Carolinas Health presentation

Presentation given at Carolinas Health (now Atrium) in Raleigh, NC, on March 2, 2017.

Introduction

Hi everybody, I'm Logan Isaac from Centurion's Guild. In this video I want to talk about why Centurion's Guild exists, why what we do is important, and basically our rationale for existing.

In a moment we're going to do a word-association exercise. When you see the next slide, I want you to write down the first three things that come to your mind — or just think of them. If you do write them down, I'd love for you to share them with us at info@centurionsguild.org, in the comments below on YouTube, or on our blog. Don't overthink what you're going to write; there's no right or wrong answer, just write down your gut reaction.

I'm not going to hit pause or anything, but in just a moment you're going to see what I'm hoping you'll share your word associations with. All right, are you ready? Here we go. Remember to write down just the first three things that come to mind with this phrase — I'm not going to say it, because I don't want to shape anybody's responses. And remember, nothing is right or wrong; this exercise is just meant to draw out our thoughts and feelings.

Once you've written down three things, if you want to share them with us on social media, we're @CenturionsGuild on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where you can share them in the comments. We generally like to hear what people think when they see this phrase, and we'll talk about it later.

What "Christian Soldier" Evokes

For some, the term "Christian Soldier" has positive moral connotations — there's a certain pride or excitement evoked, and it may even feel redundant, as though saying "Christian" also implies "Soldier," or vice versa. For others, the term draws up profoundly negative moral connotations, and just seeing it may conjure feelings of indignation or even revulsion; the two words may seem mutually exclusive, as though saying "Soldier" undermines any association with the word "Christian." To a select few, however, the term is inescapably personal. Christian Soldiers, past and present, know that who and what they are is complicated — that armed service and Christian faith run deeper than [unclear — possibly "gnostic"] ideologies and political divisiveness.

The phenomenon of moral injury, which is becoming popular, is relatively new and particularly clinical in nature — but Christian soldiers have been around for a few millennia. There's a lot of good material on moral injury and post-traumatic stress which I won't repeat here, but this video is about gaining greater insight and appreciation for the complex reality of armed service and Christian faith.

This is important because clinical, pharmacological, therapeutic, and other interventions we know of are valuable and necessary, but they need to be accompanied by rigorous engagement with a person's faith. Too often, though, care for soldiers is religion-averse, and few veteran service organizations or government agencies are willing to get theological with soldiers and veterans — whether from anxiety over the Constitution's Establishment Clause, concerns over tax-exempt status, or a well-intentioned desire for the breadth that interfaith dialogue affords.

At Centurion's Guild, we really want to mine the depths of the Christian tradition. That isn't to say we shouldn't be doing interfaith dialogue — but each partner in that dialogue should know their own tradition as well as possible, and that's what we try to do for Christianity. Moral injuries, however, cannot be treated the same way bodily injuries are. Unlike pharmacology, generic solutions don't ultimately work, because they don't go deeply enough — and avoiding religion and theology is a dangerous oversight when we consider the epidemic rate of suicide within military communities.

The Numbers

Let me explain why this matters. Every few years the Pew Research Center conducts a survey of thousands of Americans from all 50 states about their religious affiliations — they call this the Religious Landscape Survey. Despite widely reported data about the decline of formal church membership and dwindling numbers of Christians attending weekly worship, over 70% of Americans still identify as Christian. That means a solid majority of Americans still identify with a specific faith, with particular resources, practices, and beliefs.

Applying that 70% figure from the Religious Landscape Survey to the military community helps us understand the concentration of Christians who are also veterans. Assuming most active-duty soldiers receive care directly from the military, let's just look at veterans to save time. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the total population of veterans in the United States is 21.6 million, which would mean nearly 15.2 million are Christian veterans.

Trying to determine the number of veterans who identify as Christian and who also suffer from some form of combat stress required incorporating conflict-specific trauma rates. Last year I set out to do just that, calculating the stress rates before applying the Pew data — it can get confusing, but you can find it on my website, iamlmi.org; the blog entry is called "How Many Christian Soldiers Live with PTSD," I believe, with screenshots that give some idea of how complicated it can be.

