From the Reagan White House to a Watchdog for Religious Freedom: The Life and Times of Mikey Weinstein
By Ron Duncan Hart
I first learned about “Mikey” Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation from a Harper’s Magazine article entitled, “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military.” In that 2009 article the author Jeff Sharlet wrote about an American military squadron in Iraqi that had their Iraqi interpreter paint “Jesus killed Mohammed” in red Arabic letters across their Bradley armored vehicle. Sharlet describes how the soldiers in question laughed at the insult to Mohammed and Islam before driving out into Iraqi neighborhoods and a night of firefights.
As Sharlet delved into the role of religious nationalism in the American military, he told the story of New Mexican Mikey Weinstein, the widely known figure defending religious freedom in the United States military. As I inquired more about the life and work of Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, I found that he had been named one of the fifty most influential Jews in America by the Forward. Defense News named him one of the 100 most influential people on U.S. defense. Americans United for Separation of Church and State – the most important national organization addressing that issue – gave him their first ever “Person of the Year” award. Over more than twenty years, awards for his work have continued to accumulate.
On the website for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, I found Weinstein’s contact information, and he promptly answered my inquiry about doing an interview. After being vetted, I was invited to arrive to the interview with military-like precision. His instructions began by saying that he had security issues and protective defense systems that would structure the arrival process. The protocol was to call when I was thirty minutes out from the designated location. I was told to call again when I was five minutes out. Upon arrival, I was to park, remain in the vehicle, and call again waiting for clearance until the guard dogs were secure. I was warned that they were not pets but elite, trained attack dogs for protection and defense. My wife and I work together in interview situations, and the two of us waited in the car as advised until we received clearance, only then exiting the vehicle.
Once inside, we found Mikey Weinstein to be personable and passionate about his mission of defending religious freedom. We quickly settled into the questions about how he had started this protection of the religious rights of military people. Our first question was how a Republican, military-establishment lawyer with a legal background advising the military and the White House became the spearpoint for hundreds and thousands of men and women with religious issues in the armed services. How could the Foundation question and challenge military officers up the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense of the nation?
Mikey began by saying that the back story started in his days as a cadet in the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 1973 as a “doolie” or eighteen-year-old first year cadet he began to receive antisemitic threats with swastikas and death threats from fellow cadets, which he reported to his superior officer. In response he was ambushed by cadets twice in retaliation, resulting in beatings that left him unconscious, including one that put him in the hospital. Despite that ignominious start, he learned to deal with the antisemitism and went on to graduate from the Air Force Academy with honors in 1977. After the Academy he went to law school, he served most of a decade as an Air Force officer and Judge Advocate General where his duty was to provide legal advice to Air Force men and women.
He was then recruited to the Reagan White House as legal counsel. From there he went to a large law firm in Georgetown and then to one on Wall Street. Later, Mikey was general counsel to Ross Perot, who had been his father’s best friend at the U.S. Naval Academy years before. After several years with the Perot organization, he left in 2006 to form the non-profit Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which has been his chosen work and passion for the last twenty years.
When we asked what stimulated the dramatic change in 2006 from being legal counsel to Perot to forming a nonprofit for legal work to defend religious freedom, Mikey said two immediate causes had triggered it. One was Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which was known for its graphic violence and antisemitism, portraying Jews as brutal and evil. The Air Force Academy posted advertisements of The Passion of the Christ on campus, which seemed to be an encouragement for cadets to see the film. That combined with a visit he had later that year with his son Curtis, who was a first year “doolie” in the Air Force Academy like he had been in 1973, prodded him to do something.
Curtis pulled him aside at one point and told him that there was going to be trouble. He said that he was going to beat up the next cadet or officer who referred to him as a “fucking Jew,” and he went on to tell his father about the antisemitic harassment that he was continually experiencing. Mikey went back to his hotel room that night deeply disturbed about what his son had told him. He said that he began to wonder whether, if he had fought back harder when he was a cadet thirty years earlier, his son might not be experiencing the same bad antisemitic experiences he had endured.
Shocked by what he had seen and heard, Mikey began searching for ways to fight back against antisemitism in the military. In 2005 he created the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He invited retired generals to serve on the non-profit board to address not only antisemitism but all forms of religious discrimination against service members for their beliefs.
He emphasized that the Foundation was not against the military; rather, it was defending the constitutional right to freedom of religion within the ranks, so that no commander or ranking officer could impose their religious beliefs on those serving under them.
He clarified that the American military is supposed to be secular and could not constitutionally endorse political movements or religious beliefs. He went on to say that the forcing of religious beliefs on people who were trained to obey commands was akin to “soul rape.”
