> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Homebrewed Christianity: Combat Theology - URL: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/homebrewed-christianity/ - Published: 2015-08-19T05:26:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-28T21:59:13.000Z - Author: Logan Martin Isaac - Tags: Public Speaking, press *Cleaned transcript — "Combat Theology w/ Logan Isaac and Matt Moorman," Homebrewed Christianity podcast, hosted by Tripp Fuller, published August 18, 2015* --- ## Cold Open / Show Promo *(Tripp Fuller, solo)* Today on the podcast, you hear from Logan and you hear from Matt from Centurion's Guild. These are veterans reflecting on war, peace, and its costs on human lives, theologically. So buckle your seatbelt. But first — this week's podcast is sponsored by Subverting the Norm, the conference happening November 4th–7th in Springfield, Missouri, at Drury University. This event, sponsored by Phillips Theological Seminary, friends of the podcast, is bringing together theologians, activists, and church practitioners for the third Subverting the Norm — reflecting on politics, postmodern theology, and church practice. If you're a church practitioner, a theologian, an activist — all of those people will be there, reflecting together on theory, practice, and postmodernity. I'd love for you to join us. Head over to subvertingthenorm.com, or come through the Homebrewed site and click through — you'll find it there. Use the code HBCSTN and you'll get the best discount possible, and I'll know you're coming. And if you use the code, I'll buy you a pint at Mother's Brewing Company with all the other deacons in the room — well, more than a pint, honestly. Jack \[unclear last name\] is going to be there. Catherine Keller is going to be there. Alton Pollard, who I haven't seen in a long time but who inspired me back in the day when he was at Wake Forest University, is going to be there. There's so much exciting stuff happening — Subverting the Norm would be ridiculous to miss. This is the event you want to go to. You're also going to get to hear about my brand-new book at that event — *The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Jesus: Liar, Lunatic, Lord* \[title as best I can reconstruct — freely, "or awesome"\] — and about Jack Caputo's brand-new book, *Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim*. We'll be talking about both on the podcast. Jack and I are also doing a pre-game event November 4th, a one-day session starting at noon — an extra six hours of philosophical reflection on when philosophers talk about God, followed by dinner and drinks with Jack Caputo. Sign up for the Theology Nerd Boot Camp if that's your thing. So, heading into the podcast — thank you to Matt \[Moorman\] and Logan Isaac from Centurion's Guild. It was an awesome conversation. Head over to the website, get some free content and downloads, and connect with them on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Matt, as you'll find out, is a high school friend of mine — you may or may not hear some sweet stories from back then, but we'll save those for another time. You'll hear some amazing stories, and be challenged to think about the real, lived cost of war and peace on the people who carry it. A few other things coming up soon: the Great God Debacle — Lauren \[unclear last name\] versus Philip Clayton on God and science — is happening in October, another live podcast. We've also got a live podcast out of Los Angeles around Peter Rollins' event, and a live podcast with Jürgen Moltmann in November at the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta. Starting in September, if you're part of the Homebrewed community, we're running a year-long class working through Moltmann's *The Crucified God*, plus sessions on \[reading list — several names came through garbled; I've left this unclear rather than guess\] Elizabeth Johnson, Whitehead, and others. There's also a new class coming on postmodern spirituality. Head to the website and sign up for the newsletter to keep up with all of it — use the code APB when you sign up. All right — buckle your theological seatbelts, friends. Logan Isaac and Matt Moorman, Centurion's Guild, right now. --- ## The Interview **Tripp:** Hello, Homebrewed Christianity listeners. Today you're going to get to meet two people — one of whom has known me for a long time, Matt Moorman, who can verify that I've always been exactly as awesome as you think I've been. And my friend Logan Isaac, who's here with us — they're part of Centurion's Guild, which we're going to hear a lot about. But before we jump in, I just want to say thanks, Matt — it's always cool to reconnect with friends, especially when there's a reason to have them on the podcast. So, how's North Carolina? **Matt:** North Carolina is — temperature-wise — actually quite nice right now. It's a bit overcast, so I'm enjoying that, as opposed to, you know, 130 degrees with 150% humidity. **Tripp:** That's nice. I feel like summers are just a way to work on contemplative prayer in North Carolina — they slowly let you purify yourself as you get closer to hell. Or at least Satan's armpit. Or you're already in hell, you just don't know it yet. Well, I'm not the one sitting near Duke University, but we don't need to discuss just how close you are to the Devils. So — let's jump in. I want to hear how you two met. \[To Logan\] Matt's talked to me about you before, and it's always good to hear the story of how someone blessed a friend. You two are working together with other vets and that kind of thing — so tell us how you ended up connecting. **Logan:** Sure. So, the Moral Monday protests — last year, I think they were still ongoing — we had one big march, and I'd committed to myself and a couple of friends that if I had a Monday open, I was going to go. I was working most Mondays, but there was one — I think it was February — where I coordinated with some vet friends of mine coming from out of town through an anti-war organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War. So I'm there with a couple of friends through IVAW, and Matt and a couple other guys just came up to the march and saw our big anti-war veteran signs, and joined us. That's the march where we got to know one another. We kept in touch over the next year and a half or so about how the church talks about war and