There are no living World War I veterans anymore. World War II has 1.7 million living veterans at a 27% trauma rate, so about 459,000 World War II veterans live with combat stress. [I said "World War I" here in the recording, but that's clearly a slip — the figures and the 27% rate match World War II, which I'd just introduced. Corrected here; see the notes at the end.] The Korean War has 2.3 million living veterans at a 27% PTSD rate — and you'll see where I'm sourcing these numbers linked on my blog — so something like 621,000 Korean War veterans live with combat stress of some kind. The Vietnam War has 7.4 million living veterans at a 30% trauma rate, so there's probably 2.2 million Vietnam vets living with combat stress. The Gulf War in the early '90s has 2.3 million living veterans at a 12% rate, so there's likely 276,000 Gulf War veterans living with PTSD or combat stress. And my generation of OIF/OEF veterans has 1.95 million living veterans at a 15.5% trauma rate, so about 302,000 of my peers live with combat stress.

Before we move forward, it's important to note that all these numbers are very conservative estimates — they only count formal diagnoses, often through the VA. Private medical insurance and private medical care do offer PTSD diagnoses, but 60% of veterans do not receive care through the VA and therefore wouldn't be captured in VA numbers, and diagnoses through private practice are less common. So that number is a very conservative, no-less-than estimate.

If all that is true, we can total the raw numbers for an educated guess as to how many veterans of any conflict are currently living with some form of combat stress. If my math is right, we can reliably guess that almost 3.9 million veterans are currently living with combat stress. Let that sink in for a moment: if there are 322 million Americans, that's almost 10% of the population who are veterans and who live with combat stress.

Moral Injury Needs a Constructive Account, Not Just a Diagnosis

Moral injury is an important concept, but it's an incomplete model for care. Injuries are somatic — they require a body. Treating injuries assumes a number of skills that take years to master; paramedics have to be experts in anatomy, physiology, and all kinds of other bodily sciences. But with moral injury, we don't often hear talk about the moral person, or the moral body, upon which a moral injury is inflicted.

If you're into antiquarian words like I am, you'll find that "psychological" is just the latest way to say "psychical," from psyche — which is why we call moral injuries "soul wounds," and why mental-health experts are consulted. However, an overemphasis on the DSM can have the unintended effect of mistaking people for their diagnosis. I have a diagnosis, but it's not what I am. When people make the subtle mistake of assuming that PTSD is my primary feature, I become a walking privation — I am what I lack. For example, if you want to lead a small group or offer spiritual direction for vets, and you cite a learning objective like, say, "resiliency," then you're reinforcing the dangerous stereotype that veterans aren't already resilient. Maybe it's my ego, but I suspect boot camp, Airborne training, Air Assault School, and 14 months in combat have pretty well established that I can take a beating and a half. In the ten years since I've been a vet myself, I don't think I've met another vet deficient in resilience, self-esteem, or the myriad other qualities we're often implicitly told we lack.

This is the danger of focusing too much on diagnosis, and it's why the church needs a constructive account of what it means to be a Christian Soldier — not based on caricatures or stereotypes, but on the witness of our diverse history and traditions. The church cannot safely speak of injuries until we can accurately identify the features of the moral body upon which the infliction of moral injury is possible in the first place.

Centurion's Guild provides a constructive way of thinking about Christian soldiers that situates them within the story of salvation history to which the church bears witness. We help veteran caregivers, ministers, and lay people of faith share in the living story of Christian Soldiers through thoughtful conversations and meaningful community. Doing so exposes non-veterans to the complicated moral identity and architecture that is damaged when one engages in acts that violate their religious training and beliefs. We train clergy and lay people to think more deeply about moral injury and combat stress by thinking about the moral formation we all undergo in the church, as well as the cultural conditioning that affects our self-understanding as Christians. The moral people formed by churches should be shaped by scripture, reason, tradition, experience, and worship — but too often, deeply formative Christian practices are lacking. I don't mean this as an insult but as a lament; I'm familiar with the matrix of tensions inherent in church life and ministry in the world. In fact, my wife is a deacon and youth director at a United Methodist church.

Two Points: "Share In" and "Story"

Our ecumenical model is reflected in our mission: we help people share in the living story of Christian Soldiers through thoughtful conversations and meaningful community. For the sake of brevity, let's just talk about two points that help illuminate how our model complements and enriches other interventions.

