The Good Fight
November 15, 2007
By Alyssa Rosenberg

Dispatches from opposite sides of the debate about religion in the workplace.

At the beginning of our first phone conversation, Mikey Weinstein asks me if I'm Jewish. At the end of our first e-mail exchange, Angie Tracey tells me to have a blessed evening. Weinstein has spent the past four years fighting what he calls a war against Christian proselytizing through the chain of command in the military; Tracey founded the first officially recognized Christian federal employee association in the nation.

Though they are separated by 1,900 miles, religious traditions, and civil and military backgrounds, Weinstein and Tracey personify the poles in a debate about the role religious faith plays when a person picks up a weapon or sits down at a computer in service of the U.S. government.

It's been 10 years since President Bill Clinton declared that "Religious freedom is at the heart of what it means to be an American, and at the heart of our journey to become truly one America."

He issued guidelines granting greater freedom of religious expression to civilian federal employees, which, among other things, allowed them to become part of workplace ministries.

Clinton's guidelines set up balancing tests that sought to ensure that as federal workplaces opened up to religion and employees were allowed to shape their work lives around their religious obligations, no agency would fall into endorsing any faith tradition and no one's right to be free from religion would be abrogated.

But the movement of faith into the federal workplace raises questions no regulations can answer. Does faith inspire a selflessness that makes people harder workers, more considerate colleagues and more determined soldiers or public servants? And if it does, should government employees leave faith at the office door, replacing religious symbols with the flag and religious texts with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

The Activist

I am just another highly flawed mammal walking around the planet," says Mikey Weinstein. "Metaphysically, I don't know what's up there.

Scientifically, it's hard to find evidence. I consider myself very much to be Jewish. I'm reminded every hour of every day that I'm Jewish. . . . I've tried to be an atheist, but it doesn't work for me. Maybe I'm not courageous enough."

Whatever courage Weinstein might lack, he has shown almost no hesitation over the past two years in outspoken advocacy of the separation of church and state. He quit a job as general counsel of Perot Systems, a Plano, Texas-based technology company, to found the Military Religious Freedom Foundation in Albuquerque, N.M., and to fight what he calls a war against Christian proselytizing through the military chain of command.

Weinstein is an Air Force Academy graduate and he is quick to tick off other family members who also are alumni: a brother-in-law, two sons and a daughter-in-law. Weinstein's relationships to the Air Force and to Judaism are closely intertwined. He was bar mitzvahed on Andrews Air Force Base and married in a Jewish ceremony at the Air Force Academy chapel.

When the two institutions came into conflict, Weinstein became an activist. In 2004, Weinstein's son Curtis, then a cadet at the academy, told his father that he was being harassed by fellow students because he was Jewish. Further, he told his father, cadets were required to attend mandatory events with Christian overtones, and academy leaders pressured cadets to attend church services and to convert to Christianity. Mikey Weinstein's reaction was unequivocal.

"The way that I'm wired, from the time I was born, whenever I see or experience anti-Semitism, I simply do not care whether I live or die," Weinstein says. But he also says anti-Semitism in the military is an advance warning that the Constitution is under threat by a specific form of Christianity that wants to eliminate all vestiges of the separation of church and state: "Whether Jews like it or not, they can be completely secular, they can be sub rosa Jews, but Jews tend to be the miner's canary of the communities that we live in."

Weinstein insists that it's not the content of proselytizing that bothers him, but rather a sense that the right to proselytize is so important that it overrides other constitutional concerns.

"If you want to believe that those 2 million babies who were gassed, that they're burning eternally in the fires of hell, I would give my last drop of blood and my last breath to defend their right to believe that because that's what our beautiful Constitution says," Weinstein insists. "But I will not do that when my government says who the children of the greater God are."

Since his conversation with his son, Weinstein has become a prolific - and sometimes impolitic - gadfly. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation discovered that a group called Christian Embassy had produced a promotional video featuring four generals and three other officers in uniform at the Pentagon, and Weinstein wrote to the Defense Department's inspector general to request an investigation. The resulting report determined that those officers had acted improperly by appearing by title and in uniform, suggesting that the military endorsed Christian Embassy's programs.

Weinstein also has fought against plans by Operation Straight Up, another Christian organization, to send troops in Iraq care packages that included a video game in which players can shoot non-Christians who refuse to convert. The Pentagon announced in August that it would not be delivering the care packages.

Most recently, Weinstein filed a lawsuit in Kansas federal court against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Army Maj. Freddy J. Welborn on behalf of an atheist soldier who says the military retaliated against him when he refused to convert to Christianity. Weinstein sued the Air Force Academy on similar grounds in 2005, but that suit was dismissed because he was an alumnus, not a current student.

Weinstein says other lawsuits will follow and that he has been contacted by thousands of soldiers and by civil servants in many executive branch agencies. The overwhelming majority of the soldiers who reach out to him, he says, are Christian.

"We have our own clients who are evangelical Christians who are persecuted because they're not fundamentalist enough," Weinstein says. "This is not a Jewish-Christian issue. In the main, it's Christian-on-Christian violence. But [Jews are in] real serious trouble [in the view of the evangelical Christians who proselytize them]."