Christianity, and what to do with the fact that we've both served, when military service so often gets reduced in public discourse to one of two claims — the pacifist claim that if you're a Christian you can't be in the military, or the patriot claim that all Christians are soldiers and all soldiers are Christians. We've both had experiences that complicate that formula, so it's been an exploration of the different ways we've each formed our faith. **Tripp:** Maybe it'd help for you both to say a bit about how you came to faith, or how your faith shaped your decision to enter the military or go to war — biographically. How do you each process your own faith journey and your time in the military, now that you've left and are advocating for things most vets probably aren't wonderfully comfortable with? How do you tell those two stories? **Matt:** Our stories are quite different, as everyone's are, really. I grew up in a fairly typical mainline-liberal tradition — my grandfather was a Navy chaplain, and that shaped me a lot. So I grew up pretty comfortable with being a Christian and even leaning toward the pacifist end of the spectrum, but also comfortable with military service. It's funny — in college, people used to call me "the pastor's kid with a gun," as a term of endearment. Looking back, coming from a mainline-liberal tradition, I never really had a moment of conversion — just moments where my faith was challenged as I grew. One of those was Bible study in high school. I always had that tension in me. I did Navy ROTC my freshman year at NC State — that was 2001, and September happened that year. So I was right in the middle of it: I had friends who knew nothing about the military and who were engaged in theology and church, and I was also part of an organization where I heard a lot of grieving, anger, and pain — a lot of what many of us had to sit with around that time. There was always a tension between those two worlds for me, and figuring out how they connected was a personal journey. I ended up quitting ROTC at the end of freshman year and enlisting in the Air Force Reserve instead — that's how I served. Around that time I was also reading about empire, trying to understand my own complicity in it and how I might subvert it from within — wondering if there was a way to be in the military and still do that. **Logan:** My story only differs fundamentally in that there wasn't a big tension growing up. My dad's agnostic, my mom's something close to it, though she goes to church when I'm home and always has. Youth group, for me, was mostly a social thing — I never felt particularly moved by it. I wanted more education, so in 2000 I enlisted for the GI Bill. I could've chosen almost anything, but I picked fire support specialist — mostly because it paid the most. People assume it means firefighter; it's actually artillery. I went through training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was there as a paratrooper when the towers fell. I think a lot of us fell into a kind of nationalist, vengeance-driven mindset around 9/11 rather than anything more measured. I didn't end up deploying out of Fort Bragg at my two-year mark — I re-enlisted to go to Hawaii instead, and deployed from Schofield Barracks. It wasn't until I was in Iraq, and shortly after coming home, that I started thinking about combat in terms of my faith. I'd grown up in Orange County, California, where faith is like everything else there — pretty superficial. I put it on when it was convenient. But in combat you learn that some things are real and important and some things are just phony. It's a bit like Holden Caulfield — J.D. Salinger, who wrote *Catcher in the Rye*, was himself producing that character while serving as a soldier in Europe during World War II. There are things that are real, and things that are phony and not worth your time, and my faith came under that same microscope. I didn't want to be a phony. I remember thinking, explicitly, as a forward observer for the artillery working with infantry units, that I couldn't call for indirect fire and also let Scripture genuinely shape my life — that would make me a hypocrite. So I knew I had a choice to make. I found very quickly that the call to love one's enemy was mutually exclusive with my professional responsibility of calling for indirect fire. The first theological book I read was John Howard Yoder's — he takes the argument Christian realists often make to pacifists, something like "what would you do if your wife or grandmother were in danger," and deconstructs it, shows how illogical it is. I read that in uniform, loading vehicles onto a boat headed back to Iraq. I also spent time in pacifist circles, where I was told that being a Christian in the military is inherently contradictory — that simply by being in uniform you're violating your convictions, that soldiers are more proximate to evil, if not its embodiment, and I just needed to recognize that. But on the other hand, I genuinely couldn't reconcile loving my enemies with calling in fire on them. So there had to be a middle ground — though it was hard to find people who could help me find it, the space between those two extremes. That's how I found myself where I did. **Matt:** \[Thinking about\] the age we all were when we experienced 9/11 — I was a sophomore, \[going to school\] not too far from you, Logan. I used to go back to Buies Creek on weekends to watch a wonderfully gifted pop-punk band play, and I'd end up in conversations with soldiers who were students at Campbell, and with leaders of the Christian campus groups there. I tried on a lot of different versions of "Jesus and my friends," and I always felt pigeonholed — like you had to take some kind of absolutist position. I wonder how much of that is just the fact that from 18 to 25 you're only really allowed to live in one universe, and your identity gets so attached to being in the "right" one — whether that's hardcore pacifist ("I'll destroy everything you love about yourself if you don't agree with me") or "I'm a United States citizen and I love Jesus, and if you don't love me back you must be a Nazi, or a Muslim, because we killed people, and you must hate Jesus if you don't agree." All the anxiety and energy of 9/11 hit, and everyone ran to a corner — and those of us of draftable age with some kind of conscience were left asking, "wait, what's