Rev. Danny Fisher

The Christian Science Monitor is currently running an interesting series on military chaplaincy at their website. There is the addition this week of an interview with Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto professor and author of the new book The Sword Of The Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century. It’s an informative, intriguing read–well worth a look. Below is a snippet I was struck by.

[Doris L. Begen:] Chaplains were particularly important in combat because the idea of the chaplain is both to bring the blessing of the God or the gods to the cause of the army, but also to strengthen the fighting power, the morale, of individual soldiers [and] of providing the sacrament to soldiers who are prepared to kill other people… And also soldiers who are risking being killed themselves–the idea that they go in a blessed state to their death.

It’s only really in the 20th century that you get the idea that a chaplain also has a kind of a counseling role.

[The Christian Science Monitor:] Do you include in that moral counseling to commanders?

[Doris L. Begen:] That is the most interesting question, particularly in the context of the war you’re looking at right now [Iraq]. That role has never been the official job of a chaplain. Even in cases where the discussion has been, for example, [that] a chaplain has a duty to be the conscience of the military, that has been a very contested role for chaplains. Chaplains who have taken that upon themselves have frequently found that it’s not a role that their military superiors welcome from them.

[For example] Kermit Johnson, who opposed the Reagan administration’s policies regarding nuclear weapons and El Salvador placed himself in an untenable position. He was basically pushed out of his position as chief of chaplains.

[The Christian Science Monitor:] Was there a moment in time when chaplains began to do this?

[Doris L. Begen:] The Vietnam War was a big turning point in many ways for the American chaplaincy. One of the things I’ve been so struck by–if you talk to Vietnam vets–[is] that military chaplains tended to be viewed by soldiers as very much hand in glove with the military establishment. They, like military psychiatrists, were often viewed by regular soldiers as people whose job it was to prop you up and send you back out, no matter what you thought about what you were doing. The questioning, in many ways, came after the fact, by chaplains and other church people [who thought] the credibility of the [chaplain] institution had been undermined.

So you got a lot of soul-searching afterward.

[The role of the chaplain] remained contested. [In our book Sword of the Lord, the historian, Anne Loveland] talks about the notion–the question of what is the chaplain’s role? Is the chaplain the moral counselor, the conscience? If it isn’t simply to be blessing the weapons and giving people the comfort of religious tradition under the terrible pressures of war, what is it? And I think that question really has been contested both inside and outside the chaplaincy.

The importance of the chaplaincy from very early on was not only about boosting morale, but also lending legitimacy to a particular war effort. And generally chaplains [were] selected on the basis of whether they were willing to play that role. But you don’t run into conflict so much until you have large numbers of chaplains who are trained and supported from outside the military, so they have a position of some independency vis-à-vis the military and then you do begin to get those kinds of dilemmas.