WASHINGTON — Porcelain figurines are perched on the mantelpiece behind Mikey Weinstein. Guests are seated on chintz couches in front of him. It's a nice crowd at a polite suburban fundraiser.

But Weinstein has had it with nice. He's done with polite.

"We've created this foundation to be a weapon. We're going to lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds," he says.

Weinstein, 51, was once a White House lawyer who defended the Reagan administration during the Iran-contra investigation. Three generations of his family — he, his father, both his sons and a daughter-in-law — have gone to U.S. military academies.

Now he's declaring war against what, for him, is an improbable enemy: the defense establishment. He is suing the Air Force in federal court, demanding a permanent injunction against alleged religious favoritism and proselytizing in the service. He has also formed the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation to combat what he sees as a concerted effort by evangelical Christian organizations to treat the armed forces as a mission field, ripe for conversions.

Weinstein's head is big and bald, like a cannonball mounted on his short, powerful frame. At home in Albuquerque, N.M., he listens to heavy metal; he's a middle-aged corporate lawyer who quotes Meat Loaf and Marilyn Manson.

Yet one of his favorite lines these days comes from the Officers' Christian Fellowship, a private organization with 14,000 active-duty members on more than 200 U.S. military bases worldwide. Its mission statement says its goal is "a spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit."

According to OCF's executive director, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Bruce Fister, it means that "the people around a military leader ought to see the characteristics of Christ in that leader." It is a national tradition reflected in "hundreds of writings and proclamations issued down through the ages by American leaders who claim divine protection for our nation, place our nation's trust in God and claim God as our source of strength."

To Weinstein, a Jew and a member of a military family, it is an abomination. It "evokes the Crusades." He says he can't believe that generals talk like this when the United States is fighting a global war on terror and trying to win hearts and minds in Muslim countries.

He gets riled up, saying that "the Christian right wants people to think that separation of church and state is a myth, like Bigfoot."

He pauses and adds: "Let me make it clear. I would shed my last drop of blood to defend their right to hold that biblical worldview. They are absolutely entitled to believe that Anne Frank is burning in hell along with Dr. Seuss, Gandhi and Einstein.

"But I will not accept my government telling me who are the children of the greater God and who are the children of the lesser God. That's the difference. I will not defend ... (them) if they engage the machinery of the state, which is what they're doing."

Two years ago, Weinstein visited the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs as the proud parent of son Curtis, who had just finished three weeks of combat survival training. Weinstein spotted him across a room and knew instantly that something was wrong. They drove off campus, in stormy silence.

"All right, Curtis ... I can't take any more of this. What the hell have you done?" Weinstein remembers asking.

"It's not what I've done, Dad. It's what I'm going to do," Curtis answered, according to his father. "I'm going to beat the (...) out of the next person that calls me a (...) Jew or accuses me or our people of killing Jesus Christ."

At that moment, Weinstein says, "everything kind of telescoped. I could hear my heart in my ears. For a guy who talks a lot ... I was speechless."

Weinstein says Curtis recounted eight or nine separate incidents in which cadets and officers had made anti-Semitic remarks. One came in the heat of athletic competition, when an upperclassman taunted, "How does it make you feel to know that you killed Jesus Christ?"

"What hurt me the most was ... you know, he's a tough kid, he was the city wrestling champ of Albuquerque as a sophomore in high school ... (but) he said, 'Dad, I don't really know what to do when they say that,' " Weinstein recalls.

Weinstein has since talked with hundreds of cadets and staff at the academy, and has become convinced that the conflict is not between Christians and Jews, but between aggressively evangelical Christians and everybody else. Weinstein's passion already has shaken the Pentagon. His complaints about the Air Force Academy led last year to congressional hearings, an internal investigation and new Air Force guidelines on religious tolerance.

The internal inquiry substantiated virtually all of his specific allegations. It found, for example, that Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, the commandant of cadets, taught incoming cadets a "J for Jesus" hand signal; that football coach Fisher DeBerry hung a "Team Jesus" banner in the locker room; and that more than 250 faculty members and senior officers signed a campus newspaper advertisement saying, "We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world."

But the report concluded there was "no overt religious discrimination," merely a "lack of awareness over where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expression of beliefs." In its motion to dismiss Weinstein's lawsuit, the Air Force maintains that it has already remedied the academy's religious climate, and the complaint cites no specific incidents in the Air Force at large.

The pushback from evangelicals has been intense. Focus on the Family and groups, many headquartered near the academy, succeeded early this year in persuading the Air Force to soften its guidelines, so the latest rules explicitly allow commanders to share their faith with subordinates.

More than 70 members of Congress have urged President Bush to issue an executive order guaranteeing the right of military chaplains to pray "in the name of Jesus" at mandatory ceremonies attended by service members of all faiths.

The National Association of Evangelicals and the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal group, also have filed motions to intervene in the suit on behalf of Christian chaplains and service members, arguing the injunction infringes on their rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.

Judge James Parker, who is hearing the case, has not ruled on the preliminary motions, so the Air Force has not responded to the substance of Weinstein's allegation that it has a pervasive, unconstitutional bias for evangelical Christianity.