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."