actually real here? What actually matters?" I felt like we were constantly pushed into taking an absolutist position and then defending it. **Tripp:** What you're both describing, in different ways, is a desire to actually raise the question and engage across difference. Maybe the tension's died down enough now — or we've lived with it long enough — that we can ask questions we couldn't have asked back then, in the heat of it. **Logan:** Yeah, and it's tragic that this kind of reflection only happens once the dust has settled. But experience is so much more persuasive than logic, a lot of the time. As I was figuring out what I believed and what I should do, I connected with other Christian soldiers — some radically pacifist, on their way to becoming conscientious objectors, others who'd essentially, you know, put Jesus on the rifle scope and run off to war. Having the chance to sit with people like that long enough helped me understand who I was being called to be, and what it might mean to be a Christian soldier. Pretty quickly I came across other figures throughout history — I discovered the history of the saints, and hagiography. Not long after, I decided — long story short — that I couldn't be an artilleryman and stay faithful to my convictions as a Christian. But I didn't think the military itself was inherently anything; an institution is what you make of it. And honestly, I didn't want to walk away from the bond I'd built with the people I'd trained with — I have friends from high school I'm close to, but it's not the same connection I have with the guys I served with. So I started reading the regulations and found that, technically, as an enlisted man I could still apply to be a non-combatant — on paper, anyway; in practice it's another story. I applied around May or June of 2006 to become a non-combatant conscientious objector. We'd already gotten orders, which meant I was effectively asking to go back to war with my unit — I told them I couldn't carry a firearm as a Christian. Then the whole thing fell apart: I was forced out of my unit in violation of the regulations and made to watch them deploy without me in August 2006\. I was discharged honorably that November, during what would have been my second deployment. My CO application never actually went through — I was just discharged in the regular way. I found my own story mirrored in stories like Martin of Tours. Soldier-saints tend to tolerate empire and patriotism to a point — but there's often a threshold. Many of the earliest were military martyrs because they told Caesar, or the recruiter, or the equivalent — one of them, in North Africa, was told to be measured for the identification medallion, basically the ancient version of dog tags. Maximilian says no — "I'm a Christian, I can't fight." The proconsul says, "come on, it's an adventurous life, everyone else is doing it." He says, "I'm sorry, I'm a Christian, I'm not permitted to fight." And he's beheaded, in front of his own father. A few years later comes Martin — named, ironically, after the god of war. He wants to be a Christian, but neither of his parents are, so it's looked down on. He joins the military; he's strong and good-looking, so he's placed in something like the Praetorian Guard, close protection for Caesar. What's different about Martin is that he doesn't refuse to serve the way the earlier soldier-saints had — he has no problem protecting Caesar's life. It's later, up in northern Gaul in winter, that he finds a freezing beggar and cuts his officer's cloak in half to give the man the other half. That night he has a dream of Jesus before the heavenly host, saying, "Here is Martin — not even baptized yet, and he did this for me." He's baptized the next day. His biographer — a pacifist himself — frames what happens next as the real turning point: when Martin is brought before Caesar Julian ahead of the Battle of Worms, he tells him, just like Maximilian did, "I'm a soldier, I can't fight, I'm sorry." By all rights that should have gotten him killed, like everyone before him — but Caesar has him jailed instead. A peace treaty gets negotiated, and he's released. He becomes the first soldier-saint to confess his faith expecting martyrdom and not receive it. Eventually he becomes a bishop. All these stories helped me understand where my own story fit as a Christian soldier within the larger story of God — in a way that abstract propositions about just war versus pacifism never quite managed. Finding my story in relation to other Christian soldiers, and to the story of God revealed in Scripture and in a couple thousand years of church tradition, was so much more illustrative than the theory ever was. **Tripp:** So when you're approached by someone who's very much a soldier and very much a Christian, and they're ready to quote Bible verses at you all day — what's it like talking with someone whose conscience isn't pricked by any of this? I have friends and family who served who look at me like, "I don't get what your problem is — I was just following orders, that's what you do in the military. If you don't want to follow orders, or don't want the benefits of living in this country, don't enlist. But don't tell me I'm supposed to feel different about what I did." How do those conversations even start? **Logan:** I think so, because it disturbed me — and I've found there's always a way to be disturbed by this, especially in scriptural terms. I'd call myself a pacifist, but I have real hesitations about how pacifists often read Scripture — a lot of us bulldoze right through Acts 10\. Cornelius is a devout, God-fearing man who, as a Roman soldier, never leaves the military — and he's the first Gentile baptized into the church without having been circumcised (there's a unit of Ethiopian eunuchs that technically comes before him, but that's a different case — worth looking up if you're curious). So you get these contrasting images. On one hand, there's the centurion of great faith in Matthew 8 and Luke 7, praised by Jesus for having greater faith than anyone in Israel — and patriots often misread that as meaning his soldiering is his defining feature. But actually, as a soldier he holds absolute authority over the people he's occupying, and what's remarkable is that he gives that up; it's his humility before this itinerant miracle-worker that matters. I remember exactly how