Onward Christian soldiers!

It’s not just Iraqis, or even Muslims. Christian militarism has been getting along just fine for centuries now, even turning on each other when there was no non-Christian enemy to bring to Jesus at the point of a sword. When it comes to war, Christian militarists – I also like the term Christian fascists, and just invented (I think) Xianmilitarists © – can quote Jesus as readily as Islamists can quote Mohammed.

I have come to cast fire upon the earth…

…I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

…whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one.”

The ellipses show there’s context that Xianmilitarists prefer to elide. Context goes by the board, too, when they sing (disclaimer: I used to sing this, too – one of my faves):

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus going on before.

Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle see His banners go!

And lest we forget:

II Timothy 2:3: “Thou shalt endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.”

Clearly, this kind of Christian follows in a time-honored tradition of belief in which “turn the other cheek” gets only lip service. Thus you get generals like Jerry Boykin. He rose to be Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but is best known for what he said in reply to a Somali warlord he was trying to hunt down, who had claimed Allah would protect him.

Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

Sounds to me like Boykin and the warlord deserve each other.

Still in the Pentagon itself, consider this: You’re familiar with Mikey Weinstein, who sued the Air Force Academy for imposing Christianity on the cadets. Weinstein is not only the father of an academy cadet (whom other cadets called “fucking Jew”) but a graduate himself, as well as a former judge advocate general, White House counsel for Ronald Reagan, and a Republican.

Some time after suing the academy, he demanded the Pentagon investigate a video that was shot inside the Pentagon by Christian Embassy, part of the Campus Crusade for Christ. The video featured Pentagon generals and the undersecretary of the Army professing their fundamentalist Christian faith. AF Major General Jack Catton:

I share my faith, that’s who I am, and let me tell you right now, the hierarchy as an old-fashioned American is that your first duty is to the Lord, second to your family and your third is to your country.

When the Pentagon’s inspector general investigated, one of the participants defended himself by saying he saw Christian Embassy as a “quasi-federal entity.”

That alone is a hint as to how seriously these Xianmilitarists take their military oath. If there was a chance to impose a Christian theocracy, the Constitution would be tossed overboard like tea in Boston harbor. It’s not the Constitution that matters.

There’s also BattleCry (talk about chilling), a Christian youth movement that reminds me of Hitler youth in their regimentation and fervency. It’s the brainchild of Ron Luce, an Oral Roberts University grad who founded Teen Mania Ministries, from which BattleCry grew. He served George Bush as a member of , the White House Advisory Commission on Drug Free Communities.

Luce sees the United States as “set aside for God’s purposes -– a country established for good and fruitfully blessed so that we might take God’s message to the ends of the earth.” Here’s Luce’s Christian mindset:

“This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent—the ‘forceful’ ones—will lay hold of the kingdom.”

He exhorts his young followers to pray in unison: “I will keep my eyes on the battle, submitting to Your code even when I don’t understand.”

Then there’s The Family. It’s not military, exactly, and it emphasizes a personal relationship with Jesus. At the same time, its ministry is to national and international political leaders, who gather for its Washington, D.C., prayer breakfasts and use its retreat.

The Family is quiet, thorough, connected, and kind of secretive. It’s kind of a Protestant version of Opus Dei. It believes the term “Christian” is too restrictive, and prefers to describe itself as a community of believers who are building a world for Jesus Christ. It focuses on forming a core of followers who in turn form cells of, ironically, leaders.

These following-leading politicians one day heard David Coe, the son of The Family’s current leader and the heir presumptive, tell them,

You guys are here to learn how to rule the world…

If you’re a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus, you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. ‘Get your vision straight, then relate.’ Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.”

Like BattleCry, The Family enlists youth to evangelize throughout the world.

Yes, with the exception of the more subtle Family, they all sound about as crazed as Islamists rounding up Iraqi men without beards or Islamofashion-impaired women. But this is no simple issue of crazy Christians trying to take over the military. It has roots deep in ancient history, but in contemporary history, too.

This is pointed out by Andrew J. Bacevich in his book The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. Bacevich, a West Point grad and Vietnam vet, is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a self-described conservative. He supported the pursuit of Bin Laden into Afghanistan, but not the Iraq war. His son was serving in Iraq and was killed there in May 2007, prompting Bacevich’s grief-stricken article in the Washington Post.

In an interview with tomdispatch, Bacevich spoke of this administration as “intoxicated with the mission of salvation.”

Certainly, our “ism” incorporates a religious dimension — in the sense of believing that God created this nation for a purpose that has to do with universal values…

You know, at the end of the day, we, the missionary nation, the crusader state, certain of our righteousness, remain the only people to have used nuclear weapons in anger — indeed, to have used them as a weapon of terror….

I think the evangelizing issue reflects at least three things. Number one, the elite disengagement from the military after Vietnam. The Episcopalians don’t sign up any more, or the Presbyterians.

Number two, the heightened political engagement of Christian evangelicals who, by the 1960s, had embarked on a crusade to save America from itself. Evangelicals have long seen the U.S. military as allies in that cause. American society may be going to hell in a hand basket with its promiscuity, its pornography, its divorce rates, its abortion, its women’s rights, all these things evangelicals lament, but the military’s a bastion of traditional virtue. Now, they misperceive soldiers in that regard, but I think that’s one reason military service has a special appeal for evangelical Christians.

Third comes the politicization of the military. When I first became an officer, the tradition of being apolitical was still deeply rooted. As one consequence of Vietnam, that went away. The officer corps came to see its interests as lying with the political right. Evangelical Christianity is just part of a larger mix.

Weinstein notes that Sinclair Lewis visited Nazi Germany in the 1930s, observing it for several months. When he returned, he said: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

Are these Xianmilitarists serious? Well, consider Weinstein’s experience since speaking out and founding Military Religious Freedom Foundation. When asked by Salon if he’d felt any repercussions:

I don’t think I’m in double digits, but it started at about 10 o’clock last night; after the press conference in the morning, I’ve had nine death threats since about 10 o’clock last night. I usually get about two or three a week. They’re very grotesque, everything from wanting to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel to threatening to blow me up, threatening my house will be blown up, raping my wife, blowing up my house. We’ve had our tires slashed, we’ve had feces and beer bottles thrown at the house, we’ve had dead animals placed on the front door of the house.

I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, “Fuck you, Jews” and “KKK,” all that stuff.

His response?

… take a number, pack a picnic lunch and stand in line, because we’re not going to stop, we’re not going to ever stop, we’re going to lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds on these people that are trying to destroy our Constitution…. we intend to get as much information as we can, fashion it into a dagger and then stab at the heart of this unconstitutional, wretched, vile, darkness at the Pentagon. This unconstitutional darkness, we will stab at it with our dagger until we kill it.

Whoa! Mikey hates it! Mikey sounds like more than a match for any Xianmilitarist! Mikey Weinstein for President!