Members of the military also are particularly vulnerable, he says, because of the structure of the chain of command. "The members of our military give up massive amounts of their own constitutional rights," Weinstein says, explaining his focus on the armed forces. "They do that so they can form a lethal fighting unit and uphold the higher goals of honor and discipline. But they are particularly vulnerable."

He doesn't want religion to disappear from the public square, Weinstein says, just to make sure that no one faith gets institutional support during that conversation. "If I ever became president, I would encourage more people to share whatever views they've got," he says. But when it comes to serving the government, "you better recognize we have one religion, we have one Bible, we have one cross. That's patriotism, the Constitution, and the flag," Weinstein says. "If religion informs you, that's great. But . . . there is a line." For him, that line is clear.

"If you believe that your biblical worldview trumps everyone else, your brothers' and sisters' constitutional rights, you should leave the government," he says. "You should go someplace where there is no separation of church and state. You shouldn't just stay out of the government; you should get out of the country."

The Evangelist

When I moved to Washington for my career," Angie Tracey says, "I became a Baptist, mainly because I was seeking more education on the Bible itself. That was where the Lord led me, to really get that foundation in his word. . . . There are so many misconceptions. People nowadays have a tendency to write God's word by their own standards instead of reading and studying and learning what God's plan is for us. They're not just restrictions. . . . It's really a guideline for how to live a healthy, joyous, happy, fruitful life. It's God's secret to success. It's just a pleasure to know what he's all about and grow closer to him."

That passionate belief in the power of God has inspired Tracey to become one of the leaders of the movement for ministry in the federal workplace. As the founder of the first Christian federal employee association, the Christian Fellowship Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she has become an outspoken advocate for the powerful role that prayer and religious fellowship can play in making employees happier, more effective and more fulfilled.

"When I moved to CDC, I recognized that our agency is embroiled on a daily basis in dealing with life-threatening diseases, dealing with biological and chemical agents, and prevention," she says. "Some of our folks are put in harm's way when they travel abroad. I thought if any agency needs to have the blessings of God, it's ours."

Tracey says she prayed for years for God to send a leader to CDC who could help her organize a small gathering of her Christian co-workers. Because she doesn't have a seminary education, she didn't feel qualified to lead her fellow employees in Bible study. But while praying in a women's ministry at her church, Tracey heard the minister tell the assembled worshippers, "If you wait until you feel you're a biblical scholar to do something for the Lord, you will never do something for the Lord."

"I cannot even describe to you what happened inside me," Tracey says. "I just felt this sense of euphoria, and I felt God just whisper to my heart, 'I've been trying to tell you I want you to do this.' "

She discovered, however, that there was a complex application process at CDC. She would have to seek approval from a superior she thought would not be receptive, and the committee that approves applications met infrequently. But Tracey persevered. She sees God's hand in the surprising ease with which the group came to be: The center's deputy director whose reaction Tracey had feared ended up saying the group was the best idea Tracey had ever had. An emergency brought the approval committee together just after she turned in her application.

Six days after the Christian Fellowship Group was chartered in September 2001, planes hit the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington and crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pa. Tracey says the sense of urgency she felt after years of prayer must have come because her office and her colleagues would have a pressing need for prayers and Christian fellowship in the aftermath of the attacks.

"CDC deployed over 150 employees to New York to deal with the aftermath of that. They didn't know what they were entering into. As everyone was throughout the country, people were searching for God and meaning, and clinging to each other. We just feel that God was right on time in our workplace," Tracey remembers.

Two hundred and thirty people came to her first event. Almost every CDC campus has a Bible study now, and the largest events draw 400 employees, according to Tracey. Every step of the way, she says, God has helped provide for the group's needs, bringing in a CDC employee who also happens to be a music minister to help conduct meetings, drawing together a Web designer, a code writer and a graphic designer to put together a site for the CDC intranet, and even providing an offer of pro bono legal help when it appeared the group's charter might be challenged.

"I think that God has really protected us," Tracey says. "He's using [the group] to show people that there's a different way to work, to love each other, to work with each other."

Every Monday, members operate a prayer phone line during their lunch hours. They serve on CDC diversity committees. Tracey says the group has even helped resolve disputes between employers and employees. She cites one example when a CDC employee threatened to sue a supervisor for racial discrimination and came to Tracey for help. "We read in the Scriptures about respecting authority. And I said that what's in my heart is there may be a point of confusion between you and your supervisor. . . . Pray that her heart may be open to you, and that God may reveal to you any wrongdoing," Tracey says.

"God guided them to a meeting of minds and now they're friends, they go to lunch every week. They have a wonderful fellowship now, and we prevented what was going to be a taxing and draining situation for the supervisor and the employee, and we saved the agency money. It's not a matter of this nice little thing that we can do to support our employees. It's how can we shift our ideas to conduct business differently."

She's taken that message on the road, speaking at a seminar sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and working with her counterparts in workplace ministries at Coca-Cola and in the Canadian government.

But the vision of a different workplace, shaped by God's instructions, inspires Tracey every day in her own work as well - she is now CDC's coordinator for faith intiatives and programs. "In my faith, it teaches me to care about people, to love each other, to provide for each other and to need each other," she says. "I do my work as excellence unto the Lord. It's to the benefit of my workplace to have that."