Alright, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest is Jeff Charlotte, pardon me as I flip the pages in Harper's Magazine here.
The article is called, Jesus Killed Mohammed, The Crusade for a Christian Military.
Welcome to the show Jeff, how are you sir?
Hey Scott, thanks for having me.
Well thank you very much for joining us, this is really a shocking article here, I'm not even sure where to begin.
It's in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, the cover story there.
I guess let's start with the question of whether, or to what degree, our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan have become religious wars, even if they weren't meant to be in the first place, which maybe that's a wrong assumption, but to what degree have they become religious wars due to the influence of so much of this, I don't know exactly what to call it, Christianist, I guess, infiltration and control over the officer corps in the U.S. military?
You know Scott, I think the most important thing is to say whether or not the civilians at the top view what's being fought as a religious war, and you know, it seems pretty clear that Bush did, it seems pretty clear that Obama doesn't not, when you have military personnel out in the field openly advertising that it's a religious war, like the troops that I begin the story with who drove a Bradley fighting vehicle through the streets of Samarra with written on the side in giant red Arabic letters, Jesus killed Mohammed, or like Colonel Bob Young I spoke to was in command at Kandahar Air Base and decided to give Afghan warlords PowerPoint presentations on the importance of God to American democracy and how they needed to emulate that.
So it doesn't matter what the policy at the top is, if those civilians at the top aren't really confronting what has emerged as a fundamentalist front within our own armed forces, then you have the practical effect on the ground of a religious war, and it's no surprise that a lot of the people that U.S. troops are fighting see themselves as embroiled in a religious war, because the U.S. troops are telling them that it is.
And I think across the society, people still ask the question, why are we in Iraq anyway?
And things like that.
Years and years later, people don't really buy the excuses for these wars, so they make up their own reasons what it must be about.
And probably it's a mix of a lot of different reasons that people glom onto, of course.
But I could see why a soldier in the field, not having any idea why he's killing Iraqis, would be receptive to the idea that you're here because it's all part of Jesus' plan.
Every time you kill one of these guys, that just reaffirms, as you say in the article, you quote one of these soldiers saying, every time he shoots an Iraqi, that's just proof to him that he's on the side of good and the Iraqis on the side of evil, or else it just would not be going down at all, I guess.
Yeah, and I think you hit a really important point there, Scott.
That's a young man named Bruce Hrabik, who was a cadet at the Air Force Academy.
For this story, I traveled around to the Air Force Academy in West Point, Annapolis, Fort Riley in Kansas.
I interviewed more than 100 active-duty military personnel.
I'm not just cherry-picking bad apples to mix fruit and metaphor.
This is based on a really broad portrait of what's going on.
Bruce Hrabik at the Air Force Academy, a very bright young man, a very amiable young man.
I don't want to make the mistake of demonizing this guy.
This guy himself is not the enemy.
This is a guy who went to the Air Force Academy to get a good education.
Instead, he was basically told that it was all right to impose religion upon everything.
When he said that, when he described killing an Iraqi and doing God's work, this is a really important thing to understand about the fundamentalist front within the military.
A lot of people say, well, these people are just afraid to die.
No, they're not afraid to die.
Bruce Hrabik is not afraid to die, any more than is reasonable.
He's a good soldier.
He's afraid to kill for the wrong reason.
What these guys are responding to is a recognition that they can't quite state that the reasons they have been given for being sent off to Iraq, to Afghanistan, are not enough.
As you say, Scott, they're casting doubt.
Clearly, we're not spreading democracy here.
What could we be doing?
That's when they decide, well, I must be doing God's work because I'm not doing democracy's work here.
Really, what's happening there is that soldier, he's not a psychopath or anything like that.
He's just a young airman who has been betrayed by his leaders.
It's such a poisonous way of looking at the world because, of course, when God is on your side, you can never be wrong.
Any wrong thing that you do becomes justified.
I don't know why it would be any different for al-Qaeda jihadists who travel from Libya to go blow themselves up in Iraq.
They look at it the same way.
There really is that sense of a longing for certainty.
Again, I always emphasize this because I think too many progressives tend to dismiss fundamentalists as stupid or something like that.
They're not.