little authority I extended to Iraqis when I was there — those words, "Lord, I'm not worthy to have you under my roof, only say the word," would never have come out of my mouth back then. So this man shouldn't be judged by his military rank — it's his humility that's being commended, and it happens to be exercised by someone who would have looked, to his own community, like an outsider. On the other hand, you've got John's Passion narrative, which is deeply critical of soldiers — they're the ones who crucify Jesus, mock him, slap him, curse him. What do you do with a figure — Longinus — who embodies both roles? A soldier who pierces Jesus's side to confirm he's dead, and who, at that same spot, looking up as the sky darkens, proclaims, "surely this man was a Son of God," before any of the disciples say it. Catholic and Orthodox tradition names those two soldiers as one person and gives him a name — Longinus. He's depicted as one of the four great pillars around the altar at St. Peter's in Rome. To me, he represents just how complex the story of Christian soldiers really is — we can't flatten them into one thing or the other. There's always a way to unsettle people on both sides of the aisle. **Matt:** It's funny — being a long-time listener \[of the podcast\], I find myself pretty compelled by some of the criticisms coming out of radical theology. Take Bonhoeffer — here's someone questioning everything at once, and I think looking back, he's been claimed by so many different groups. We tend to hold him up as basically a modern-day saint for his actions and his writing, but he was also part of German military intelligence — complicit in, if not actively involved in, assassination attempts against Hitler. A lot of people point to that and say, "see, he was fine with violence." I don't think that's really fair to him — but whatever you want to say about Bonhoeffer, whether you cast him as a pacifist or as a patriot who was fine with weapons, it's more complicated than either label. That's part of what we're getting at — whatever side of the spectrum you fall on, it's more complex than the label allows. **Logan:** Yeah, I think you're right — there's something to be said for humility, and for letting that kind of criticism land on your own position. It goes back to what you said about wanting a flat moral universe at 18 to 25\. The problem is that's just not reality — and thankfully, it's not the reality Scripture gives us as Christians, either. **Tripp:** When you're starting something like Centurion's Guild and working with different veterans' groups — what does it look like, coming home, to be politically active and also to advocate for a more compassionate reception than vets got after Vietnam? My grandfather, Hiram Fuller, was a chief master sergeant in the Air Force, and he used to say he had a hard time understanding Christian pacifists, because they were often the harshest critics of soldiers who came home having simply had their number called. **Logan:** I think part of what we're dealing with today is that our generation watched what happened after Vietnam — people coming home and getting dumped on for things entirely outside their control. A soldier isn't responsible for how a war ends; especially when drafted, you're essentially a cog in the machine. And that actually was a brutal reality: you got drafted, trained alone, flew to Vietnam alone, spent twelve months with a unit you'd never met, came home alone, and came back to a society that projected all its feelings about the war onto you. I think we've swung the other way now, trying to make amends for that by nearly drowning returning soldiers in positive affirmation instead. When you say "thank you for your service," you're assigning positive moral value to someone's experience — which might be justified, but it can also bulldoze right over how genuinely traumatic that experience was. War leaves a moral mark on you; there's no getting around that. So what I try to do is caution pastors and other ministers against assigning moral value at all, positive or negative — just "thank you, welcome home, it's good to have you back." It really is good that we're not treating this generation the way we treated Vietnam vets; deploying whole brigades instead of scattering individual draftees is genuinely a step forward. But churches will still, say on Memorial Day or Veterans Day, ask veterans to stand — and sometimes that's asking someone to publicly own a service that, for them, was morally complicated in ways that might include involuntarily killing noncombatants. Here's an example that was told to me, not my own story: someone was a convoy driver, and convoys were drilled over and over — you do not stop, you do not drop food. So you'd see starving kids on the roadside and feel horrible for not feeding them, but stopping would just create false hope that someone would come back the next day. And if a kid ran in front of your vehicle, you still couldn't stop — it might be a diversion, a setup. Keep your speed, keep going. One young man had a child run in front of his Humvee and had a split second to decide between that child and the nine soldiers riding in the back of his truck. He made a choice he's had to live with ever since. Maybe he did the right thing by preserving those nine lives — or maybe there simply isn't a right answer in war. You have to be willing to sit with that ambiguity, and listen to veterans tell their own stories on their own terms, instead of projecting a narrative of "monster" or "hero" onto them. Typecasting them as either one keeps them from getting to define themselves — and honestly, for those of us who've been in combat, it's often easier to believe we're monsters than to believe we're heroes, given some of what we've done. That's another reason the middle ground matters so much to me. **Tripp:** How did you personally respond to something like *American Sniper*? I was struck by how differently people read that film — some saw it as a perfect vindication of what was going on, others as a sympathetic explanation of guilt and complexity, others as basically a nationalist tearjerker. How do you have a conversation about something like that, which clearly triggers a dozen different reactions and becomes a mirror for whatever people want to throw at it? **Logan:** I think the story around *American Sniper* — the movie, the