{"id":141,"date":"2010-12-20T20:23:52","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T20:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/military-chaplains-post-dadt.html"},"modified":"2010-12-20T20:23:52","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T20:23:52","slug":"military-chaplains-post-dadt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/military-chaplains-post-dadt.html","title":{"rendered":"Military chaplains, post-DADT"},"content":{"rendered":"

GetReligion Commandante Mattingly and I have have been having a bit of a
\nback-and-forth about chaplains in the military post-DADT over on Cathy Grossman’s Facebook page<\/a>, and I thought the issue worth venting a bit more publicly. (Here’s his official review<\/a> of the coverage.) <\/p>\n

TMatt’s
\nview seems to be that it’s a question of (as Kierkegaard might say)
\nEither\/Or: “You either have no discrimination and equality, or you have
\nno chaplains.” He believes that the current regime, which restricts what
\nmilitary chaplains can say, is intolerable, and seems to prefer
\nsomething on the order of “equal access” for all clergy.<\/p>\n

My own
\nview is more along the lines of the closest thing we have to a
\ndefinitive legal standard: the Second Circuit Court of Appeal’s 1985
\nruling in Katcoff v. Marsh<\/a><\/i>. (The plaintiffs, who lost, chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court.) Katcoff <\/i>makes
\nclear that the reason hiring chaplains doesn’t violate the
\nEstablishment Clause is that the military must provide for the religious
\nneeds of its personnel. It’s not, in other words, the chaplains’ free
\nexercise rights that count, but those of the people they have been hired
\nto serve. And the chaplains are under an obligation to provide those
\nservices to all military personnel.<\/p>\n

TMatt believes that this adds
\nup to “a state-mandated and funded theology.” In my view, what it adds
\nup to is some real restrictions on what military chaplains can do and
\nsay. For example, it is and should be against the rules for a
\nfundamentalist Protestant minister to tell a Jewish soldier dying on the
\nbattlefield that this is his last chance to accept Jesus as his Lord
\nand Savior and thereby avoid being damned for all eternity. And it
\nshould be against the rules for a gay Lutheran serviceman who comes to a
\nCatholic priest for counseling to be told that he must spend the rest
\nof his days celibate or be guilty of a mortal sin. These are things that
\nclergy in civilian life can do, exercising their free exercise rights.<\/p>\n

At
\nthe same time, it must be recognized that making religious services
\navailable to military personnel means giving them access to the bona
\nfide teachings of their own traditions. Let’s suppose, for example, that
\na conservative evangelical comes to a conservative evangelical chaplain
\nlooking for guidance on how to square his own convictions about the
\nimmorality of homosexual activity with the military’s post-DADT policies
\n(to say nothing of civil society, where it is unconstitutional to pass
\nlaws against homosexual activity). The chaplain should be able to talk
\nabout how their common religious tradition teaches that such activity is
\nimmoral while the larger society (including the army community) sees it
\nas licit. <\/p>\n

Bottom line: Military chaplaincy cannot be ruled by
\nEither\/Or. Like our First Amendment jurisprudence generally, there needs
\nto be a balancing of free exercise rights with bans on religious
\nestablishments. Just as military personnel need to be able to have
\naccess to the religious services of their choice, so military chaplains
\nneed to see themselves as government employees, rendering unto Caesar
\naccording to Caesar’s rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GetReligion Commandante Mattingly and I have have been having a bit of a back-and-forth about chaplains in the military post-DADT over on Cathy Grossman’s Facebook page, and I thought the issue worth venting a bit more publicly. (Here’s his official review of the coverage.) TMatt’s view seems to be that it’s a question of (as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nMilitary chaplains, post-DADT - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/military-chaplains-post-dadt.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Military chaplains, post-DADT - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"GetReligion Commandante Mattingly and I have have been having a bit of a back-and-forth about chaplains in the military post-DADT over on Cathy Grossman’s Facebook page, and I thought the issue worth venting a bit more publicly. (Here’s his official review of the coverage.) 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(Here’s his official review of the coverage.) 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}