Date: March 17, 2018
From: 11 Active Duty U.S. (Service Branch Name Withheld) MRFF Clients

The undersigned eleven U.S. (Service Branch Name Withheld) active duty personnel wish to thank Mr. M. Weinstein and the support of the MRFF in aiding us in stopping our (unit name withheld) Commander from presenting "Leadership Principles of Kevin Sorbo" at Commanders Call with particular emphasis on Sorbo's role as an "anti-Christian" college professor in the 2014 Christian-themed movie "God's Not Dead."

We requested the MRFF's help through our installation MRFF coordinator. We were advised of certain court cases and regulations. We met with our Commander and asked (him/her) to not proceed with the "instruction" as it would be a violation of our constitutional oaths and regs.

Our Commander at first was angry. (He/She) stated that (he/she) "only wanted to let people in my command know that the leadership of Christ is a great example to follow." After a 45 minute discussion we were able to convince our Commander to refrain from proceeding with the proselytizing lessons. We explained to our Commander that there were far better ways to accomplish this leadership instruction using other examples like JFK, Batman or even Breaking Bad's Walter White. Our Commander is heavily involved in both the Officers Christian Fellowship and the Navigators here at (military installation name withheld). There have been other instances of proselytizing by (him/her).

Big thanks go to the MRFF and Mr. Weinstein for taking our calls even in the middle of the night. And guiding us as to what to do and giving us the information we needed to succeed. The MRFF helped us to stay confident and informed so that we could do this thing in confronting our Commander. If our Commander ever tries this again or tries for revenge we will call the MRFF immediately.

Also one of us had our mom and dad ask for help from the MRFF about 10 years ago and they both were greatly helped back then in 2007 as well.

(all names, ranks, unit position titles withheld)

By: Mikey Weinstein, MRFF President & Founder
Date: March 19, 2018

As Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), I am disgusted, yet again, by our grossly negligent and disgraceful "Caligula in Chief," this time for picking Mike Pompeo, an unabashedly fundamentalist evangelical to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

Due to his own actions, Trump has already seriously degraded popular adherence to and respect for the First Amendment. But while his backlog of bigoted, sexist, unpresidential and unconstitutional decisions is bad enough, MRFF and I are far more concerned with Trump's ravenous, manipulative, and increasingly dominionist, fundamentalist evangelical "pack."

Trump's "cabinet" is already a dangerous Pandora's box waiting to explode and unleash a disastrous, dominionist regime. Should Trump pass on, we face a Pencetacostal presidency.

Mike Pompeo will join the ranks of other hard-core fundamentalist evangelicals like Sessions, Devos and Perry… the list goes on. We are dealing with a governmental conflict of interest of Jehovian magnitude. Trump is simply surrounded by a tumultuous sea of faith-based advisors while he blindly barks out orders on his own island of blissful and willful ignorance. Who in Trump's camp is protecting the First Amendment?

Pompeo is explicitly Islamophobic. He sees the war on terrorism as akin to a holy war and remarked that terrorists will "continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [sic] is truly the only solution for our world." Pompeo appears a proponent of the biblical apocalyptic "rapture," and MRFF's fear is that his appointment is yet a closer step towards allowing dominionist fundamentalist elements the opportunity to invoke biblical ideology as a means to initiate a "holy war" with the middle east.

The fundamentalist evangelical influence in our U.S military, as exposed by MRFF, is perilous. And, the public is catching on. Just last week (3/15/18), MRFF was cited in the VOX news article - "Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, talks about politics as a battle of good and evil."

Excerpt from VOX article:

Since Trump's election, the evangelical wing of the military seems to be getting stronger. Complaints to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group preserving religious liberty in the military, have doubled since November 2016, with members of non-evangelical faiths protesting the increasingly central role of evangelicalism in the military...[read more]

MRFF currently has just under 55,000 active duty U.S. marines, sailors, soldiers, airmen, cadets, midshipmen, national guard, reservists, and veterans, about 96% of whom self identify as practicing Christians.

MRFF's fight for the Separation of Church and State in our U.S. Military is more important now than ever, and we are buckled in ready to fight even harder for the American Constitution. This is 2018. There is no place in our government for evangelical crusaders the likes of Mike Pompeo.

By: Tara Isabella Burton, Vox
Date: March 15, 2018

[...]

That Pompeo is an evangelical Christian is, on its face, not particularly notable; 25 percent of Americans are. But Pompeo's specific brand of evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on seeing Muslim-Christian relations as an apocalyptic holy war, makes him an unnerving choice for such a senior foreign policy position.

[...]

Since Trump's election, the evangelical wing of the military seems to be getting stronger. Complaints to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group preserving religious liberty in the military, have doubled since November 2016, with members of non-evangelical faiths protesting the increasingly central role of evangelicalism in the military.

Pompeo's defenders rightly point out that Pompeo, like any person of faith, is entitled to practice his faith while in office. But a vision of the relationship between America and the Islamic world as, fundamentally, a relationship between good and evil is at odds with the very nature of the secretary of state's office.

[...]

The fundamental problem I have with presenting any particular religious tenets as a good management practice in a US military training class (other than the fact that it clearly violates our Constitution) is that it dismisses the number one teaching of that religion. For Christianity that #1 tenet is that He is God, your creator and you should obey His word because as the creator He is entitled to make the rules.

[...]

I would like all those zealots who are quick to violate Constitutional law and their own oath to support, protect and defend that Constitution by requiring subordinates to learn and even follow their personal choice of religious faith to consider their own beliefs. If the being whom one worships and acknowledges as supreme really is supreme, he doesn't need a mere mortal to accomplish his goal. Does God really need any army? Man gives himself way too much credit!

[...]

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