Wild Goose Festival 1: Moral Formation
A talk given at the Wild Goose Festival on June 23, 2012, at Shakori Hills, NC. The first of three sessions on moral health: formation, fragmentation, and reintegration. Lightly edited from the original recording.
The latest VA effort for Vietnam-era veterans has centered on PTSD — a real advance in mental health studies. PTSD is delayed stress resulting from a traumatic experience, and it isn't exclusive to the military — rape victims experience it, car accident victims experience it, anyone carrying a traumatic injury that hasn't been dealt with can experience it. I don't think we should be delaying that work. We shouldn't let time haphazardly heal these hidden wounds of war. That's not a clinical claim — it's just what I think.
As a result of a 2009 paper, a new term has started circulating: moral injury. It's similar to PTSD, but it isn't only about being a victim of a traumatic experience — it's witnessing, perpetrating, or failing to prevent an act that violates one's own religious or moral beliefs. If my church tells me killing is wrong, but I have to kill a child who steps in front of my convoy — that act may have been justified, there may be frameworks that account for it — but the violation of my own internal moral or religious framework is what's being called moral injury.
I have some issue with the word "injury," because it names something as inherently clinical, and I think the clinic is one way we need to be addressing this — not the only one. That's part of why I've called this talk "moral health," though even that phrase is still somewhat clinical. I want to make sure we're not simply medicalizing something that's intrinsically a human issue.
War Is Not Human Nature
The first thing I want to establish is that war is a social or moral construct — not something intrinsic to human nature. We hear it often: "we're inherently violent." But that claim actually cuts against the tradition many of us claim — our story begins in Genesis, where we're created good, not violent. Violence is something acquired through socialization, not something inherent to who we are. If it were essential to human nature, why do people feel guilty after committing it, even when it's socially sanctioned, as in war? We tell people a war can be just, and studies still show that even when it is, people feel remorse. If violence were simply human nature, why would we feel guilty about it at all?
One further piece of evidence, offered with some caution: the official U.S. Army historian of World War II, S.L.A. Marshall, claimed in Men Against Fire that only about a quarter of riflemen actually fired their weapons at the enemy in combat. The Army's response, in Marshall's telling, was to try to raise that number — without much apparent interest in the question of why a low firing rate still won the war.
Posturing is also far more prevalent than actual killing, in humans and across the animal kingdom generally — combat is often less about causing harm than about how far each side can push before the other backs down. You can see this even in the biblical record: Israel claims victory in one battle in the Old Testament, and a tablet survives from the other side of that same era claiming the identical victory. Both sides can't be right. A great deal of what gets recorded as martial history is puffery — not because I want to dismiss it, but because it should trouble us that we treat lethal force as something we can do well, and that doing it well will solve our problems.
That confidence in lethal force is a fairly recent development, and one that the American military — the most lethal fighting force the world has known — built into new training methods, treating a lower firing rate as a failure to be corrected. By Vietnam, the firing rate was estimated above 80 percent; in Iraq, over 95 percent. My grandfather flew supply ships in World War II and trained on concentric-circle marksmanship targets. My father, training for Vietnam, would have trained on cardboard silhouettes shaped like a person, with a scoring zone at the chest — pop up, put it down. When I went through basic training, every target that came up, I put down, with a rifle round.
What that kind of training does is desensitize a person to fire reflexively rather than with moral discernment — what's called reflexive fire. Dave Grossman writes about this as a form of conditioning: an institution wants a particular action from a soldier, and there's an inhibitor in the way — chiefly, the ordinary human inclination toward peaceability — so the institution has to find the stimuli that overcome it. Video games are part of that conditioning, but not the whole of it; we were violent long before video games existed, and Vietnam-era veterans didn't train on them. We take behavioral cues from our whole community, not just our parents — books, movies, advertising, everyone around us.