book, and everything orbiting it — is as much about the man who killed Chris Kyle as it is about Kyle himself, who clearly struggled with psychological and combat trauma. As the church, we're supposed to bear with those who are suffering, and Kyle suffered — he had PTSD, and he was in the process of trying to recover. So what do we do, as Christians, with the fact that the person who ended his life was also someone the church's resources for thinking about that kind of complexity ought to reach? I think we want to make him one thing or the other, and that's the same flat-moral-universe problem again. PTSD isn't something you recover from as quickly as the film suggested — I haven't actually seen it yet, mostly because of the graphic combat scenes, though I do mean to. I want to know that story, and where — or whether, and how well — it fits into the larger story of salvation history. It might be a difficult fit. Joan of Arc is canonized; so is Maximilian of Tebessa. I think it matters that the church thinks carefully about how it goes about making saints — capital-S canonized saints, the people we hold up as examples for our own lives — and I don't think being a sniper is, in itself, exemplary within that story. But how we think about soldiers carrying trauma, and how we build theologies of war or peace around real experience rather than abstract propositions handed down from on high, should be what's determinative. The stories themselves are so much richer than the propositions we try to draw from them. **Matt:** One of the things we talked about at the last conference — something Logan and I have talked about a lot — is how the church talks about friend and enemy. The language we use matters. We talk about praying for our veterans and service members on Veterans Day — even fairly mainline-liberal churches do this, usually as a single line tucked into a corporate prayer. But what does it look like to also pray for Iraqi and Afghan civilians? **Tripp:** Or for the people we'd call terrorists? **Matt:** Right — or that. I think it's important to include all of those people without it turning into a kind of performative gesture — the "look how enlightened we are, we're praying for Osama bin Laden" version, which can end up feeling like a slap in the face to your own members, like you're saying "screw you guys, look at us caring about people way over there instead." There's probably a way to do it that doesn't require falling hard on one side or the other, but that's something each church has to work out for itself. One thing that comes to mind: at a church I recently finished working at — a fairly large UCC congregation in California — the question of the American flag's presence in the sanctuary had come up on and off for a while. What was interesting is that the conversation didn't start because some "enlightened" peace activist wanted every nation's flag represented, or the UN flag added — it started because a returning vet struggling with PTSD said he couldn't come up to the communion table with the flag there. He said, "I love my country, and if I get called back, I'll serve — I just can't do that and take communion at the same time." And what struck me was watching church leadership suddenly get cautious — "are you sure we should move it?" — worrying not about the person who'd actually served and was trying to come to Christ's table, but about how people who'd never served, or hadn't in a long time, might feel about it being moved. That moment flipped the whole question on its head for me — questions about symbols and language and who we pray for get a lot more complicated once you're actually in the room with the people those symbols represent. **Tripp:** You mentioned "combat theology" before we started recording — can you say more about that? I feel like there are questions we waste a lot of time arguing about in church council meetings that just dissolve once someone with real, informed experience of combat is in the room — because so often we're protecting our ideologies, or our patriotism, more than we're protecting reality. **Logan:** The phrase works a bit like "Christian soldier" — it can be heard two very different ways. In conservative circles it's almost redundant: of course soldiers are Christians and Christians are soldiers. For pacifists, it's a contradiction in terms. Combat theology grew out of a growing sense that what we usually call "theology of war" is too abstract and impersonal. I sat through more classes than I can count at Duke, and at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where I've just come from, talking about proportionality and just cause and last resort — but for Christians, war is about dismembered bodies, widows, orphans. It's specific. It's personal. It's flesh and blood. What I want to help the church do — what Centurion's Guild is hopefully doing — is craft a martial hermeneutic: a way of reading Scripture and culture that occupies the middle ground on the spectrum between patriot and pacifist, since both are legitimate parts of that spectrum but tend to command way more than their share of attention. A lot of theologians are excellent, genuinely helpful resources — but I think we should notice how few theologies of war are actually being written by veterans. If we take seriously what we believe about narrative, embodiment, and incarnation, we should be building our theologies of war out of soldiers' actual experience, instead of handing down logical conclusions and propositions onto that experience from outside it. That's what combat theology is about — learning to be specific, particular, and personal, instead of generic and universalizing. **Tripp:** What kind of reactions do you get introducing that idea to — is it the "Mennonite Mafia"? I've heard rumors, I don't actually know if I'm remembering that right. **Matt:** \[Confirming, and explaining\] So, just so listeners know — I'm at Union Presbyterian Seminary, and Duke's right down the road; I live in Raleigh. There's definitely a certain aura around Duke and how it engages with questions of war. I'd always heard it called the "Mennonite Mafia" — a group of students at Duke, maybe a product of \[Stanley\] Hauerwas's methodology, a bunch of Mennonites who rode motorcycles and looked down their noses at anyone who showed up to class in uniform. **Tripp:** Wait — Mennonites who rode