All of Me or None of Me: Why I Left Sojourners

For fifteen years, Sojourners magazine used my writing to build their credibility on military issues. When I asked them to remove my unpaid work in January 2025, they refused. What their COO said during our negotiation — which I recorded — exposed everything wrong with how progressive institutions treat veteran voices.

What They Wanted

From 2007-2011, I wrote for Sojourners about conscience and war. Rose Berger helped me write better. The editing was substantive, even if it tended toward civilian catharsis rather than truly dialogical. I thought they were genuinely interested in centering veteran voices.

It was performative.

In November 2011, Sojourners CEO Jim Wallis held a National Press Club event on "moral issues in the election." [all the links to which are now broken 🤷] He discussed poverty, immigration, abortion, and gay marriage. He didn't mention veterans or military suicide in the media cycle leading up to Veterans Day in 2011, when 17 current and former soldiers were dying by suicide every day, when active duty suicides exceeded combat deaths. It was also less than a week before the After the Yellow Ribbon conference at Duke University, an event Sojourners refused to cover.