They're human beings and they're looking for reasons.
They're in the military.
They're trying to do the right thing.
They're sure not going to find that certainty in the rationale that's been given to them for why they're in a foreign country fighting and dying and killing.
They turn to this issue.
Like the Colonel I mentioned, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Young, Kandahar Air Base.
Again, a man of startling personal integrity, really, genuinely.
He'd be a good neighbor except for the fact that he's devoted himself to this religion because, again, when he tries to explain to the Afghan warlords what they're doing in Afghanistan and he looks to the rationale that's been given to him by his civilian commanders, it doesn't make sense.
Instead, he came up with this long PowerPoint presentation.
He brought in a Christian praise band.
He showed me the PowerPoint presentation.
He shared it with me.
It goes through American history, reinterpreting American history as if to say that it all culminates in this divine mission in Afghanistan.
That's insulting to the people that he's speaking to, but it's also endangering his own troops because he's saying to these Afghan warlords, we're here on a crusade and it won't be a big surprise when they respond in kind.
Well, you also make the very interesting point in the article that this really began during Vietnam when the excuses for that war were wearing very thin and when, I guess you say, it had been mostly Catholics and kind of mainline Protestants had been sort of the dominant religious forces in the military, nothing too literal and nothing too fundamentalist.
But then those leaders all started denouncing the Vietnam War and kind of were edged out of the military and replaced by real true believer Pentecostal types from the South.
Well, there's nothing wrong with being Pentecostal.
There's nothing wrong with being from the South, for sure.
Again, the thing that we want to remember is that these guys are violating the First Amendment and that's freedom of and from religion, but it's also freedom of religion.
There's nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist in the military.
There's something wrong with imposing your views on those in your chain of command and that's exactly what happened, as you say, after Vietnam, especially as the chaplaincy began to change in the military.
The chaplain corps is very important.
These are officers.
They're the only officers, if you're a military personnel, that you can turn to with confidence.
You can't go to a doctor like a civilian.
You can't go to a lawyer like a civilian.
The only person you go to with confidence, if you have a problem, is a chaplain.
Chaplains are important figures.
Vietnam was one step and the next step, and I tell this in the story, happened under Ronald Reagan.
Just like he deregulated a lot of things, he deregulated the chaplaincy corps in the military.
So it used to be the military tried to have a fairly representative chaplain corps.
That didn't mean if you're a Presbyterian, you get a Presbyterian chaplain.
It just meant that you knew there were Presbyterian chaplains around, and that every chaplain, regardless of their faith, was trained to minister to all people, again, regardless of the faith or lack thereof.
Well, Reagan wiped that out and said, if you've got a Bible college with a PO box somewhere and you want to ordain chaplains for the military, you can.
And there's this great influx of these folks who have not been trained to serve people of other faiths and no faith.
Now it's about 80%.
About 80% of the chaplaincy corps is fundamentalist or evangelical conservative.
And then you've got even more extreme strains.
There's an organization called the Chaplaincy for Full Gospel Churches.
It ordains about 200 military chaplains.
And if you go to the website, look at the newsletter, you'll see things.
Well, one of the things they're in favor of is clearing all the Muslims out of Europe.
One major chaplain ordained through that, endorsed through that agency, he describes mainline Protestant Christians, which is to say Episcopalians, Methodists, and so on.
He says even there, they're demonic.
There's only one way to be on the side of God, and that's to share his faith exactly.
These people have now been moving up the ranks until they're really at the top of the military.
And that's important to emphasize, Scott.
These are not fringe characters.
I'm talking about General Bob Kaslan, one of ten division commanders in the military.
General Robert Van Antwerp, who said his mission in the military is to raise up a godly army.
General Johnny Wida, the Air Force in command of thousands of troops in the DMZ in South Korea, who is an extreme fundamentalist and sees his job as converting those under them and using the force of his uniform and his position to coerce and bully those beneath him.
Well, yeah, and I appreciate the care in your statements, and I hope I didn't sound anti-religious.
Oh, no, no, not at all, not at all.
You know, it's a thing that...
You don't say not at all, I just always sort of hit that note, because I don't want people to mistake what I'm saying for, you know, you're free to believe whatever you want to believe.
