U.S. Air Force Academy ... turning into a taxpayer-supported Evangelical institution ..

The Crusaders | “The Christian Taliban is running the Department of Defense” | By ROBERT C. KOEHLER | Tribune Media Services | May 3, 2007

Sixteen words may be all that stand right now between the apparatus of government and the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare. And those words are starting to give.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”
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When George Bush, in the wake of 9/11, puffed himself into Richard the Lionheart and declared he would lead the country in a “crusade” against terrorism — you know, crusade, as in slaughter of Muslim infidels — turns out . . . oh, how awkward (if you’re on White House spin duty) . . . he may have been speaking literally.

What’s certain, in any case, is that a lot of people in high and low places within the Bush administration — and in particular, the military — heard him literally, and regard the war on terror as a religious war:

“The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him,” a lieutenant colonel, according to a BBC reporter, said to his troops on the eve of the destruction of that undefended city in post-election 2004.

“I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jerry Boykin notoriously boasted a few years back, speaking of a Muslim warlord in Somalia. And by the way, George Bush is “in the White House because God put him there.”

And, of course, just the other day, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who conducted the first official investigation into Pat Tillman’s death, opined that Tillman’s family is only pestering the Army for the, ahem, truth about how he died because their loved one, a non-believer with no heavenly reward to reap, is now “worm dirt.”

Until I read the newly published “With God on Their Side” (St. Martin’s Press), Michael Weinstein’s disturbing account of anti-Semitism at the U.S. Air Force Academy, I shrugged off each of these remarks, and so much more, as isolated, almost comically intolerant noises out of True Believer Land. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do . . .

Now my blood runs cold. Weinstein, a 1977 graduate of the Academy and former assistant general counsel in the Reagan administration, and a lifelong Republican, has devoted the last several years of his life to battling what he has come to regard as a fundamentalist takeover of the Academy, turning it, in effect, into a taxpayer-supported Evangelical institution. He charges that the separation of church and state is rapidly vanishing at the school, which routinely promotes sectarian religious events, tolerates the proselytizing of uniquely vulnerable new recruits and, basically, conflates evangelical interests and the national interest. ...