as the number of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and adherents of hundreds of other traditions has grown, American evangelicalism has become more entrenched, tightening its hold on the institutions that conservative evangelicals consider most American—that is, Christian.
“It was Vietnam which really turned the tide,” writes Anne C. Loveland, author of the only book-length study of the evangelical wave within the armed forces, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942–1993. Until the Vietnam War, it was the traditionally moderate mainline Protestant denominations (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians), together with the Catholic Church, that dominated the religious life of the military. But as leading clergymen in these denominations spoke out against the war, evangelicals who saw the struggle in Vietnam as God’s task rushed in. In 1966, Billy Graham used the pulpit of the Presidential Prayer Breakfast to preach a warrior Christ to lead the troops in Vietnam: “I am come to send fire on the earth!” he quoted Christ. “Think not that I am come to send peace but a sword!” Other fundamentalists took from Vietnam the lessons of guerrilla combat, to be applied to the spiritual fight through the tactic of what they called infiltration, filling the ranks of secular institutions with missionaries both bold and subtle. That same year, one Family organizer advised
inverting the strategy of the Vietcong, who through one targeted assassination could immobilize thousands. Winning the soul “key men” in the military could mobilize many more for spiritual war.
“Evangelicals looked at the military and said, ‘This is a mission field,’ ” explains Captain MeLinda Morton, a former missile launch commander who until 2005 was a staff chaplain at the Air Force Academy and has since studied the history of the chaplaincy. “They wanted to send their missionaries to the military, and for the military itself to become missionaries to the world.”
The next turning point occurred during the Reagan administration, when regulatory revisions helped create the fundamentalist front in today’s military. A longstanding rule had apportioned chaplains according to the religious demographics of the military as a whole; that is, if the census showed that 10 percent of personnel were Presbyterian, then 10 percent of the chaplains would be Presbyterian. However, all chaplains were required to be trained to minister to troops of any faith. In the mid-1980s the Pentagon began accrediting hundreds of new evangelical and Pentecostal “endorsing agencies,” allowing graduates of fundamentalist Bible colleges trained to see those from other faiths as enemies of Christ to fill up nearly the entire allotment for Protestant chaplains. As a result, more than two-thirds of the military’s 2,900 active-duty chaplains today are affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. Morton thinks even that figure is an underrepresentation: “In my experience,” she says, “80 percent of the chaplaincy self-identifies as conservative and/or evangelical.”