That's the whole point here, and these are the guys who are crossing that line.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and it goes right to the First Amendment.
And it's interesting here, you talk about this meme that, well, the Constitution doesn't really ban this kind of thing.
And it's interesting because, of course, you know, the text of the amendment talks about Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
And so I hear this kind of a lot on the right, is that, well, listen, what it's saying is they can't establish an official Church of America, but it doesn't mean that nobody who has a government job may freely express himself while at his government job.
That's only... courts made that up, or whatever.
And so they sort of kind of have a point.
I would tend to agree with the court in that instance, or whatever.
But they sort of have a point about the very literalist reading of the amendment there.
But it seems like none of them who really repeat this meme have actually really read it.
As far as they know, there's nothing about separation of church and state in there at all, really.
It's just something, some myth the liberals made up.
I heard this from all ranks, the idea that this was the separation of church and state was introduced by liberal judges in the 1950s.
You know, the 1950s, that great age of American liberalism under Eisenhower.
In fact, the phrase comes from Thomas Jefferson.
And even before that, very early on, it was sort of percolated from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island.
But it's true, the phrase, the separation of church and state, is not in the Constitution.
There is, of course, this First Amendment.
And then you've got this leadership problem where you've got really top commanders who aren't even familiar with that.
I spoke with General John Regney, the three-star general, who actually still is.
He's moving on at the end of the spring.
He's in charge of the Air Force Academy, which is the most elite war college in the world in history.
I mean, this is the most elite place you can get.
And this guy is there.
He was brought in because the Air Force Academy had effectively become a kind of evangelical seminary.
One outgoing general said the problem's going to take six years.
It'll take six years to restore constitutional principles.
He threw up his hands and left.
They brought in Regney to clean up the problem.
I interviewed Regney.
It's a natural I want to say.
Now, General Regney, how do you see the balance between no establishment of religion and free exercise of religion?
And he said, excuse me, what are you talking about?
I said, I'm talking about the First Amendment.
And he said, the First Amendment.
He's paraphrasing directly from its text there, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
In the end, I actually literally read it to him.
He said, boy, what is that constitutional thing again?
That's a quote.
He said, what are those constitutional things again?
He turned to his two officers with him to help him out in the interview, a retired colonel who's now head of PR for the academy, and Colonel Keith Darlington, head chaplain.
And they decided to pass on the question.
Now, Scott, if you or I, you know, did know the First Amendment, and I hope we both do, that's one thing.
We're civilians.
These are not only military personnel who have taken an oath to defend us with their life, but they're also at the Air Force Academy in charge of training the whole future officer corps.
So it's no surprise when you get cadet after cadet after cadet who I spoke to there, telling me that there's no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution, that America was founded on Christian principles, that officers in Iraq and Afghanistan should try and spread Christian principles.
I mean, I don't blame those young people.
I blame their commanders.
They're the ones, they've been betrayed by the chain of command.
It's General Regney that we need to look at.
Well, and it's, you know, the entire military that stopped teaching the Constitution.
I mean, I was never a soldier, but I believe I know from history, I think, that they used to teach everyone the Constitution.
Even, you know, the lowest level Marine got at least a short class, and this is what your oath is to, this is what we're fighting for, and they don't do that anymore.
Not even the officers know.
They still do it, they just don't pay attention.
The interesting thing is, you know, throughout my interviews, actually, the people who I found who were most familiar with the Constitution were enlisted people, which is interesting because this fundamentalist front is really concentrated in the officer corps.
And I met a lot of, I went out to Fort Riley, which is home of the Big Red One, one of the famous divisions of the Army in Kansas, and spoke with a lot of young soldiers who were back from Iraq.
This group happened to belong to a Free Thinkers Club.
You know, there were atheists and agnostics and so on, and there were two of them involved in lawsuits, one because he had been threatened multiple times for his atheism.
The Army actually had to bring him back from Iraq because they couldn't protect him, not from insurgents, but from his fellow soldiers who were trying to kill him.
Another young medic named Destin Chalker, really, really bright young guy, knew the Constitution by heart, and for him it wasn't a matter of life or death, it was a matter of liberty of conscience.
He got back from Iraq, I think his second or third tour.
