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ST. LOUIS DISPATCH – Church-state issue once again to the fore

Published On: March 26, 2012|Categories: News|1 Comment|

Selected Article Excerpts:

  • Tuesday night should have been called “Dueling First Amendment Activist Night” in St. Louis.

    On the campus of Washington University, the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics hosted the Rev. Barry Lynn, an ordained United Church of Christ pastor who is also executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

    Five miles to the south, Eden Theological Seminary, a United Church of Christ institution in Webster Groves, hosted Mikey Weinstein, a Jewish graduate of the Air Force Academy who is also his alma mater’s largest pain in the neck.

  • Weinstein’s father graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, and Mikey spent 10 years in the Air Force as a JAG (judge advocate general). As a former lawyer for the Reagan administration, he defended the White House during the Iran-contra investigation and went on to be general counsel for one-time presidential hopeful H. Ross Perot.

    Weinstein left Perot Systems Corp. after he learned that his son, a cadet at the Air Force Academy in 2004, had been accused repeatedly by other cadets of killing Jesus.

  • Weinstein’s subsequent complaints to the Pentagon led to congressional hearings, internal academy investigations and new guidelines on religious tolerance. According to the Washington Post, the Air Force’s internal investigation ‘substantiated virtually all of (Weinstein’s) specific allegations” — that the commandant of cadets at the academy taught an incoming class a “J for Jesus” hand signal, that the Air Force football coach hung a “Team Jesus” banner in the locker room and that faculty members and senior officers signed a newspaper ad that said, “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world.”
  • Since then, Weinstein’s organization, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has battled the military in what Weinstein called in an interview last week “blood sport.”

    “We are fighting a Christian version of the Taliban,” he said, a subgroup of evangelical Christians he calls “fundamentalists” and “dominionists” who “have created an internal national security threat” to the United States. He has filed lawsuit after lawsuit, building a gradual case that the U.S. military — all the way up to what he calls the “Pentecostalgon” — is infused to its core with an evangelical fervor.

    Weinstein, whose organization says it represents more than 27,000 active-duty military, 96 percent of whom are Christian, was speaking at Eden as part of a multicity tour promoting his new book, “No Snowflake in an Avalanche,” a title he took from Voltaire.

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One Comment

  1. Dennis Coffey May 3, 2012 at 2:47 pm

    I’ve just learned of the MRFF. Thank you, especially Mikey and Chris, for your great work!

    To the MRFF blog writer:
    I’d like to comment on this post about Mikey in St. Louis: The ‘newspaper of record’ for St. Louis is named the ‘Post-Dispatch’, not simply ‘Dispatch’. Your misnaming the paper makes you look bad to those of us who know, and I don’t want that. I call it the ‘newspaper of record’ because it was one of Joseph Pulitzer’s flagship papers, and was one of the five newspapers JFK subscribed to while in the White House.

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