Movies are a significant part of what I look at. There's a paradigm in the culture — never quite named as such — that I'd call the John Wayne figure: swaggering, self-certain, mildly religious, violent only in defense. Jimmy Stewart, by contrast, was already a movie star when he entered the Army Air Forces in World War II, flew combat missions, came home a colonel, and told LIFE magazine he would never make another war picture. John Wayne was too young for World War I and too old for Vietnam, and never saw combat. That should probably disturb us — who are we listening to, the Jimmy Stewarts or the John Waynes? Part of what I want to explore is why we credential the wrong things — why John Wayne over Jimmy Stewart, who had something to reflect on and might have played the part more honestly. There's also Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, who came home and starred as himself in a film about his own combat — which strikes me now as an almost unimaginable thing to ask of a person.
Formed in Community
The second point: moral formation happens within community. Nobody is formed in a vacuum. We take behavioral cues from everything around us — not just parents, but books, movies, video games, neighbors, pundits. And when we go to war, we go as a community, not as isolated individuals. Daniel Bell argues that a just war cannot be waged by an unjust people — if a society hasn't conducted itself justly, it can't wage a just war, whatever the criteria say on paper. I don't think I need to spend much time establishing that we are not, at present, an unambiguously just society. Jus ad bellum, taken seriously, actually restrains passion and reinforces virtue, individually and socially — and just war theory, in its interest in restraining violence and restoring justice, has more in common with pacifist traditions than the usual framing admits. We need to get past treating these as opposite sides.
Pete Kilner, who taught ethics at West Point and spoke at a veterans' event I helped organize, titled his talk "The Beauty and Tragedy of Combat" — and I think that's honest: combat lets people see things that feel like they transcend ordinary reality. Karl Marlantes writes about the camaraderie of war as unmatched anywhere else. I can sit in church and not know a single person who'd die for me. In the military, I don't have to ask. The fact that the military holds something close to a monopoly on the language of virtue should concern the church — particularly for young men who want to know they're making a difference in the world. Church, too often, doesn't offer that. The military does, along with something concrete to carry and a clear sense of protecting the innocent, even where the theology underneath it is shaky. We aren't teaching young men that the church can be that place too.
This isn't a soldier-versus-civilian question. A soldier, at their best, acts on behalf of the people they represent — especially in a democracy. Abraham Heschel said it better than I can: in a representative democracy, some are guilty, but all are responsible. That responsibility is what gets lost when soldiers come home and feel the entire moral weight resting on them alone — which is part of where the suicide rate comes from. We need to be able to be self-critical as a society and as a church: we are responsible too, and that responsibility should call us to action. Guilt, in that sense, is a healthy response to real circumstances, and it can draw a person toward constructive action rather than despair — the dangerous state is nihilism, not guilt. That's part of why the church has practices like penance rather than jumping straight to excommunication: some acknowledgment of what's wrong comes first.
That raises the real question: how do different communities form people differently? What's the difference between how a pacifist congregation forms someone and how a patriot congregation does — and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each? I've met young men from historically pacifist traditions who came to me — an outsider to that tradition — wanting to talk about feeling called to protect the innocent and defend their country, which suggests their own tradition hadn't given them the framework to answer that pull for themselves. The same failure shows up in the opposite direction, in congregations where flag and cross blur together and the distinction between God and country gets lost. We need to know when faith complements service to country, and when it has to contradict it.
Vows and Creeds
Vows and oaths matter here too. Churches have creeds; the Apostles' Creed was originally how converts were taught what it meant to be Christian — catechesis in the early church took years. We shouldn't be shy about the fact that formation starts with simply being told what a community believes, before a person is equipped to evaluate it critically for themselves. Once we can actually say what we mean by a creed, we're in a position to critique it — and the best critique comes from love, not indifference. The reformers Chesterton pointed to as real models weren't Luther or Calvin — they were Francis and Ignatius, both soldier-saints. Ignatius laid down his sword at the foot of Mary. Francis turned back on his way to the Fourth Crusade.
An oath binds a soldier to a community and a nation the same way a creed binds a believer to a church — and a church is bound back to the individual in turn. The enlistment oath — to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to obey the orders of the officers appointed over me — has real power; I said it once and I still remember every word of it. Acts 5:29 puts a limit on that kind of allegiance: we must obey God rather than human authority. Our allegiance to country is finite. Our allegiance to God, as far as our lives are concerned, isn't. That's part of what troubles me about the military becoming a site of proselytizing that conflates God and country as though they were one and the same.
