"We estimate that between 28% and 34% of officers and NCOs (non-commissioned officers) in the U.S. military would either back or be extremely sympathetic to Joyner" - Mikey Weinstein, founder and head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation
Amidst chaos in Washington, while Republicans in Congress are accused of holding the "full faith and credit" of the United States hostage through the current government shutdown, a leader of the newly emerging, reorganized religious right who has ties to prominent Tea Party Republicans has just called for a "military takeover".
In a September 30, 2013 broadcast, as reported by Raw Story and Religious Right Watch, Morningstar Ministries head Rick Joyner -- a leading prophet and apostle in the theocratic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation who has ties to former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin [see: 1, 2] and other leading Tea Party-aligned Republicans -- publicly issued a call for a coup - a "military takeover" of the United States government and the imposition of martial law.
In an interview with former Reagan Administration lawyer Michael "Mikey" Weinstein -- who formed the civil rights watchdog organization the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) after discovering a pattern of coercive evangelizing at his former alma mater, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs -- Weinstein told me his organization estimated that between 28% and 34% of officers and NCOs in the United States military were adherents to a supremacist form, of Christianity known as dominionism who might back or at least be sympathetic to evangelist Joyner's call for a coup.
"It is a terrible mistake to dismiss Joyner as merely fringe. The opposite is true", explained Weinstein, who emphasized that there are dozens of dominionist evangelical para-church organizations engaging in what MRFF views as predatory evangelizing in the military. "Complacency is complicity," warned Weinstein, who called Rick Joyner's call for a military takeover a "red line" and also a "wretched" form of "sedition".
"We are most concerned about a fusion between dominionist Christianity and the military's weapons of mass destruction", warned Weinstein, who says his client base, members of the military who turn to MRFF for protection against coercive evangelizing, is approaching 35,000. Most of those MRFF clients, according to Weinstein, are Christians who are targeted for holding the wrong doctrine and theology.
Morningstar Ministries founder Joyner, who over the last decade has partially rebuilt the crashed real estate and media empire of disgraced TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who were caught up in a 1980s scandal which led to a flurry of media claims that the religious right was spent as a political force, has promoted the claim that President Obama's health care reform legislation includes a provision to create a left-wing paramilitary force akin to Hitler's Nazi "brownshirts".
Despite his promotion of fringe right-wing conspiracy theory, Joyner - accorded the status of "prophet" within his movement - boasts ties to Republicans such as former Senator Jim DeMint, now head of the mammoth Heritage Foundation and to evangelists in the upper echelon of Christianity Today such as the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, and some surprising international connections as well - Joyner has frequented an internationalist conference co-hosted by a close confident of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
[video, below: Morningstar Ministries head Rick Joyner calls for a "military takeover"]
read the rest of this story here, at Alternet