The first is share in. Nobody exists in a vacuum, and that complicated phrase we've been talking about is unintelligible apart from the tradition and community which birthed it. Christian soldiers are Christians first, and as members of the body of Christ, they are not alone — the church shares in their story, and it is incomplete without them and the glory they give to God in their own particular ways. By "sharing in," we also want to remember that for the church there is neither soldier nor civilian, neither enlisted nor officer, nor is there grunt and pogue, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. Soldiers should not exclude civilians — neither by the impulse to protect them by keeping their stories inside, nor by wielding social prestige as a weapon, lording it over their civilian counterparts. On the other hand, non-veterans have a responsibility to own their part in the evils of war. As the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel has said, in a representative democracy, some are guilty, but all are responsible. Wars belong to all of us — the culpability as well as the pain. We are our brothers' and sisters' keepers, and it's up to us not only to multiply the joy of our members, but to divide their grief.

Secondly, the story of Christian Soldiers is alive. Our history is ours to interpret and assign meaning to. It's a story that belongs to the whole body of Christ, and soldiers should invite civilians in rather than push them away. Individual soldier stories are all subplots in the story of salvation history, and the whole church inherits the stories of soldiers past by merit of our one baptism. Therefore, we must take care not to assign positive or negative moral significance without care, because to do so injures the whole church, not just those who bear the greatest moral weight for the conduct of violence.

Christian soldiers are not all cut from the same cloth. The canon of soldier-saints in the Bible and in church history is not morally monolithic — we cannot write out Cain, Samson, or Joan of Arc without also excising King David, Francis of Assisi, or Ignatius of Loyola, all of whom were soldiers who did violence.

Biblical Soldiers

For the rest of my time, I want to share a sample of Christian soldiers with you. I do so within the context of moral injury, because Christian soldiers represent the moral bodies upon which moral injuries may be inflicted. My purpose isn't ideological — to treat moral injuries most effectively, we need to figure out both its causes and its victims. There's a lot more I could say about why story and narrative matter, but that would take more time than we have. If you want to read more about the philosophy behind this, I'm currently teaching a class at Duke University that explains the significance of narrative, story, identity, and culture. The title of the course is "The Virtues of War," and it's deliberately provocative, just like the beginning of this presentation was. All my lectures and everything you need to know are on my website — bit.ly/virtuesofwar (case-sensitive).

So maybe I should finally introduce myself. I'm Logan Isaac, and I spent over six years on active duty as an Army artilleryman. After two years as a paratrooper at Fort Bragg, I transferred to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii to pursue my education and would live in Hawaii. After a year there, I deployed to OIF2 and spent 14 months in combat, including the transfer of authority in July 2004 and the nation's first free elections in January 2005.

Being on the battlefield stirred up my faith, so I started exploring theology, which got me reading my Bible a lot more closely than I ever had before. I quickly was confronted by the fact that soldiers don't appear to be the most scrupulous characters in Scripture. That time of searching led me to some very difficult conversations and decisions. One was that I felt being an artilleryman made it nearly impossible to love my enemies if I was busy blowing them up. I read a lot of [unclear in the recording — possibly a specific author, tradition, or movement name; I couldn't confidently make this out] literature that convinced me of that, but which failed to convince me of the often-repeated assumption that the military is inherently evil. My service put me in relationship with incredible people whose character was frankly far deeper than the folks I knew through church. As a Christian, though, I felt convicted that a gun or a howitzer didn't contribute to the Kingdom, but I didn't believe the military was monolithic.

In 2005 I applied to be a non-combatant conscientious objector, which meant I would deploy again, but without a weapon. An article written about my application at the time appeared in Geez Magazine's winter 2006 issue, with a headline along the lines of "Christian Soldier Returns to Front Lines Unarmed." (The actual published headline was "Soldier finds Jesus, goes back to the front lines, unarmed" — worth checking which title you want to use if this transcript goes anywhere public.) The rest of the story gets fairly complicated, but I wrote a book about it with InterVarsity Press in 2012, called Reborn on the Fourth of July, because I was baptized in a condominium swimming pool in Waikiki on Independence Day in 2006.

I'll share more about other Christian soldiers in a moment, but most of them appear in my second book, For God and Country (In That Order), which I wrote with Herald Press, the Mennonite publisher, in 2013. Both books are available for $10 each if you go to the Centurion's Guild Shopify store, or if you see me at an event somewhere.