motorcycles? **Matt:** Yeah, Mennonites on motorcycles. **Tripp:** Is there a picture of this anywhere? That would make a great image for the post on this episode. **Matt:** I'm honestly not sure if that's just something we joke about internally or if there's overlap with something real — but I like to imagine it. **Logan:** I might be questioning your sources here, but in my experience — particularly for student vets at Duke — it's come to imply a certain kind of theological belligerence. I don't say that as a description of how I see myself, but I do think there's an instinct within some pacifist circles to treat the military as simply, inherently evil or wrong, and therefore as having nothing credible to contribute to theology. I think that's flatly wrong-headed, and it's had real, practical effects. While I was at Duke, from 2010 to 2013, there were at least two student veterans I knew of — one I was close to in particular — who'd been honorably discharged and started classes within six months of coming home, and who felt genuinely uncomfortable being asked to worship alongside Muslims, something the community would sometimes do at a Muslim center nearby. People noticed and accused him of being intolerant, but it wasn't some abstract, logical position — it was an embodied, experiential reaction, six months removed from being shot at by people who, in his military training, had been narrated almost entirely as "this is Islam, this is what Muslim people are," rather than as a specific enemy or a specific ideology. He left, ultimately, because he felt like his standing as what he understood as a just warrior was looked down on rather than respected. The middle ground I've tried to represent has meant fighting an uphill battle — not just against people like \[Hauerwas's critics or the "belligerent" wing\], but also against mainstream patriots who assume pacifism has nothing to offer, even though I probably lean more pacifist than anything else myself. I think our methods matter here. Someone like Stanley \[Hauerwas\] can carry himself, and write, in a way that comes across as fairly belligerent — and I don't think that's what contemporary Christian culture needs, not when we're losing veterans to suicide at a rate of roughly 22 a day, one about every 65 minutes. We don't need a bull in a china shop. We need theologians of grace who can speak gently and reverently into that middle ground, working out what it means to be a Christian soldier yesterday, today, and tomorrow. That's really what we're trying to do in narrative form, in the tradition of the Duke school of theology — think through what it means that Christian faith and military service intersect at times. They're not absolutely mutually exclusive; there's overlap, and we want to find where that overlap sits, and speak to the people caught up in it in ways they can actually recognize, without projecting our own theological anxieties onto them. One way we try to do that is by reclaiming military language — which is exactly what the early church did with words like *evangelion*, "gospel," and plenty of other Latin military vocabulary repurposed to mean something very different. Centurion's Guild has a newsletter we call *Change of Command*. In the military, a change-of-command ceremony is when one commander formally hands off to the next — they both hold the unit flag for an oddly long, almost awkward pause, looking at each other, before the flag passes hands. That pause says something to me about the moment we're living in theologically — God's kingdom has already been inaugurated, has already come, in the body of Jesus Christ, and yet we're still standing in that pause, waiting for our earthly commander to actually let go of the flag. We're caught in that middle ground, trying to think about it more carefully — and the phenomenon of Christian soldiers has been a genuinely fruitful way for us to do that. **Tripp:** A friend of mine who does a lot of work helping churches — especially evangelical ones that have largely lost touch with liturgy, rites of passage, and ritual — is putting together a kind of post-war ritual for when soldiers come home. He oversees a region for a mainline denomination, and pastors keep asking him: what do we actually do? It always seems to collapse into either "welcome home, join the prophetic critique of the war" or just "hooray, glad you're back." What would it look like for a church to actually affirm the ambiguity and intensity of that whole period of a person's life — to say, bring your questions here, we'll support you? **Logan:** I think it starts with that kind of affirmation. Edward Tick wrote a book called *War and the Soul*, and he focuses a lot on Native American ritual practice — I don't want to just borrow another culture's rituals without real care, but he and Karl Marlantes, who wrote *What It Is Like to Go to War*, both suggest that even within combat, there could be rituals that undo some of the dehumanization that boot camp and combat tend to produce. That might look like, after a major engagement, burying the enemy dead alongside your own and consciously recognizing that what happened was necessary but not something you have to lose your humanity over. Marlantes also describes a Mass for the dead he's found meaningful in the Catholic tradition. In more low-church or nondenominational settings, I think you can still get at something similar — starting by affirming the parts of someone's story that were genuinely morally right. That's part of why the soldier-saints have been so useful to me: you can separate protection from aggression. Protection is willing to give up its own life; aggression is usually about taking someone else's. There's a defensive part of soldiering and an offensive part, and I think it starts with identifying — differentiating — what was good and what wasn't, and then highlighting the good and mourning the bad. That includes something like confession, even if it's just talking with a trusted friend or some kind of religious authority over a beer about what actually happened. Words have power, and violence tends to produce silence. There's a young man locally who, for the first time, was able to tell someone — me — what it was like for him to kill somebody in Iraq. He told me because we shared a kind of camaraderie he doesn't have with his own priest or pastor. He described aiming at