He said, “We Jews are often the miners’ canary. When we start to asphyxiate, it's going to be more than 'Houston… we have a problem.'” The Foundation hired Sam Bregman, Albuquerque attorney, to file its first lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force on October 6, 2005, for not preventing religious proselytizing within that service. Over the next twenty years, many more lawsuits have followed.
In 2006 he published the book With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military with co-author Davin Seay, in which he began the process of identifying the religious bias within the military despite it being unconstitutional. In endorsing the book, General Robert T. Herres (USAF Retired), former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “No one I know is more willing that Mikey Weinstein to take on such a tough, unpopular issue that goes to the very heart of one of our nation’s most important and long cherished principles. Read this book to understand why we should all share Mikey’s concern.” Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, author of The Politics of Truth, said, “With God on Our Side is the story of one man’s willingness to stand up for the Constitution of the United States. It is an important call to arms for all who love our country and the principles for which it stands.”
Mikey explained that the shift toward permissiveness regarding religious indoctrination in the military began when the legal authority to draft soldiers expired in 1973. Richard Nixon had campaigned on eliminating the draft and creating an all-volunteer army, which he accomplished. The volunteer recruits to the new army came in larger numbers from southern and midwestern states, changing the demographics of the military. Since those regions had larger fundamentalist Christian populations, it gradually began to create a culture of fundamentalist values within each of the military services. Mikey described how this culture had begun to permeate the military, citing examples from the production special rifle scopes engraved with Bible verses to teaching the “just war” theory and even Jesus’s alleged love of nuclear weapons.
His cellphone rang, and he picked it up. “Mikey … I can hear you breathing Bro, anything you want to say?” No answer. He hung up muttering, “Fuck you. That is number thirteen today, and they will just keep coming.”
Mikey pointed out that the recent call by the current Defense Secretary for the American people to pray in Christian, evangelical terms for victory and the safety of the troops in the military action with Iran is an example of the template of evangelical culture that is being imposed from the pinnacle of military command. The Secretary referred to praying, “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches in the name of Jesus Christ.”[1]
Mikey pointed out that his call eliminates not only Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists but other Christians who might not pray on “bended knee” to Jesus Christ as evangelicals do. He said that this is an example of the fundamentalist culture that permeates the military today in which even the conflict with Iran is being portrayed as a Christian crusade against the enemy Islam. Mikey’s comment was, “This shits all over the Constitution. We are no longer the United States of America. We are the Disunited States of America.”
Mikey stated, “We have 100,000 clients in the military, and 95 percent of them are Christians – but they are being told that they are not Christian enough. They are being proselytized by military superiors, and they come to us. We have shaped the MRFF to be a militant and aggressive organization so that when a commander gets the call from us, they shit in their pants, so that is how we intervene.”
He added, “Whenever an extremist form of religiosity has been joined at the hip with that part of the state that makes war, we wind up with oceans and oceans of blood. It’s not only the eight crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. We look exactly like the ninth version of the eight crusades, and that is giving a huge recruiting bonanza to the Islamic extremists.”
He continued, “In the military your commanding officer is not the same as your shift manager at Starbucks. He has complete control over your life, and if you do not obey him you are in subordination, which is a felony in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Since they [i.e. military men and women] cannot fight back, we do it for them…Our job is to chronicle, expose, intervene, and attack. We provide our clients A.A.R.P., meaning Anonymity, Action, Results, and Protection. When they come to us, we can help them file an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint. We can help file an Inspector General complaint. Those are useless because you have to use your own name. And if you do that, it is like having a tarantula on a wedding cake. In the military, they can do revenge and retaliation like nobody else can. We can file a legal case in the courts, but the other thing we do is media. The military hates to be embarrassed in the media, and we are real fucking good at it.”
He pointed out that he had done interviews with news agencies from Tokyo to London, Paris, Bulgaria, and Australia. In an aside he said, “As we speak, they are sending a crew out from Paris from the Télévision Française 1, the largest network in France, to do an interview.”
Then, Mikey told us about one interview that stood out to him. “In 2007 I got a call from Tokyo that stunned me. It was from the Kyoto News Service, one of the largest in the Far East. The guy said they wanted to send a reporter to interview me from Japan. We sat in this very room. The Japanese reporter started by saying, ‘You probably wonder why I am here,’ and I answered, ‘I do.’ He said, ‘We are here for one reason. In 1936 the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria, and then five years later, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, we bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. We did those things because extremist Shintoism became inextricably intertwined with our Imperial Japanese Army, Air Force, and Navy, which ultimately led to our defeat and nuclear weapons being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two times they have been used in war. We are looking at your fight. You are not fighting crazed Shintoism, but you are fighting crazy Christianity in your military.’”
