Q1. Can you tell our readers a little bit about your book? What is your core argument?
Enlisting Faith tells the story of how the federal government, through the military chaplaincy, struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism over the twentieth century. It traces how the United States shifted from a chaplaincy that consisted of only mainline (white and African American) Protestants and Catholics to one that counts Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Christian Scientists, Buddhists, Seventh-day Adventists, Hindus, and evangelicals and, as of spring 2017, recognizes over 200 different faith groups and denominations among military personnel. This evolution was uneven—neither accidental nor fully envisioned. Blurred religious and racial categories confounded a military that, for decades, remained invested in racial segregation and race has always complicated government oversight of religion. Nevertheless, changes in the chaplaincy emerged through a combination of incremental top-down decisions made by government officials and grassroots agitation from civilians.
My core argument is that despite the constitutional separation of church and state, the government managed religion in the military and religion has played a significant role in state administration. As a result, it’s important to think about religion-state influence as bidirectional: the state has shaped religion as much as religion has shaped the state.
Enlisting Faith also makes two related arguments about periodization and the institution of the military. First, I argue that the idea of “tri-faith America” emerged in World War I, not World War II or the Cold War, and the military initially cultivated religious pluralism for pragmatic, rather than ideological, reasons. By World War II, when consensus around “tri-faith America” achieved public prominence, it had already begun fracturing. More religious groups wanted recognition, some who fell outside the Protestant-Catholic-Jewish fold, like Buddhists, and some who rejected the pluralist ethos, like Protestant fundamentalists. This divide has grown, and it continues to challenge the military and American society writ large.
Second, and relatedly, the military became a major arena of inter- and intra-religious politics over the twentieth century because it is as much a social and cultural institution as it is a martial one. The military can be conservative and hierarchical and, simultaneously, progressive and innovative. In recognizing the value of diversity and enabling civil rights, it often led the way (imperfectly, to be sure) and hastened change. I show how the military has served as a laboratory for state policy and a bellwether of change in American society—and this holds for race, gender, and sexuality as much as it does for religion.