He'd been wounded.
He gets off the plane.
He is forced to stand at attention.
His first time is fetal back in American soil.
Stand at attention and listen to prayers to Jesus and told that that's why he'd been fighting there by colonel, colonel telling him that that's what he was fighting for was Jesus.
I mean, you know, and this just broke this guy's heart.
He had already had his doubts about the war and what it was about, and I think that pushed him over.
So there's people in the military.
I mean, it's important to remember what's going on in the military.
It's not that the military has become this block, solid, fundamentalist thing.
There's a fundamentalist front within the military concentrated in the officer corps, and there's lots of folks in the military who just want to do their jobs.
You know, this is lots of folks in the military who are against the war.
They know that this is a war we shouldn't be fighting.
They don't want to be there.
Well, in any other job, you can quit.
And, you know, even though we don't have conscription right now, once you sign up for the military, you're not allowed to quit.
So your boss telling you, listen, I want you to believe like me, and, you know, he's got a gun and he's your officer, you don't have a choice.
That's coercion pure and simple at that point.
That's the important thing.
And, you know, there's plenty of military personnel who take that very seriously.
For instance, one thing that's interesting, you'll very rarely find in the military an officer who will openly discuss his particular partisan political views.
They might say, I believe in the war, but they're not going to say vote for George Bush or vote for Barack Obama.
Yeah, they kind of pride themselves in not caring about that kind of thing.
Well, even if they care about it, they don't say it, because if I'm a colonel and I say that, then the people underneath me think they've got to do that too.
But there's no hesitation when it comes to religion, even though that is banned by the military.
What they're doing is really against the rules, but there's no hesitation and there's no punishment.
I spoke to one senior officer at the Air Force Academy.
I spoke to him about one of the things that I found out there, that numerous cadets, we're talking dozens of cadets, are using the three weeks off they get a year, they get three weeks off a year, to go and lie on their visas to go to China and do undercover missionary work.
They say that they're going to be English teachers, and then they go and do missionary work, which is illegal in China.
It's a violation of the Academy's honor code.
It's lying.
It's a potential diplomatic incident.
I spoke to the senior officer.
I said, Are you concerned about this?
He said, Oh, yeah.
He said, All these cadets should be expelled.
This is not officer material.
I said, So why don't you do something about it?
He said, Oh, my career would be over in a minute if I said one thing about it.
I'm powerless to stop this.
So that's where you've got that problem, is that the people who are crossing that line, there's absolutely no punishment.
I hate to say it, but under Obama, that's really held true.
I think there was high hopes.
At the heart of my story is a man named Mikey Weinstein and his group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
They are fighting for freedom of and from religion within the military, and they've been at this for several years now.
They had high hopes that under Obama, they were told that there was going to be a big change at the Pentagon, they were going to be courts martial of these officers who are routinely crossing this line, coercing the subordinates.
Instead, nothing.
Instead, the very officers they were sure were going to be out under Obama are being promoted.
You see guys like Secretary of the Army Pete Garrett under Obama, guys who started a video by a group called Christian Embassy, a very fundamentalist group that had officers testifying in uniform on duty at the Pentagon that the Christian mission was more important than their military duties.
Obama decided to hold him over.
Not because Obama shares these views, but I think Obama has just decided not to take on this fight.
In effect, he's abandoned all those men and women in the military who are at the mercy of this fundamentalist front.
Frankly, he has abandoned the rest of the world, which counts on big countries like the United States not waging religious crusades.
I've talked with Mikey Weinstein before.
He's a very interesting guy, and he's got a lot to say.
In part of your coverage in this Great Harpers article that you've written here, you talk a lot about the anti-Semitism among some of these religious zealots in the military.
I'm a little bit confused.
I wonder if you can shed some light on maybe a little bit of what the actual religiosity is about here, because I guess I would have just assumed that most of these guys are fundamentalists in the mold of somebody like John Hagee, who's trying to force Jesus to come back and create Armageddon sooner.
Part of doing that is loving the Jews and having America be as close to Israel as possible and that kind of thing.
So I wonder whether there's a kind of conflict.
It makes no sense cognitive dissonance-wise.
It is the same people we're talking about, or are there kind of different strains of fundamentalist Christianity going on here?
