Religion and the military

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Hi there. If you’ve been paying any attention to the news this week, you can’t have missed the tragic spectacle of US Secretary of Defense War leading a prayer with a bunch of military folks. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but for the fact that the “prayer” in question was actually a thinly-disguised quote from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: specifically, the famous “Ezekiel 25:17” scene with Samuel Jackson.

The Pentagon claims that SecWar was actually paraphrasing the real bible verse upon which Tarantino’s dialogue is based, and that anyone saying Hegseth misquoted the Bible verse is “peddling fake news”. I’ll let you decide for yourself:

It’s obvious to me that Secretary Hegseth hasn’t been studying his “dreams vs. reality” chart lately:

Anyway, sneering aside, the embarrassing incident got me thinking about the relationship between religion and the military, or at least my own experience of this. Which means that I’m going to be overwhelmingly talking about the Christian religion and the military. Apologies to readers of other faiths, but I would love to hear your own experience in the comments.

How can a belief system which contains such classics as “love your neighbour as yourself,” and “turn the other cheek” be used to justify killing? We’re not the first people to have thought about that. Classical thinkers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas formulated the “Just War” theory, which explains when it’s morally permissible to start a war and how you prosecute it in a moral fashion.

Today’s post isn’t about Just War or any other moral framework encompassing religion and the military. Instead, I’m going to look at how religion permeates into the military to be experienced by the people within.

I’ll start by talking about chaplains and their important role in military forces. Then I’ll contrast this with the many ways in which they stand apart from “normal” troops. After that I’ll talk about how religion was (and is) used to give a sense of legitimacy to the cause. I’ll conclude by showing how military beliefs and behaviours subvert some of religion’s edifying effect.

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Chaplains are integral to the military…

Let’s start with what I know, which is the Irish system. This might be hard for a civilian to understand, especially in a secular society like Ireland, but chaplains serve in every barracks and formation in the Defence Forces.

More importantly, they’re there at the milestones in a soldier’s career:

• In training, where they can be found out in the cold and the rain, distributing chocolate and words of encouragement to recruits (I’ll let you guess which aspect is more important).
• During passing out or commissioning parades, when the newly-minted soldier is celebrating with their loved ones.
• When the soldier deploys overseas. A chaplain goes with every overseas unit and stays with them throughout, ministering to lonely and homesick troops.
• At family occasions like weddings or christenings, a chaplain can be the default priest for military families.
• In the unlikely but always possible event of a soldier’s death in combat, a chaplain will provide the last rites.

Although chaplains are important at home, they really come into their own overseas. People who wouldn’t dream of darkening the door of a church at home are regular mass-goers overseas. I’m speculating here, but I think the familiar mantras of the prayers and actions of the ceremony make one feel more at home in the midst of a very alien culture.

Chaplains overseas have a crucial role in supporting soldiers’ mental and emotional health. Being in a war or post-war zone is hard and separation from families and loved ones can exacerbate existing problems at home. Soldiers of all ranks value having someone outside the chain of command whom they can confide in and talk about their worries. And someone who wouldn’t be caught dead going to “therapy” would happily chat with a padre.

The genesis of the Irish Defence Forces Chaplaincy is described in Moral Formations, an account of how the [Catholic] Church shaped the military of the young state in its first decade of existence (1922 to 1932):

It’s clear from the account that chaplains were an important source of morale and comfort to troops, as they are today. However, an equal (or maybe greater) part of their role was to shape the character and behaviour of the troops which formed the fighting arm of the [Catholic] state.

The chaplain’s role was to mould the morals of the soldier under his charge to “a standard in discipline and behaviour, such as would be a credit to the young Army of a Christian state.”

Ireland has changed a lot since the 1920s, especially in its relationship with religion. Although chaplains remain a very important part of the modern Irish military, I would argue that their role today is mainly about morale and individual spiritual wellbeing, not the “moral formation” of the force as a whole.

The USA seems to be going in the other direction, from a baseline of a very pluralistic and welfare-oriented Chaplain Corps. They were in the news recently with the announcement that SecDef Pete Hegseth is cutting the number of faiths (not even Cromwell managed that, so best of luck to Handsome Pete in that one).

Another reform is that US chaplains will no longer wear their rank insignia, rather they will wear a religious symbol. Pete gets a lot of hate, most of it justified, but I think this one makes sense.

He said that: “A chaplain is first and foremost a chaplain, and an officer second.” I still agree… this is strange and uncomfortable. I’m agreeing with this lunatic.

Let’s move swiftly on before I go completely Team Heg and start leading my own Pentagon prayer meetings. Luckily, this dovetails nicely with our next section on how chaplains sit apart from the rest of the military machine.

…but they are somewhat apart from it too

Chaplains are obviously non-combatants. That in itself isn’t unusual, because so are military doctors and medics. Non-combatants are barred from taking part in hostilities and, in return, must be treated differently by the enemy (most pertinently: they can’t be shot at).

What makes chaplains different from other soldiers is that they have a second and parallel chain of command. They answer to a higher power. I’m talking, of course, about bishops and other members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Military people everywhere care about where other military people fit in the great big pyramid that is the chain of command. They obsess about rank and precedence to an extent that sometimes baffles civilians. Obviously, deference to rank can be non-conducive to a chaplain’s approachability.