someone who had a gun pointed at his unit — no doubt in his mind about the threat — and the moment after he killed him, he felt a rush of elation, because he'd kept his buddies safe, taken out someone who was clearly a threat. But within milliseconds that turned into the most crushing shame he'd ever felt, because however you cut it, you've taken another human life, even if it was necessary. We have to be willing to look at war and name the parts of it that are evil, morally corrosive, and worth lamenting — you can call something necessary, but you should never call it good, because that's not the church's witness, historically. At the same time, we shouldn't overlook what was genuinely good, though we shouldn't overstate it into heroism either. That's the real gift of the old Catholic penitential tradition — Aquinas's *Summa*, the manuals used for hearing confession — which gave priests actual taxonomies of sin, so they could say "you did this, not that; this is the weight of it," instead of the binary, totally-evil-or-totally-innocent framework I think a lot of us inherit from Protestant culture. Identifying the good from the bad, and taking both seriously for what they actually are — lamenting the bad, supporting and respecting the good — is, I think, the most important part. **Tripp:** Two more topics I wanted to raise. One is about young men — especially ones who aren't positioned to make a lot of money in whatever the market currently rewards. The military offers meaning, purpose, value, and a career to men whose more traditional, masculine-coded vocations — blue-collar labor that used to support a single-family income — the economy no longer really validates. I wonder how much of what you're both dealing with is also a critique of what happens to masculinity and all that unused energy when the system doesn't offer it a healthy outlet. **Matt:** Yeah — I think Logan and I both fall into this category somewhat. There's what people sometimes call the "economic draft." For me, it was largely about money — I was floundering at NC State, and I wanted structure, plus tuition help, so the Air Force Reserve gave me both. I think Logan's story is fairly similar. Any conversation the church wants to have about this really has to hold together two things: the personal, moral experience of individual service members, and the structural conditions that put them there in the first place. If a church says it "supports the troops," that word can end up totally hollow — abstract, disembodied, more about affirming a slogan than actually thinking about a person. I've told this story before, and it's funny in retrospect — I was heading to a drill weekend, in uniform, my meals already covered by the government, and I stopped at a small barbecue place in eastern North Carolina I used to go to a lot. When I went to pay, they told me someone ahead of me had already covered my bill. Part of me obviously wanted to just accept a kind gift — but at the same time, I thought, well, my meal's already paid for through my tax dollars, so is that actually support? If you really wanted to support the troops, that kind of gesture isn't really it — real support means caring about the circumstances that led someone to enlist in the first place, whether that felt like the only viable option, and it means grappling with the actual geopolitics behind why a given conflict was deemed necessary in the first place. Any real conversation the church wants to have about ministering to and learning from service members and veterans has to include that structural, social layer — that's the piece I keep coming back to. **Logan:** \[Building on this — attribution uncertain, but the details point to Logan\] That's my focus too, when I think about political theology — we have to talk about economics. The truth is, in Southwest Philadelphia, where I worked for a year as a social worker, you'd have a drug dealer on one corner, a recruiter on the next, another drug dealer on the corner after that — and there's this sense of, those are basically the two options on the table for a lot of these kids. And if that's genuinely the choice on offer, what's the "Mennonite Mafia" supposed to say to that? I think part of the angst you see in especially upper-middle-class, overeducated Christian circles is that they've never actually had someone sit them down and say, "here are the options, pick." The more I talk with students — especially in rural North Carolina or inner-city Los Angeles — the more I hear that the choice really is something like: join the Junior Police Academy or ROTC now, or end up in a gang, doing something illegal; or go into policing or the military. There often just aren't other options in front of them. I think one of the things the church could do is address those systemic issues directly, while also recognizing that there's a whole group of young men with a lot of energy, angst, and unresolved identity questions that the system currently gives no healthy place to work through. There's no reason the only way to get an education and spend four years building structured relationships in community has to involve a gun — it could just as easily involve distributing food, or education, work like that. I think one mistake a lot of pacifists make is treating the military as one homogenous thing, when really there are four different branches and any number of specialties within each. That's part of why I struggle with "support the troops" as a phrase — it assumes "the troops" are a single, coherent identity, which they aren't. My own difficulty is that I don't want to be a hypocrite, and I can't fully claim that ground — I just finished my third degree on the GI Bill. So I can't look someone in the eye who tells me the military is their best path to college and tell them not to do it, because I did exactly that. But I think the deeper problem is what you said — these are young men who want to do something meaningful, and we've loaded the military up with an enormous amount of meaning, on top of an enormous amount of money. That's two big reasons to join, right there. I was actually approached at a Mennonite convention in Pittsburgh in 2012 — I gave a talk, along with another Centurion's Guild member, at one of the youth gatherings, maybe a couple hundred people — and within about 24 hours several young men separately told me some version of "I