Finally — and this is just a technicality — my birth name appears on the titles, because I used to be Logan Mehl-Laituri. I took the name Martin when I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in 2013, and then my partner and I both took the name Isaac when we got married in 2014. So now I'm Logan Martin Isaac. Maybe one day we'll go through and update the covers of the books — but maybe not.

The first Christian soldiers are biblical, and their story is as complicated and nuanced as the soldier stories that follow. You may already know the centurion of great faith from Matthew 8 and Luke 7. But did you know that in the Catholic Mass, the last thing the congregation says together before the priest consumes the Eucharist quotes him directly? Jesus is amazed at his humility, at his believing that Christ's authority overrides that of the government, saying, "I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed." [The liturgical wording in the Mass is usually "...only say the word and my soul shall be healed" — worth checking your source if precision matters here.]

Not all biblical soldiers are as good as this commander — some are meant to be cautionary tales, examples we're not supposed to follow, and yet God works through them anyway. That means we shouldn't see any of these characters in absolute terms. We should remember that Cain was marked by God not for shame at killing his younger brother, but for protection. According to Genesis 4:15, he was marked so that no one who came upon him would kill him — including, I imagine, Cain himself. His curse of being a fugitive and a wanderer, in fact, lasts all of two verses.

Furthermore, we must recall that in Exodus, there's a reason there are ten plagues instead of none — God was patient with Pharaoh, far more patient than mere mortals might be. There are as many times, if not slightly more depending on your translation, that the text says Pharaoh's heart was hardened on his own as there are that say God hardened Pharaoh's heart. So we should be slow to think of him in absolute terms, since it seems even Moses — and God — did not.

Finally, I remember hearing about mighty Samson as a child. Judges 16, however, is not a hero story but a warning cry. Samson is not a revered character within the context of Scripture. As a Nazirite, he's forbidden from touching dead bodies, supposed to refrain from alcohol, and never to cut the hair on his head. He breaks the first two requirements in short order, and his weakness for women eventually violates the third. His revenge is something like a murder-suicide — an act of terrorism that God paradoxically uses to his glory. But we are not called to be like Samson, or Pharaoh, or Cain, for that matter.

The amazing complexity of biblical soldiers is best summed up in a figure oral tradition has named Longinus — this is the earliest depiction of him, from a 3rd-century illustrated Bible. In the Gospels he's not given a name, and it's not clear whether more than one soldier is involved, though tradition likely merged two characters. He hints at the profound nuance of Christian soldiers.

In the scene where he first appears, he carries a long spear — from which he gets his name, from the Greek word for lance, an instrument used only in battle. At the foot of the cross, he's the soldier who pierces Jesus's side to make sure he's dead, which makes him the single person most directly responsible for killing Christ, the only Son of the Father. Let that sink in for a second. But the second time he appears, at that same place, at Jesus's feet, he looks up as the earth shakes and the sky darkens and proclaims, "Surely this man was a Son of God" — a claim that's noteworthy because it happens several verses, and in some cases chapters, before any of Jesus's own disciples say the same thing. These two vastly different moral acts, embodied in one biblical character, should inspire us to think far more deeply about Christian soldiers. St. Longinus holds a place of honor in the Vatican as one of four [I said "pillars in the Octagon of St. Peter's Basilica" — worth double-checking that description against your source] in St. Peter's Basilica.

I've spent some time on biblical soldiers because not all denominations share in the tradition of saints or hagiography. But in case you're wondering about Christian soldiers outside our textual canon, there's plenty more to go around.

Soldier-Saints Who Challenge Patriotic Assumptions

I often gravitate toward examples that challenge assumptions held by either patriots or pacifists, or that inspire other Christian soldiers to remember that many saints made enormous contributions to the church despite crippling combat stress.

There's no shortage of saints who challenge patriotic assumptions about loyalty to our nation. A large number of early soldiers became military martyrs in the first several centuries, after Emperor Diocletian tried to purge the military of Christians, who were accused of atheism because they refused to worship the Roman gods. Maximilian of Tebessa, for example, was a conscript from North Africa who refused to be measured for a uniform and wouldn't even allow the identification medallion — the ancient equivalent of dog tags — to be put around his neck. The magistrate tried to persuade him, reminding him that military life was one of travel and adventure, but Maximilian didn't care. Reminded that refusal was a capital crime, he gladly stretched out his neck before the sword and was killed, insisting that a soldier of Christ could not kill another.

