DADT Repeal and the Military Chaplaincy

[Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared as a response to a comment on the 12 May 2011 article “Westminster Presbytery overtures 39th GA seeking to help chaplains maintain clear and unequivocal stance against sexual immorality” on the Johannas Weslianus: PCA News and Views blog.]

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Article by Darrell Todd Maurina

Dear Chaplain ______,

Much of what you say is valuable and crucially important for civilian church leaders to understand. However, I wish I could agree with you that “the military knows that if they attempt to force Chaplains to do things against their conscience … it would defeat the purpose of having chaplains and no one would serve in the military as a chaplain.” The problems come up when evangelical chaplains or conservative Roman Catholics have fundamental problems with “politically correct” issues being pushed by the military’s top leadership. It’s a lot easier for a theological liberal in the chaplaincy to live with an evangelical or conservative Roman Catholic senior chaplain than the reverse.

There are reasons why there are a lot of O-3 and O-4 evangelicals in the chaplaincy, but it becomes increasingly difficult for evangelicals to reach the O-5 and O-6 levels. Running into an intolerant liberal colonel in the chaplaincy can be a career-ender for an evangelical, or at least one that causes him to choose to go into the National Guard or the Reserves.

Think, for example, of the longstanding problems in the military chaplaincy over how to handle “proselytism.” The chaplaincy is founded on the concept that chaplains perform religious services for members of their own faith groups while making arrangements to provide such services for others. I remember a particularly effective Assembly of God chaplain telling Buddhist soldiers that if they’re Buddhist, it’s his job to help them become the best Buddhist they can, citing the Bushido warrior code as an example. Of course, he’d be the first one to say that he’d love to see that Buddhist become a Christian, but it’s up to the soldier which chapel service to attend, if any. As Calvinists, it’s not a problem to say that God converts, we don’t, and our focus needs to be on faithful preaching of the Word rather than getting more notches to our roster of converts made through soul-winning.

The military chaplaincy is virtually the only thing we have left in the United States that is comparable to the issues faced by evangelicals in the state churches of Europe. If tax dollars are going to be used to pay clergy — and even the ACLU agrees that is legitimate, since there’s no other way to provide for the free exercise of religion by deployed troops in combat environments, and in garrison environments in some foreign countries where the choice of off-post churches is limited at best — the government must seek out and recruit people who can meet the religious needs of its service members.

Unfortunately, if the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” actually gets implemented (and that’s not yet a settled issue), you’re entirely correct that the military will probably have to not only accept but also seek out chaplains to serve homosexual troops. It is impossible to repeal DADT and not get homosexual chaplains on the same “religious need” grounds that we have chaplains for relatively low-density religious faiths, the two most obvious being Judaism and Islam.

Realistically that will probably end up being some female UCC or PCUSA lesbian chaplains, plus a few tokens from the Metropolitan Community Churches, which have been trying for years to get a chaplain candidate approved. The reality of the military environment is such that it will take a long time before very many enlisted combat troops are even slightly tolerant of homosexuality. Southern “good old boys” are not exactly likely to give more than lip service to command directives to tolerate homosexuality.

Evangelicals represent a huge portion of the military, and when combined with Hispanic Roman Catholics, are probably the largest two blocks of service members who are actually attending religious services. If the military is going to pay people to perform or provide religious services (and yes, I understand the difference), it has to have evangelical chaplains not only for minority faiths but for the major religious groups.

The problem, however, is that a military chaplain will unavoidably have to cooperate with as well as submit to other chaplains who would never be allowed to be ordained in his denomination, and to chaplains who would not be allowed to join his church as a private member, and even in some cases to chaplains he considers to be unconverted. This isn’t anything new; there have been Roman Catholic and Jewish chaplains in the military for a very long time.

As long as that’s limited to longstanding doctrinal differences between denominations, that’s not a major problem. A Mormon LTC serving as an installation’s family life chaplain is not going to try to tell a Roman Catholic priest to stop celebrating the Mass, regardless of LDS teachings on “priestcraft” — on the contrary, the Mormon LTC is going to encourage the Roman Catholic chaplains to use their own Catholic family life resources and is going to encourage the evangelical chaplains to use resources by people like James Dobson and Focus on the Family.

Respect for the tenets of service members and chaplains of other religious faiths is fine. Evangelicals have long understood that it is necessary to serve in the chaplaincy. Most problems of “religious intolerance” in the military chaplaincy aren’t coming from evangelicals — they’re usually very clear that if you don’t like what they preach, don’t come to their chapel, and the problems take care of themselves.

However, how is a lesbian female chaplain who is a full bird colonel going to handle the preaching of a junior OPC or PCA chaplain who tells a homosexual soldier in a counseling session that he needs to repent? Let’s complicate the situation by adding that the junior chaplain has just a couple of years in military service rather than being prior service enlisted, is only an O-3, and is a bit rough around the edges in his counseling, but because he’s a good preacher has much higher attendance at his chapel services than the full bird colonel and other mainline Protestant chaplains, leading to some jealousy factors?

That kind of scenario, without some very clear policies in place to protect evangelicals and the clear political warning to Congress that it’s an issue on which evangelicals will fight, could make life extremely hard on evangelical chaplains. If the result is an exodus of evangelical chaplains, it will have serious negative consequences for the military.