want to protect people, I want adventure, but my congregation would basically disown me if I joined the military." That told me two things: first, that pacifist communities don't always do a good job carrying forward the reasoning behind their own pacifism in a way young people can actually receive; and second, it left me wondering what I was even supposed to tell this person, since I'd more or less just told a room full of people not to enlist, while being something of a hypocrite about it myself. I ended up saying — well, if you want adventure without a weapon, become a firefighter. You get to jump out of airplanes if you want, work in genuinely dangerous places, and people love you for it. There are worse vocational options. We can be more creative about giving young men and women a sense of vocational fulfillment, in the church and elsewhere — but it's a real question: what do we do for people who want a life of meaning, when the military looks like the only door open to them? **Tripp:** Last question. Based on your experience as a Christian soldier and veteran — what advice would you give soldiers navigating relationships with people who aren't Christian? You mentioned earlier how easily Islam gets cast as "the enemy," when there are actually thousands of Muslim soldiers in the U.S. military — which, as part of the Bill of Rights, guarantees you access to your own clergy no matter what you believe, or don't. Structurally, the military recognizes religious plurality with a kind of dignity that a lot of the soldiers I've talked to say doesn't always show up on the ground. So — what's it like being a soldier of any faith inside a pluralist military, when so much of the culture around it reads as so specifically Christian? **Matt:** \[Attribution uncertain\] For me — because most of my friends outside the military weren't religiously affiliated at all, I was in a fairly "artsy" crowd — I think I actually experienced just as much friction from that direction as from military culture itself. There's something to learn, as Christians, about how we wear the different "uniforms" life hands us, the different rooms and groups we move through — in this case specifically military service. It's interesting, because in a lot of ways the military forces you into genuine, intimate pluralism more than most other spaces in society do. If I'm just a student at some college, it's easy to retreat into my own cultural bubble, only hang out with people who already believe roughly what I believe — four-and-a-half-point Calvinists doing Bible study, minus the "L," or whatever. Being a Christian in the military means having to think about what it means to have a moral voice, a kind of witness — how we relate to the institution, how we might help it be a little better, a little more conscientious. I think we need more of that from the church generally — because if you're not in the church, if you're religiously unaffiliated, which is more and more common, or if you're Muslim, or Jewish, you're carrying assumptions about what "Christian soldier" even means. Being able to say, "no, actually, here's what it looks like for me" is a real form of witness — and I think that witness can genuinely shape both the church and the military. The military has changed the church, in some pretty profound ways, too. **Logan:** Interfaith engagement specifically isn't really a strength of mine, I'll admit. There's a version of the old "modest proposal for peace" — the idea that if Christians could just stop killing each other, everything else would start to look coherent — that can come across as tribalistic if you're not careful. But I think what it's actually getting at is: if we can't get this right among ourselves, nothing else is going to hold together, so let's start there and let the rest follow. That's part of why I find the Golden Rule so useful — do to others what you'd want done to yourself. But more specifically, we don't know who we are apart from the rest of humanity — Christianity doesn't exist in a vacuum any more than I do individually. So if the rest of the world looks at a "Christian nation" and sees belligerence, overreach, violence, that says something real about what we actually are. It helped me, when I was in Iraq, that I was something of an outsider myself — an artilleryman embedded in an infantry unit, the odd one out, which is probably why I ended up housing our interpreter whenever we were in one place for a while. For six or seven months, whenever we were stationary, I bunked with him. I don't know exactly what assumptions I'd carried into that about Muslims or Iraqis beforehand, but it was humanizing hearing his actual story — he'd gone to university, had an engineering degree, worked as a carpenter for a while before becoming an interpreter. Around then I started wondering what it would be like if the situation were reversed — if China had invaded America and I'd enlisted as an interpreter, watching Chinese soldiers shoot at Americans. Try sitting with that for a second. That's part of why I think listening to our neighbors matters so much — if the church is going to be what it claims to be, we have to take seriously the ways we routinely fail to actually be Christians in that regard. One of my favorite lines from Scripture is that the world will know Christians by their love — I don't always know, on my own, whether I'm being one; I mostly trust it when the people around me tell me I'm loving them well. That's one of the things that forced me to reckon with violence and my own part in it, directly — I couldn't stay an artilleryman — but also indirectly, in recognizing that I'm still complicit in a much larger system, and that I have to keep thinking creatively about how to interrupt that system wherever I actually can. I don't know if that's "interfaith" exactly, but it's where I've landed. **Tripp:** That makes sense — and honestly, even that story about the translator is a good example of how your own lived experience reframes questions that usually stay so abstract. Thank you both so much for joining us and sticking around. Matt, always good to see your face — sorry we didn't get into any of the actual high school stories, we'll have to save those for next time. **\[Matt or Logan — closing line, attribution unclear\]:** Thank you so much — it's been a really good conversation, glad to have been part of it.