Serving in the military is often a disruptive event in the lives of those who join, precipitating a reassessment of the service member’s ethical sensibilities or, tragically, resulting in lasting moral injury and trauma. The military experience compels them to navigate multiple identities, from citizen to warrior and back. Their religious identity, sometimes rooted in a civilian religious community, can be altered by military participation. Those who find faith during service often adopt one rooted in military culture. Still others find faith after leaving the service, providing a salve for the disruption of military experience. In many cases, religious cultural toolkits provide necessary meaning-making frameworks to make sense of war; however, these same frameworks can exacerbate trauma when moral expectations do not reflect reality, resulting in moral injury.
Drawing on a series of inductive, in-depth qualitative interviews with forty-eight veterans and six military chaplains, this dissertation explores how varied religious resources and potentially traumatic events affect the lives of post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian. Adding to existing research on moral injury, it traces how military chaplains, ethics education, just war theory rhetoric, and formal religious practice supplied by the military alter the course of service members’ moral lives. As these resources aim and re-aim them at the military’s institutional strategic goals, service members come to inhabit the warrior identity. Amid this new identity and the realities of modern warfare, trauma is likely, and service members must navigate an interruption to their deeply held moral beliefs, narratives, and expectations. After service, lasting moral wounds, traumatic experiences, and a loss of identity can make reintegrating to the civilian sector challenging, thus precipitating or exacerbating trauma. These narrative trajectories reveal how veterans use Christian faith or other systems of meaning-making to understand war and their identities as service members and veterans. Drawing on post-traumatic theologies and feminist and womanist ethics, this dissertation argues that these stories uncover tainted theological frameworks and a military culture in need of redemption. / 2023-11-04T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43290 |
| Date | 05 November 2021 |
| Creators | Suitt, Thomas Howard, III |
| Contributors | Ammerman, Nancy T. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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