I think you've hit on two important things there.
There are indeed different strains.
For years I've been writing about what I call the elite fundamentalism and populist fundamentalism.
Elite fundamentalism is the guys who do the National Prayer Breakfast, and I wrote about them in my book, The Family.
Populist fundamentalism is what you're really seeing in the military.
That tends to be what's called Christian Zionists.
These are evangelical Christians who see a very particular role for Jews and Israel in particular in their prophecy.
But what you've got to remember is philosemitism and antisemitism are two sides of the same coin.
John Hagee, who is a Christian Zionist, also believes that Hitler was doing God's work by chasing the Jews to Israel.
So I guess technically you can call that philosemitism, but with friends like me, these are not on your side.
It's the same thing in the military.
There is a fair amount of antisemitism.
Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has encountered a lot of it.
In fact, when he came to me about a year ago and said, I'd like you to write about this because I want to write about fundamentalism, at first I was pretty skeptical of what he was saying.
I mean, he's a great talker.
He's a guy who speaks a mile a minute.
I thought, well, this guy is surely exaggerating how bad it is, and he probably had some bad experience with antisemitism, but I don't know if it's as pervasive as he says.
By the time I was done with my interviews and talking to officers at all ranks, I was certain that it was.
Antisemitism is not driving it.
It's a small part of it, but it's a significant part.
I keep returning to the Air Force Academy because it's such the heart of this thing.
When I went out there, I spent close to a week out there just talking to as many people as I could.
Johnny Whitaker, who was then the head of PR, a retired colonel, meets me, literally first thing off the plane.
He knows why I'm there.
He knows what I'm there to cover.
He says, oh, no, we've really handled that.
The Academy is completely diverse now.
It exactly represents American life.
It's about 80% Protestant.
I sort of did a double-take because America is not 80% Protestant.
It's about 51% Protestant.
He said, and we've even got some Jews, or at least they claim to be Jews.
I'm quoting directly there.
I'm so puzzled.
What Whitaker seemed to be saying was that cadets were claiming to be Jewish so that they could get off of duty during the Jewish Sabbath.
Which might be a reasonable thing to do.
Oh, well, I was thinking to avoid some of the Christian indoctrination.
One thing that a lot of soldiers and sailors and Marines and so on told me, one of the things that bugs them, if, say, you're Jewish, you're a Muslim, and so your Sabbath is a different day, or you're not religious and you don't want to go to church services on Sunday.
This happens throughout the military.
Many, many people have experienced this.
That's fine.
We're not going to force you to go to church.
You're going to clean the latrine.
You're going to clean the toilet.
You have two choices.
You can go to church, or you can get down and scrub toilets.
Here's the thing.
We're right up against the time wall here real quick.
If I could get you to comment on the part of this that's, I guess, the most shocking to me, because I'm not a religious guy and I don't think in these kind of terms, is that this really is, you know, we are righteous, and anybody who opposes us, whether they know it or not, basically they're working with Satan to oppose us.
These are demons that we're fighting in Afghanistan.
They're probably, I guess, demons inside the Air Force Academy who oppose this view.
Yeah.
The leading group is called the Officers Christian Fellowship.
About 15,000 officers around the world in the U.S. military, and their mission and their materials, this is, I'm quoting, they said, what we are doing is we will need to press ahead obediently, not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, that includes you and me, Scott, to keep us from the mission of reclaiming territory for Christ in the military.
Elsewhere they describe even people who are Christians but not their sort of Christians.
If you're a Catholic, if you're a Mormon, if you are a mainline Protestant, a liberal Protestant, they'll say that even though you mean to do good, you're doing evil, you're working for Satan, you are what they call a spiritual terrorist.
So, in effect, they've declared war even on their fellow Christians within the military.
It's really their way or the highway, and that's a scary attitude, especially when you're talking about people with the most powerful weapons in the world at their disposal.
Well, thank you so much for bringing this story to light.
It's a really great piece.
I recommend everybody go check it out.
It's in the current issue of Harper's.
It's called Jesus Killed Muhammad, the Christian Crusade to Convert the U.S. Military by contributing editor Jeff Charlotte.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Great talking to you.