Letting Go, and the Stories We Tell
When veterans can't let go — and shalom, at its root, carries a sense of release — you'll see them walking into the VA still in uniform, ten or twenty years out, because that uniform was the one place they felt an identity that was honored. That was especially true for Vietnam veterans, and coining the phrase "the Greatest Generation" in the 1990s, while passing over an entire generation of mostly drafted men as though their service didn't count, was one of the more contemptible things this country has done to its own veterans.
How we narrate soldiers' stories matters enormously. I'm working on another book profiling people like Ignatius, Francis, and Desmond Doss — a Seventh-day Adventist who gave up a shipyard deferment, entered the Army as a conscientious objector, refused to carry a weapon or work on the Sabbath, fought to stay in the military against attempts to discharge him, and went on to save 75 members of his unit at Hacksaw Ridge — on a Saturday. When challenged about it afterward, he said, "even Christ healed on the Sabbath." Those are the stories that should be forming us — not Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers, Braveheart. At the same time, we can't swing to the opposite extreme and treat soldiers as nothing but instruments of harm. People need room to affirm that their mission, at its best, is to restore justice. Deny them that room entirely, demonize them outright, and the shoe that doesn't fit gets forced on anyway.
I asked to stay in for a second deployment as a conscientious objector — unarmed. I'd been in five years and had enormous respect for the people I served with. When I brought my CO packet to my pastor, he told me I was abandoning the people I'd sworn to protect. My commander — who never had grounds to charge me with anything — told me privately that applying for CO status while asking to deploy again amounted to aiding the enemy. One of the worst days of my life was watching my unit deploy without me. When I've tried to explain that bond to pacifists, it often doesn't land — the church, in my experience, doesn't yet have the resources to understand what it is. Maybe that's because we've reduced faith to something between me and Jesus alone. But the most reliable way we worship God is through each other — through how we treat the people we disagree with. Disgracing another person, in that sense, disgraces God.
Discussion
The conversation that followed touched on several threads, condensed here:
On military evangelism. Someone raised the documentary Constantine's Sword and its account of evangelizing at the Air Force Academy that frames Jesus as commander-in-chief — a framing that can dehumanize a religiously different enemy. I don't have a clean answer beyond the same principle: God is our commander, but that has to sit inside real limits. Acts 5:29 sets the threshold. When military chaplaincy exists primarily to support the mission rather than to speak conscience freely — and tends to draw more conservative voices comfortable folding faith into patriotism — dissenting perspectives get filtered out before they're heard, which is part of why a conscientious objection tends to catch everyone off guard when it happens.
On an hour a week versus a whole life. Someone pushed back that reciting a creed once a week doesn't obviously form anyone, given how much of the week is spent elsewhere. I agree — and that's exactly the military's advantage. It isn't an hour a week; it's a culture, an identity, immersive by design. A creed only forms someone if the community around it reinforces it daily, the way military culture reinforces its own values daily.
On identity and reintegration. Edward Tick's point, which I find persuasive, is that what gets called PTSD isn't really a medical problem so much as an identity problem — a fragmented identity a person doesn't yet have the resources to reintegrate. Someone I'd served with once described me, in writing, as a "former veteran," and it needled me more than I expected. There's no such thing. That's not a status you leave. The church, if it's going to matter here, has to be willing to become part of that identity rather than staying separate from it.
On avoiding both extremes. Someone asked how to hold service members accountable without demonizing them. My rough answer: retire "thank you for your service" as a reflex — it assigns a positive moral value to a set of experiences that often haven't earned one, and being thanked by strangers 48 hours after a firefight can feel worse than being ignored. "Welcome home" does more work. And before someone deploys, the most useful thing to tell them isn't really about the deployment — it's that there's nothing they could do over there that would put them outside of being loved when they come back. A lot of what makes moral injury unbearable is the fear that isn't true.
On collective versus individual responsibility. Someone offered the image of a fist and the body that swings it — the fist doesn't bear the guilt alone. I'd put it the way Heschel does: some are guilty, but all are responsible. Soldiers subordinate part of their moral agency to a chain of command and a citizenry that sent them — which doesn't erase individual responsibility, but it does mean the rest of us don't get to stand at a safe distance and say it wasn't us.