Mennonite Weekly Review

Last month, I went to a talk given by former U.S. Air Force officer Mikey Weinstein at a local university. Speaking on behalf of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, he shared the following story of a soldier serving in Iraq who called him, sobbing, recently.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

After a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad, the soldier found a street boy, cradling the disintegrated body of another street child who, the soldier found out, had been like a brother to him.

The soldier developed a close relationship with the boy, and, after consulting with his wife, began to pursue plans to adopt him. (The U.S. State Department ultimately forbade the adoption.)

When the soldier’s unit rushed to the scene of another bombing one day, he began looking for the boy, and his heart dropped when he saw him, screaming and covered with blood. After he and a medic cleaned him up, they found that he was not injured, but could not stop screaming.

Eventually, they saw the boy was holding a cartoon tract depicting a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi man walking side by side. A bomb explodes, and the next frames show the soldier sitting in heaven with Jesus and the Iraqi writhing in hell’s eternal fire.

The boy was screaming because he thought his dead brother was suffering eternal agony. The soldier asked the boy who had given him the tract; he pointed to the soldier’s commanding officer who, the soldier saw, was handing out the tracts to other Iraqis at the scene of the calamity.

Weinstein, who is Jewish, made it his mission to expose the influence of “dominionist” Christianity in the U.S. military, after his two sons at the Air Force Academy in Colorado complained of religious harassment, such as getting called f–ing Jews and feeling pressured to convert.

He began to hear stories from other soldiers and cadets about high-ranking officers forcing them to attend revival services and movies with explicitly Chris­tian themes.

Jewish cadets complained about classmates calling them “Christ-killers” and telling them that the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus.

Of most concern to Weinstein and other members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is the number of high-ranking Department of Defense employees and generals with command over thousands of troops and nuclear weapons who belong to the “fundamentalist Christian parachurch military corporate proselytizing complex.”