NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA AND MORAL AGENCY AMONG CHRISTIAN POST-9/11 VETERANS

Suitt examines the role Christianity plays in helping post-9/11 military veterans manage the trauma of their service in this nonfiction work.

In both official and unofficial ways, Christian moral frameworks are inescapable in the American military; as the author observes, approximately 65% of people serving claim a Christian affiliation of some kind. Despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the military reinforces Christian ideals by making the chaplain a central figure who provides religious services, ethical instruction, and spiritual as well as psychological counseling. This “religious cultural toolkit” furnished by the military can be indispensable to veterans processing the pain and trauma of their service. The author presents a rigorously empirical investigation of religion’s role in the healing process—Suitt interviewed 48 veterans and six military chaplains who served post-9/11 and who identified as Christian at some point during that time. What emerges from these “religious military narratives” is a fascinating picture of the ways in which the military’s use of religion “is simultaneously good and bad, or rather, creative and destructive.” On the one hand, it can provide genuine spiritual succor necessary to active soldiers as well as those attempting the fraught reintegration into civilian life. On the other hand, religious dogma can be used to reinforce a military agenda—war, violence, and the dehumanization of the enemy—at odds with Christian morality. The sample of interviewees has its limitations, a fact that author acknowledges, and Suitt’s prose can be leadenly academic, too often deploying phrases like “religious meaning-making systems.” However, this is a thoughtful and provocative study that highlights the many ways in which the military co-optation of religion can restrict the moral agency of its soldiers and make them fully responsible for their own trauma (“Simply, if service members are not autonomous moral agents, then just war considerations of blameworthiness in war ought to fall on superior officers and the military organization overall”). This is a stimulating and timely study, especially in an age of perpetual and religiously charged war.

An important and insightful contribution to the literature on religion in American military life.