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Is There a Christian Nationalism Problem in the US Military?

Retired Air Force officer Mikey Weinstein says there is and is trying to separate church and state, but it might be too late

Mitchell Peterson
8 min readJan 21, 2022

A few days before January 6th, 2021, all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including the uber-evil Dick Cheney, wrote a letter that was published in the Washington Post. These ten DC insiders, with connections to every branch of the American armed forces and the military-industrial complex, wrote in their op-ed that the military must stay out of the election.

The same day, Admiral James Stavridis, Supreme Commander of NATO and managing director of private equity giant Carlyle Group, penned a column for Time magazine supporting the letter by the Defense Secretaries. Even further, the Financial Times had an article about that same letter and claimed there was a coup in place.

Why did they all feel the need to speak out? Why were they warning the United States military to stay out of politics a few short days before there was an insurrection that saw mobs of seething right-wingers — many of them veterans — break into the Capitol Building looking to hang lawmakers and overturn the election results?

What were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the boys worried about? Trump had, a few months prior, fired his Defense Secretary Mark Espers and put in as many loyalists as he could to the civilian positions in the Defense Department.

Was a coup really in the realm of possibility, and did these former Defense Secretaries feel they needed to reiterate to the military that stepping in would be unconstitutional?

Are there enough Christian right-wing sympathizing generals, admirals, colonels, and rank-and-file members of the armed forces that they’d pull an authoritarian move like that and overturn an election in the name of “saving the country on behalf of right-wing conservative Christianity?”

I don’t know, but I hope not. What I do know is that retired Air Force officer Mikey Weinstein says the US military has a major far-right militant radical evangelical fundamentalist problem.

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Mitchell Peterson
Mitchell Peterson

Written by Mitchell Peterson

Freelance writer in his tenth year outside the US. Currently in rural Spain writing the Substack bestseller and soon-to-be book, 18 Uncles.

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