Irish military chaplaincy came up with an elegant solution to this problem. Chaplains in the Defence Forces are treated as officers but deemed to assume the rank of whomever they’re speaking to. If they’re speaking to a raw recruit then that’s their temporary rank, and the recruit can call them “Father,” “Padre,” or even “Joe¹.” If they’re speaking to the Chief of Staff, then the same applies, and the padre can call the general “Joe².”

This model, as far as I know, is unique, but please correct me if I’m wrong. Most Anglosphere militaries give their chaplains an officer rank, and many continental armies do the same. My favourite has to be the Finnish military, who have a “Field Bishop” rank which is equivalent to a Brigadier General:

In other countries, such as Germany and France, chaplains are civilians who are seconded into the military but aren’t service members themselves.

Whether they are given a rank or not, military or civilian, chaplains and the religious authority they embody don’t always sit comfortably with the military’s chain of command. A chaplain once told me that overseas, they used to be called the “Black Adjutant³” and had a direct line to the military top brass. In other words, they were outside the normally inviolate authority of the commander in theatre and therefore provided a useful backchannel to authorities at home (and a check on the commander’s power). This is similar to the idea of a political officer—we will discuss that in more detail below.

This is illustrated vividly in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (regular readers will know this is one of my favourite books—and a stunningly realistic description of military life). One of the main characters is a chaplain. At every turn he is confronted with brash or rude “military” men who resent his unique and “unusual” status.

This is a strain for him because he’s already a meek and retiring individual and the naked aggression he faces knocks him for six. His colonel throws him out of the officers’ club when a passing general remarks that it’s “no place for a man of God,” but later forces him to attend every night when the same general says “it’s where a man of God should be, with the sinners.”

Religion was used to give armies legitimacy…

Speaking of Catch-22, one of the memorable scenes with the chaplain character is when the colonel asks him to start leading prayers in the briefing room before bombing missions (now we know what Pete Hegseth has been reading). The colonel is convinced that this will get him recognised as a great leader:

“Now, I want you to give a lot of thought to the kind of prayers we’re going to say. I don’t want anything heavy or sad. I’d like you to keep it light and snappy, something that will send the boys out feeling pretty good. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want any of this Kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff. That’s all too negative…

The men are already doing enough bitching about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in with any sermons about God or death or Paradise. Why can’t we take a more positive approach? Why can’t we all pray for something good, like a tighter bomb pattern, for example? Couldn’t we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?”

Using religion to improve your military’s odds against the enemy is nothing new. Everyone does it, to a certain extent, and every country mobilises their chaplains in a time of war to help rally the troops around the flag. Not that it always helped:

The First World War and Russian Revolution saw the end of the Orthodox military chaplains in the Russian forces. Their role was supplanted by the commissars, political officers who reported to the party outside the formal military chain of command.

When the Soviet Union fell, the chaplains returned to the Russian military. When Putin came to eternal power he also brought back the political officers. He hasn’t called them commissars—yet. With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine he has also decided to boost the numbers of Orthodox chaplains serving with the Russian forces there. In other words, now there are three parallel command and control structures in the Russian army.

Will it work for Putin? I doubt it. The results so far aren’t great. The thing is, chaplains (and commissars, for that matter) can only do so much to mould the proper sense of fighting spirit in their charges. The military has a way of pushing back against attempts to make it politically correct, as we’ll discuss in the conclusion.

…but the military has always subverted religious strictures

Coming back to Moral Formations and my own country: in 1932, Ireland hosted the Eucharistic Congress. The closing ceremony (partially depicted below) drew an estimated million people from a population of three million:

Note the honour guard of military standing around the altar, closer even than the ranks of clergy. This was a time of religious devotion in Ireland and the military was presented as a shining standard bearer of a “Christian state.”

At the same time, however, soldiers were suffering from venereal diseases at a staggering rate which impeded military effectiveness. Prostitution and the company of otherwise “loose” women were one of the main sources of recreation for soldiers besides drink.

Attempts by the religious authorities to stamp a code of conduct on the military were never going to work, despite their undoubted successes in promoting sports and other clean pursuits.

Groups of young men will always bend or break the rules and will find ways to push back at whatever orthodoxy is being pushed.

Coming back to our friend Handsome Pete, the Secretary of Defense, it’s clear the guy has either never seen Pulp Fiction or was too drunk when he saw it to remember. Heads will already have rolled at the unit which put together this “prayer” for him to lead.

Here’s what happened. The top brass picked this Combat Search and Rescue Unit as their “next up, best dressed” unit for recognition in the Secretary’s prayer meetings. At the last minute, someone realised they needed a prayer and made the fatal mistake of asking an actual soldier to provide. Not the unit chaplain, not even an officer who had been through the spine-removal process that is commissioning. A real, actual, living, breathing soldier. And he saw his opportunity for immortality, and didn’t shirk from it:

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

—Joshua 1:9

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading and please remember, if you haven’t already, to subscribe using the link below. Please also share this article with a friend and help me broaden my reach. Every little helps! See you next week.

Cover picture: A chaplain assigned to the 1st Infantry Division provides spiritual support during a rotation at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, Feb. 18, 2025. (Spc. Matthew Garnier/U.S. Army) via Military Times

1. If “Joe” happens to be the chaplain’s first name, that is. Otherwise the recruit should not address the chaplain as “Joe.” ↩︎
2. Again, only if that’s the said general’s name. ↩︎
3. In a military unit the adjutant is the senior officer responsible for administration. As I’ve previously written here, administration is everything. ↩︎