A more recent example is Franz Jägerstätter — a farmer who also refused conscription. Rather than the Roman Empire, he faced down the Third Reich, defying even his own bishop, who encouraged the middle ground of passive resistance. But he insisted that survival is not a virtue, that he would not serve in the Nazi army. He was beheaded, and the Catholic Church declared him a saint in 2007. [Historically this was his beatification — the formal step of martyrdom recognition, and a stage on the path to sainthood — rather than canonization; flagging in case the distinction matters wherever this transcript is used.]

Soldier-Saints Who Challenge Pacifist Assumptions

Now that we've heard of some saints who push back against patriotic impulses, let's talk about some who challenge pacifist assumptions that often absolutize an ethic of non-cooperation.

Joan of Arc is one such saint — and a woman, at that. After hearing from the Archangel Michael and Saints Catherine and Margaret, telling her to restore her king to the French throne and overthrow English tyranny, she did just that. Military sexual assault was as real a danger then as it is today, and in order to avoid being raped, she had to wear a suit of armor. Later, when the English captured her and put her on trial, she claimed to have preferred carrying her flag over wielding a sword. She was killed for cross-dressing, but sainted posthumously, and the English clergy involved in her trial were [likely: "anathematized"] — condemned for using political power to advance evil. Here the martyrdom is of an illiterate woman who only ever referred to herself as "the Maid." By her own account, she was called by God and the angels to lead her nation in battle, and her victory suggests God's mysterious blessing.

Another Christian soldier who forces us to rethink anti-military bias in the church is Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish knight and author of the Spiritual Exercises that bear his name. After suffering a debilitating wound in battle, he began reading the Gospels and the lives of the saints. Upon his conversion, he took some time to abandon military life entirely, but he eventually left his sword and armor at the foot of a statue of the Virgin Mary at Montserrat in Spain, where [the site he left them] is still found. After that he went to seminary, became a priest, and founded the Jesuits not long after. His military training was put to good use — his order was the first to include a vow of obedience as a requirement for initiation, and to this day the Jesuits are known as "God's Marines." Like the military, they're also known for the things they haven't done so well, including being the vanguard of the Spanish Inquisition. But today, many Catholic educational institutions in the United States are Jesuit, and they have a wonderful mission overseas, particularly around education.

More Recent Examples

I'll assume there are fewer soldiers and veterans watching right now than civilians and caregivers, but there are a number of individuals well known for their evangelical work whose military service or combat experience we often overlook.

We all know about Francis of Assisi, for example, who preached to the animals — but none of that would have happened had it not been for his experience at the Battle of Perugia, in which he was one of only nine survivors. He spent a year as a prisoner of war, and when he was ransomed by his wealthy family, he wandered the streets at night and was known as something of a vigilante. He tried to return to battle but was stopped twice by dreams that convinced him to finally turn back and go home. He did eventually find God, who told him to repair the church. After trying to be martyred by preaching to a Muslim sultan, he founded an order — the Franciscans. Eight of his first ten followers were veterans of the same war in which he'd fought, most of them former enemies. As for the animals — we might ask, in light of the emotional-support animals the VA now provides, whether he was ministering to them, or they to him.

Finally, a few well-known modern Christian soldiers who help remind my peers that there is hope are worth covering. Maybe you've heard of Koinonia Farm in Georgia, started by Clarence Jordan, a former ROTC cadet who saw the racism of the South and decided the military wasn't for him. Or maybe you've heard of John M. Perkins, the civil rights champion and founder of the Christian Community Development Association, or CCDA, who spent three years in the Army in Okinawa during the height of the Korean War. He describes his military service — not in the dismissive tones common in the progressive circles he now runs in — but as the first place he had a trusting relationship with white men.

Closing

That's it for now — just a little bit about Christian soldiers past and present, and why they're significant in terms of moral injury and combat stress, or even just in terms of the raw numbers of American veterans and soldiers who identify as Christian, and why our mission matters right now, at a time when our conflicts are ongoing and veteran services rarely delve into theological issues. Centurion's Guild does just that — it's our bread and butter, and we look forward to hearing from you or your loved ones if there's anything we can do to help, by sharing in the living story of Christian Soldiers, either through meaningful community or thoughtful conversation. Leave your questions below or in the comments, or write us at info@centurionsguild.org. We look forward to hearing from you.