The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received a litany of complaints about religious ideology seeping into military orders since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, independent journalist Jon Larsen first reported.
Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, a nonprofit group established 21 years ago that focuses on ensuring constitutional protections for service members, spoke with HuffPost by phone Tuesday morning and illuminated some details of the complaints, which have come from more than three dozen military units situated in at least 30 different military installations.
“We started getting calls in the wee hours of Saturday morning from people saying their commanders were just jubilant about this and trying to tell people, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all part of God’s plan,’” Weinstein said. […]
Part of what makes the accounts so disturbing, Weinstein said, is that service members aren’t able to push back when they’re given orders that blur the line regarding the separation of church and state.
“This is all about time, place and manner,” he said. “If you’re being proselytized to by your superior, you can’t say, ‘Get out of my face.’ Under the military’s criminal code of justice, insubordination is considered a felony.”
One of the complaints MRFF received over the weekend came from a non-commissioned officer currently stationed outside of Iran but awaiting deployment at a moment’s notice. That officer filed the complaint on behalf of himself and 15 other troops, all of whom are of different religious backgrounds. (For their protection, MRFF is keeping the identity of these service members anonymous.)
The non-commissioned officer, who is Christian, reported to MRFF that a commander told them to tell fellow troops that the war in Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan.” The commander allegedly cited the Book of Revelation and the section specifically referring to Armageddon and the “imminent” return of Jesus Christ.
The non-commissioned officer said the messaging from higher-ups is not only “destroy[ing] morale and unit cohesion” among troops, but they also believe the commanders are flagrantly violating their oaths to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of religion.
According to the complaint first reported by Larsen, the commander said President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
The commander “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazy,” the complaint said.
“I and my fellow troops know that it is completely wrong to have to suffer through what our commander said today. It’s not just the separation of church and state … It’s the fact that our commander feels as though he is fully supported and justified by the entire (combat unit’s name withheld) chain of command to inflict his Armageddon views of our attack on Iran on those of us beneath him in the chain of command,” the officer wrote in his complaint to MRFF.
Weinstein said some service members called him on Sunday to report that they were being invited to Bible studies at their commanders’ personal homes to “discuss how this was all part of the plan and it’s all being lived out in the Book of Revelation and Christian eschatology.”
Commanders were “in a hurry” to get subordinates on board, according to the complaints received by MRFF.
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