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# The Mic They'll Never Put Down
- URL: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/mic-never-put-down/
- Published: 2026-09-23T18:41:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T18:48:06.000Z
- Author: Logan Martin Isaac
- Tags: Public Writing

### "Public" (Civilian) Theologians are Killing (Public) Theology

---

Three weeks ago, I gave Mac Loftin [an open invitation to reply](https://gijustice.com/20250904-0800-loftin/?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) to my public response to [his column](https://www.christiancentury.org/online-columnists/what-us-veterans-taught-me-about-odyssey?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) at *The Christian Century*;

[Who Wills the Collapse? A Response to Mac LoftinI intended this as a pitch to Christian Century in response to Mac Loftin’s September 2 column, “What US Veterans Taught Me About The Odyssey.” Their submissions inbox is currently closed. I’m publishing it here instead, because the argument doesn’t require their permission to be made. Mac![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/icon/Philosopharma.sq-bfef2321-ae0d-4f58-ad24-32694ce35cc2.jpg)MartinaliaLogan Martin Isaac![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/thumbnail/Jeremiah-Ruins-1-5236398f-654d-4089-8dfc-8eabfb265b64.jpg)](https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/who-wills-the-collapse/)

What I got in return was [correspondence](https://gijustice.com/tag/mac-loftin/?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) that was gracious in tone, evasive in substance, and silent, in the end, on the one point that mattered: whether he'd say any of it where the veterans he wrote about could answer back. Loftin has not accepted my invitation respond, ironically(?) doing to this veteran what I informed him he had done to the nameless "veterans" he's so thankful for having "taught \[him\]." Silence itself is his argument. 

Loftin's column put a reading group of veterans alongside Simone Weil and Euripides in a decidedly civilian antiwar lineage, and when I pointed out that his thesis exploits veterans' credibility while keeping martial critique off the page, [he corrected the record](https://gijustice.com/20260917-0817-loftin/?ref=loganmartinisaac.com): he never claimed their reading was his, or his was theirs. Fair. But that correction doesn't touch the actual claim. An antiwar conviction doesn't materialize from close reading alone. Someone has to have paid for it first. Loftin knows this, it's the reason why veterans are in his original piece to begin with. What he won't do is let that debt come due in a form where they could contest how he's spent it.

I've watched this move before I ever heard Loftin's name; this ain't my first rodeo. 

In 2011 I sat across from Stanley Hauerwas at Duke and he told me the church had failed miserably, that [we needed to confess](https://youtu.be/sUhAtkCoTGI?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) our complicity in sending people to war unformed. In 2024, George Kalantzis, who names Hauerwas as an influence, [sat across from me on *The Fightin' Word*](https://pewpewhq.com/tfw/ep005?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) and proposed the same thing: services of lament, not for veterans to repent, but for the church's complicity in needing them to fight at all. Fourteen years, same prescription, same civilian mouth doing the confessing. I called that what it is: Thank You For Your Service in vestments. A debt acknowledged in exactly the amount of language required to avoid paying it.

[When “Lament” is Liturgical Theater — Grunt Works | Human dignity for rank and file beleiversI’ve been sitting with something that makes my skin crawl. In October 2011, I interviewed Stanley Hauerwas at Duke . We talked about moral injury, about the church’s complicity in sending people to war without adequate formation, about Veterans Day pageantry and the people who “put on their l![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/icon/favicon-0082971e-660e-4f4f-a56c-0b7d69d24217.jpg)Grunt Works | Human dignity for rank and file beleiversLogan M. Isaac![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/thumbnail/kalauerwas.001-699e1187-d7b0-493c-8458-9ccf75d74f85.jpg)](https://pewpewhq.com/blog/lament-liturgical-theater?ref=loganmartinisaac.com)

Loftin is the same transaction with different props. Homer instead of [Cranmer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%5FCranmer?ref=loganmartinisaac.com). A magazine column instead of a chapel service. Civilian theologians get to sound antiwar, sound humble, sound like they're decentering themselves by putting veterans next to Weil, all without once putting their theses somewhere a martial hermeneutic could take it apart in front of an audience. That's not modesty. That's custody of the mic.

Here's the part civilian theology can't answer, and won't try to: **a martial hermeneutic doesn't ask to be included in the seminar. It asks who gave the seminar its authority to speak on this in the first place**, and what that authority is actually made of. Mostly it's made of the same thing Loftin is trading in; proximity, borrowed at no cost, sold as 'expertise.' Book-training and combat stress are not the same epistemic exercise, and everyone standing at the lectern knows it, which is exactly why the lectern has to stay in (so-called) civilized hands. To confess an insight came from people who bled for it, and I did not, would mean admitting the obvious; *no debt is payable in prose alone*. It would mean sitting in a humility that, to someone who has never been made small by anything real, feels indistinguishable from humiliation. So instead: gratitude, footnotes, silence when asked to answer in public. 

[Staurology | Mac | SubstackClick to read Staurology, by Mac, a Substack publication. Launched 4 years ago.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/icon/https-3A-2F-2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com-2Fpublic-2Fimages-2F9667dc31-f5c2-4ba7-86af-6e772ea20f4c-2Ffavicon-48x48-6ed231dc-eca2-4ac4-bca6-7793c5eac94d.jpg)SubstackMac![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/17/6a/176af55d-3866-4b2a-84a2-298ad9e4b215/content/images/thumbnail/https-3A-2F-2Fmacloftin.substack.com-2Ftwitter-2Fsubscribe-card-9c159c43-8a0d-444f-b942-d622eb0594ae.jpg)](https://macloftin.substack.com/)

[Stauros is the Greek](https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g4716/niv/mgnt/0-1/?ref=loganmartinisaac.com) word for wooden stakes, as in the only way to kill a vampire. 

Kalantzis learned this from Hauerwas. Loftin, whether he'd put it this way or not, learned it from both of them: that the mic can be held indefinitely, that "someday I'll pass it on" is a sentence with no due date attached, as long as the people you're citing never get a microphone of their own. It works right up until it doesn't. Every generation of men who held the mic that way eventually stops speaking, by choice or otherwise, and what gets said next isn't up to them anymore. Sometimes what's left behind is a body of work. Sometimes it's a body of work and [a stack of receipts](https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/who-holds-the-receipts/) the people they quoted kept the whole time.

I'd still rather Loftin spoke for himself. That offer doesn't expire. But nobody should have to wait for an answer from above before they let justice have a word. After all, when we're all dead and buried, justice *is* The Word.