Michael “Mikey” Weinstein’s MRFF recently had a case of the vapors when they read the Southern Baptist Convention’s chaplaincy website, which includes the 1941 quote from Alfred Carpenter that

Every chaplain is a missionary in uniform, and an evangelist at large…

Weinstein’s group let loose the vitriol:

MRFF’s Constitutional [sic] civil-rights [sic] battle for separation of church and state in the U.S [sic] military faces vicious opposition from fundamentalist evangelical Christian dominionists hell-bent on ensuring military chaplains function as “government paid missionaries”…

As previously discussed, every Christian is a missionary. Every Christian, regardless of employer, is a missionary in their field — even as they are paid by their employer.

That includes government service, and it includes the military.

Every military Christian is a government-paid missionary in uniform — not just chaplains.

Mikey Weinstein, ever the demagogue, is doing nothing more than hyping up ignorance and hate — but he doesn’t stop there [emphasis added]:

This archaic, crusader like mentality is, by far, the greatest threat America faces today.

Terrorists are killing Americans and plotting attacks at home and around the world. ISIS, while on its heels, has sworn its enmity of America. American troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the heart of Africa — and those are just the places we know of.

And Mikey Weinstein thinks Southern Baptists are “the greatest threat America faces today”?

Not the sharpest bigot in the drawer, is he?

But wait, there’s more. Weinstein contends this threat to America justifies a restriction of Christians’ constitutionally protected rights:

The terrifying prospect of a powerful minority group of fundamentalists using our country’s military might as a force for evangelism IS a clear and present danger.

Weinstein provides an example of what is known as a false premise — since no one, not even his own previous explanation, said anything about “using our country’s military might as a force for evangelism.”  He builds on the prejudiced falsehood with the groundwork for a call to arms.  Besides being a Tom Clancy novel and movie, “clear and present danger” is the legal construct that would justify the abrogation of a citizen’s otherwise protected rights.

Mikey Weinstein’s apparent goal is to have the government restrict the exercise of Christianity — at least, the Christianity that doesn’t meet his criteria for being the right kind of MRFF-approved Christianity.

Weinstein’s been at it for a decade, though, and not so successfully — but there’s always tomorrow.

In the meantime, Weinstein will settle for so stigmatizing public Christianity that some Christian troops will self-censor out of an abundance of caution, not realizing the damage they do to the rights of the troops that follow in their footsteps.

Similarly, some hesitant military leaders will censor their troops out of an abundance of fear, not realizing — or at least not publicly acknowledging — the damage they may do to the US military’s culture of religious freedom.

All because Mikey Weinstein doesn’t like Christians saying Christians should do Christian things.

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