Military Chaplains’ Experiences with Diversity

Abstract

Thus far I have showed how the military manages religious diversity in accordance with US law, traditional American values, Department of Defense policy, and the need to maintain a Chaplain Corps that can’t be challenged on establishment grounds. I have also explained how chaplains can exert their agency within this institutional and cultural framework to facilitate and sometimes limit the free exercise of religion. The previous chapter described how two specific religious traditions, Islam and Wicca, fare in the military. I concluded that it’s probably easier for Muslims to have their religious needs met because they are easier for chaplains to anticipate, because Islam resembles Christianity more than Wicca does, and because no one contests that Islam is the kind of thing that has free exercise rights, a religion. This chapter is more directly about the chaplains themselves. How do the chaplains feel about religious diversity? How pluralistic can the military make its chaplains be? How are the chaplains’ selfconception, theological outlook, and relationships with religious “others” affected by the increasing religious diversity they encounter?

We’re not members of some homogeneous civil religion in which we’re all crushed together. Instead, like a magnet, part of us connects to each other, and part of us most certainly does not.

—Reformed Episcopalian chaplain