Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

2) Undertake a study of the role of religious communities in healing moral injury, addressing the needs of returning veterans, and utilizing the resources and rituals within our religious tradition that can help veterans to make restitution, be restored to society, and receive forgiveness;

3) Reach out to our religious neighbors of many faiths to share our various

Traditions’ understandings of moral injury and restitution and join in common cause to create greater protection for moral conscience in the Armed Services as a means to prevent some cases of moral injury; and

4) Encourage ministers with standing, military chaplains, and seminarians seeking to become religious leaders, to become trained in Christian teaching about the moral conduct of war, research on moral injury, and the role of religious communities in healing moral injury.

Background

The capacity for moral understanding and the will to do what is right affirm the divine image in humanity. Instruction in moral principles and the guarding of moral conscience are crucial dimensions of Christian faith, dimensions found in every religious tradition. In difficult situations, such as war or other times of extremity, moral decision making can be agonizing and carry life or death consequences. In such extremities, the guarding of moral conscience is crucial to faith. As General Assembly Resolution 0728, states:

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) affirms the God-given right of

conscience and
military service but who, Iraq, realizing that this

offers moral support to men and women who volunteered for on the grounds of Christian conviction, refuse deployment to

action may subject them to military discipline.

Under the conditions of war, love of country, duty in military service and Christian faith may clash, and nothing is more devastating to the soul than the knowledge of having violated one’s core moral values, an awareness of failure the Christian tradition has called “mortal sin.” Such an awareness of sin and the self-condemnation it elicits threaten the soul as well as the physical life of a soldier. Moral suicide can lead to physical suicide.

Suicide rates among active duty military, which have been climbing since 2003, are at unprecedented rates; in some cases, such as the Marines and Army, the annual rate in 2009 was double the 2006 rate. In addition, veterans constitute twenty percent of all U.S. suicides, while veterans are fewer than ten percent of the population. The Veterans Administration continues to attempt to stem the tide of veteran suicides, an average of eighteen a day, with little success; among the six thousand suicides a year, an especially large number are among veterans under age 35, even though fewer than one percent of Americans now serve in the military.

Since colonial times, an individual’s choice to refuse military service for reasons of faith has been allowed to members of pacifist traditions, a right of free practice of religion granted in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. CO status is not a right of law, but a privilege granted by military regulations, rather than through legislation. The Pentagon has occasionally suspended granting CO status, as it did briefly in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War. In addition, the requirements for CO status used today have not been revised since the Vietnam War and are structured on the basis of conscription. Nonetheless, the military continues to grant CO rights while having an all volunteer military.

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court in Gillette v. United States, 401 US 437, expanded Department of Defense regulations governing Conscientious Objection to non- religious moral conscience, while simultaneously limiting CO status to objection to “war in any form.” This decision protected the religious consciences of pacifists and those who object to all wars. Yet it denied this same protection to the vast majority of religious people who follow moral principles such as just war. To be regarded as just, a war must pass all the following criteria:

•   It must be defensive, the principle of just cause;

•   It must be declared by a competent authority;

•   It must have the right intention to serve justice and lead to peace;

•   It must have a chance to succeed in its intentions;

•   It must uphold non-combatant immunity by protecting civilians;

•   It must be a last resort after all other measures to resolve a conflict have been

  utilized; and

•   It must be proportional and result in more good than harm.

  Those who voluntarily enlist in military service are persons of conscience who want to serve their country honorably, and they undertake military service for many legitimate reasons. Those who serve in the U.S. Armed Services are taught that moral conscience in war is crucial. They are instructed in the principles of just war in basic training and the war colleges. Such principles inform United Nations regulations on the conduct of war, including the Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg Principles, which require the exercise of individual moral conscience in war. However, if an individual refuses to deploy because a war violates his or her moral conscience, the consequences are sanctions, court martial, prison, and/or dishonorable discharge. Those who apply for CO status are currently required to prove a “crystallization of conscience,” a process by which internal changes in conscience lead an individual to oppose to all wars.

  With various limitations on the rights of religious and moral conscience in war and ambiguities in the military regulations governing CO status, many in military service are denied the right to exercise moral conscience. Those in the Armed Services who deem a particular war unjust, illegal, and/or immoral and who refuse to deploy face serious, career- ending punishments because objection to a particular war, sometimes called selective conscientious objection (SCO), is not allowed and is prosecuted as a punishable offense. These consequences mean that what the military itself teaches and international agreements uphold, the military punishes. According to Col. Herman Keizer, ret., a military chaplain for 34 years and former Executive Director of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, Department of Defense, and Command Chaplain of the United States European Command, the teaching of just war without a means to apply it creates a major, irresolvable moral conflict for individuals who oppose a particular war but are required to fight it.

On March 21, 2010, the Truth Commission on Conscience in War held a public hearing at the Riverside Church, NY, to examine how better to protect religious and moral conscience in war. Sixty -five co-sponsoring organizations (listed below) appointed seventy commissioners—religious leaders, military chaplains, veterans, theological educators, nonprofit organization leaders, artists, and mental health professionals—who attended the hearing and are also listed below. They receive testimony (videos are posted at www.conscienceinwar.org) from:

•   veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq,

•   a Gold Star mother,

•   U.S. Army colonel (ret.), Vietnam veteran, and a military chaplain for 34

  years

•   Jewish, Christian, and Muslim experts on religious ideas of just war,

•   an attorney specializing in military regulations governing Conscientious Objection,

•   a philosopher of war, former Marine, and a veteran of Vietnam,

•   a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, and

•   a Veterans Administration psychiatrist and MacArthur Fellow, who is a leading expert

  on PTSD.
  Each of the fourteen testifiers discussed service in war and moral conscience.

  Commission members discussed the testimony and additional information from

  Veterans Administration mental health professionals about an injury of war newly identified in December 2009 as “moral injury.” The VA clinicians define moral injury as the devastating negative consequences of “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” Research on moral injury indicates it is a significant contributor to clinical depression, addiction, violent behavior, and suicide, though its preliminary status means moral injury remains off the official list of injuries treated by VA clinicians.

  Moral injury was identified as both a contributing and an aggravating factor to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but unlike PTSD, it involves a conscious moral dimension and is sometimes called “spiritual injury.” It can occur because a soldier witnesses or commits an atrocity in a war he or she supports, such as killing civilians; it can occur in the aftermath of a war when veterans morally re-evaluate participation in a war they conclude was unjust; and it can occur when soldiers are forced to deploy in a war they deeply believe is wrong.

  On November 11, 2010, the Truth Commission released its report at an Interfaith

  Service to Honor Moral Conscience, hosted by National City Christian Church in