Mikey then said, “Our military is the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind with all the nukes and conventional weapons, but fundamentalist Christianity joined at the hip with that power is dangerous. It is against the American Constitution. The founders cleaved a grand canyon like the one in Arizona between church and state, and they put in clause 6, article 3 in the Constitution, which says that we will never have a religious test for any position in the Federal government, which includes the military.” He expressed concern that the current administration promotes a template in which military participation appears limited to those who are white, straight, Christian nationalists, and male.
“I know we are in 2026, but it feels like 1933 in Nazi Germany. I lost many members of my family at Dachau, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen, and I could never understand why an advanced and scientific culture like Germany would allow National Socialism to occur. But now I get it. At some point your grandkids are going to ask what you did to fight against this. If you don’t resist, you are collaborating – even if you do nothing.
“My wife’s great aunt survived the Holocaust. She would never talk about it. Finally, she was on her deathbed, and I went to see her. She was very intellectual, a Berliner with piercing blue eyes. She got up on her elbows, and she said to me, ‘Don’t you ever stop your fight. Mikey, I remember being in Berlin when Jews could no longer congregate in groups larger that 100 and nobody did anything; then they knocked it down to 70, then 30 and no one did anything. Eventually, Jews could not congregate in groups larger than three, still people did nothing. So, make sure you do not stop this fight.’”
He stopped a second, choked up, and he quoted her, “When you are a Jew, you always have to be ready to get away.”
“I am Jewish.” Mikey said, “I know what real antisemitism is. I do not consider it to be antisemitic to be against Likud or Netanyahu or Israel’s policies against the Palestinians. Antisemitism is the old school hatred of Jews being complicit in the execution of Jesus Christ. I am a public figure, but I did not ask to be one. If you do what I do, it is not cool. It is lonely, dangerous, brutal, and expensive. We are in the media somewhere every day. Since the unprovoked attack on Iran, it has gone viral. It just won’t stop.”
Mikey told us that he receives hate mail and threatening phone calls every day, and he answers every call personally because some come from military service men and women seeking help, and he does not want to force them to leave a voicemail.
"We got a call one day to help a Navajo sailor on a huge aircraft carrier. They are like cities. They can hold 4500 or 5500 sailors." Weinstein noted that the sailor's Navajo spirituality is a tradition going back thousands of years. "He was being mercilessly proselytized by a Chief Petty Officer, and we were able to get that officer moved to the far side of the ship, and about a week later the parents of the sailor from Window Rock, Arizona got in touch saying we have a message from our son saying, 'Would you please tell Mr. Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, thank you for being the voices we are not allowed to speak with.'"
Since 2005 Mikey and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have been actively challenging religious freedom issues in the U.S. military with letters to commanders, personal meetings, lawsuits, and public outreach through the media. That has gained international recognition for the Foundation, which is backed up by a board of directors that includes retired generals, a Nobel Prize winner, and prominent figures in business and the arts. With pride in his voice, Mikey pointed out the distinction of the Foundation, noting that “We are the only New Mexico organization that I know that has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and we have been nominated eight different times.” This year this New Mexico Foundation under the leadership of Mikey Weinstein, the lawyer and combative former U.S. Air Force officer, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize once again.[2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/us/politics/hegseth-christianity-military.html?searchResultPosition=2
[2] https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/2025/09/mrff-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize-by-one-of-the-founding-members-of-nobel-peace-prize-winning-humanitarian-organization/
Ron Duncan Hart, Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies in Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Distinguished Lecture Series. He is a cultural anthropologist and former Dean of Academic Affairs. He has awards from the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Fulbright among others. He is an award-winning author and his most recent book is Evangelicals and MAGA: The Politics of Grievance a Half Century in the Making, which received an American Jewish Press Association Rockower Award ("the Jewish Pulitzers") for Excellence in Writing about Antisemitism.
Read Hart's multi-award-winning series on Jews and Christian Nationalism in the NM Jewish Journal. “Prophetically terrifying and a great history of the Evangelical takeover of the government leading us to a U.S. theocracy,” commented one judge.
Community Supporters of the NM Jewish Journal include:
Jewish Community Foundation of New Mexico
Congregation Albert
Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque
The Institute for Tolerance Studies
Jewish Federation of El Paso and Las Cruces
Temple Beth Shalom
Congregation B'nai Israel
Shabbat with Friends: Recapturing Together the Joy of Shabbat
New Mexico Jewish Historical Society
Policy Statement Acceptance of advertisements does not constitute an endorsement of the advertisers’ products, services or opinions. Likewise, while an advertiser or community supporter's ad may indicate their support for the publication's mission, that does not constitute their endorsement of the publication's content.
Copyright © 2026-27 New Mexico Jewish Journal LLC. All rights reserved.
