Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Backward Christian soldiers
Evangelicals are taking over the US military, reports David Belden. And one man’s determined to stop them

If you heard it said that America’s military was being taken over by agents of apocalyptic Christianity, you might think it the fiction of some leftwing alarmist. But what if it came from a man who said, “I never thought, coming from a conservative military Republican family filled with [US Air Force] Academy graduates and people that have been in so much combat, that at this point in my life, after being a White House lawyer, a lawyer for a Texas billionaire, a businessman, that I’d suddenly become this political activist”?

Meet Mikey Weinstein, who has become the leading whistleblower and campaigner against the influence of fundamentalist evangelicals in the US military. Listening to him is a strange experience. He is the most combative speaker I have ever heard in public life. His language is so extreme that I hesitate to reproduce it lest readers discount his views. “When I see anti-Semitism, I don’t fucking care if I live or die, someone’s going to get a fucking beating,” he says in one of his milder moments. But the man himself is convincing, both in person and in his book With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military. If he is right … well, more on that later. First, hear his voice:
http://newhumanist.org.uk/1681/backward-christian-soldiers