Michael “Mikey” Weinstein is an anti-Christian bigot. He heads up the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I don’t have a problem with someone criticizing the way religion is used. I do it myself. I’m just as disturbed with copies of a Left Behind video being passed around to military personnel. But I would never use the language Weinstein does to criticize it.

My biggest complaint about religion in the military is that too many Christians blindly support almost every military action of our government.

Weinstein is a bully masquerading as a civil rights champion. He describes evangelical Christian groups that don’t support his leftist social agenda as “monsters” and “hate groups,” “fundamentalist Christian creatures” and “bandits.” Weinstein’s rhetoric obscures any legitimate criticisms he might have. Ken Klukowski writes:

“[Weinstein] says Christians — including chaplains — sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of ‘treason,’ and of committing an act of ‘spiritual rape’ as serious a crime as ‘sexual assault.’ He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are ‘enemies of the Constitution.’”

 I wonder what Weinstein would say about comments made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his tenure as president and Commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Weinstein would have had real problems with FDR’s views of Christianity that are very similar to what he criticizes today. Was FDR committing “spiritual rape”?

In an address given on October 6, 1935, FDR said:

“We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Its teaching, as has been wisely suggested, is ploughed into the very heart of the race. Where we have been truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity; where it has been to us as the words of a book that is sealed, we have faltered in our way, lost our range finders and found our progress checked.”1

 He declared the following on March 9, 1937:

“I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.”

 While running for his third time in a Brooklyn speech, Roosevelt said the following in November 1, 1940, criticizing Republicans:

“I am certain that the rank and file of patriotic Republicans do not realize the nature of this threat. They should remember, and we must remember, what the collaborative understanding between Communism and Nazism has done to the processes of democracy abroad…

“Those forces hate democracy and Christianity as two phases of the same civilization. They oppose democracy because it is Christian. They oppose Christianity because it preaches democracy. Their objective is to prevent democracy from becoming strong.”

 In his September 1, 1942 Labor Day Address, FDR said the following:

“PRESERVATION OF THESE rights is vitally important now, not only to us who enjoy them, but to the whole future of Christian civilization.”

 As World War II broke out in Europe, FDR warned:

“Those forces hate Democracy and Christianity as two phases of the same civilization.”

 The following year, on May 27, 1941, FDR stated in one of his radio addresses:

“The Nazis are as ruthless as the Communists in the denial of God.”

 “In his second inaugural address, FDR pledged to do his utmost by ‘seeking Divine guidance.’ He took that mission further on January 25, 1941, when he wrote a personal prologue to a special edition of the New Testament, which was distributed to millions of U.S. soldiers. ‘As Commander-in-Chief,’ Roosevelt wrote, ‘I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.’

“He believed that all American soldiers should have the opportunity to read the words of Christ in preparing for battle. Once, when joining those soldiers aboard a warship with Winston Churchill, FDR asked the crew and prime minister to join him in singing the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ In his final inaugural address, FDR affirmed, ‘So we pray to Him for the vision to see our way clearly … to achievement of His will.’”2

When American soldiers were landing on the beaches of Normandy, Roosevelt led the nation in prayer during a radio broadcast.3

There’s  the right way to criticize the use of religion and the military and the wrong way. Mikey Weinstein is doing it the wrong way.

Some of the above material was taken from Conservapedia.

1. “Statement on the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Printing of the English Bible.” [↩]
2. Paul Kengor, God and George W. Bush: A Spiritual Life (New York: Regan Books, 2004), p. 176. [↩]
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Franklin Roosevelt’s D-Day Prayer, June 6, 1944. [↩]