REVIEW
The
Military Chaplain
Abercrombie, Clarence L., III. THE MILITARY CHAPLAIN. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1977, 191 pp. Three basic questions guide the study reported in The Military Chaplain: (a) in the context of American society what roles and values are viewed differently by civilian clergymen and military commanders? (b) assuming there are differences, where along a military officer civilian-clergyman continuum are chaplains generally located? (c) are there any factors of military or religious background that predict where along this continuum a particular chaplain will be found? To answer these questions a survey was sent to every Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, and United Methodist chaplain in the army, to every officer commanding a unit to which one of these chaplains was assigned (as of January 1, 1972), and to 100 randomly selected clergymen of each of the four denominations. The response rate for the chaplains was 39%, commanders 37%, and nonmilitary clergymen 44%. The data reveal that commanders generally rated the military functions chaplains performed (helping the army making soldiers better able to fight, assisting the commander, and so on) more important than did the civilian clergymen. Although there is little disagreement between clergy and commanders on their evaluation of pastoral functions, clergymen and commanders disagree greatly over the importance of the chaplain’s prophetic task (e.g., standing firmly against all political claims of ultimacy). Commanders stress &dquo;legitimation of
suffering&dquo;; clergymen stress the prophetic ministry. Similarly, more than 90% of the chaplains do not feel their task is to legitimate the
ARMED FORCES AND SOCIETY, Vol. 4 No. 1, November 1977 @ 1977 Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society
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military and almost 99% feel it should not be. Thus, both civilian and military clergy define their ministry in essentially the same ways. However, on issue-oriented attitudes and beliefs seen as important for military chaplains (U.S. interests in international relations, sensitivity to human suffering, nuclear retaliation against civilian population centers), chaplains are much closer in their views to commanders than they are to civilian clergymen. Quite simply, as this study makes clear, chaplains really love the army. Most chaplains tend to see military values as similar or identical to the values they developed as Christians and clergymen before becoming chaplains, and clergymen who become chaplains do not change their original attitudes. Moreover, differences between chaplains’ attitudes and civilian clergymen positively correlate with differences between these clergymen’s attitudes and those of the commanders.
What, then, accounts for these differences between clergymen and chaplains? Military background variables explain only a small portion of the variation. The author speculates that self-selection into and defection from the chaplaincy may account for some difference. More important, however, seems to be that for civilian clergy religion has changed over the past few years while for the chaplain it has not. The average chaplain has been in the army almost ten years and over those years the data indicate that the chaplains’ attitudes have remained fairly stable; but the attitudes of their civilian counterparts have changed significantly. In short, the military environment has shielded chaplains from influences that were making the civilian clergy much less
&dquo;military.&dquo; In concluding his study,
Abercrombie assumes a generally optimistic Army attempts to preserve respect for human life and dignity; the Chaplain Corps has remained faithful to the original source of its religious attitudes. Civilian clergy, in contrast, appear stance. The U.S.
increasingly less willing to accept a nationalistic definition of Christianity. However, if divergence between the attitudes of chaplains and civilian clergy is but one manifestation of a larger political (and theological) problem regarding American society’s attitudes toward the military, then American churchmen must think out more clearly what a chaplain should be and how he is to render service to the army, the nation, and his flock. One clear need is to examine what structural forms will be best suited to allow the chaplain to perform the prophetic ministry that is intrinsic to his theologically defined role.
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This study is very well done. The book is interesting and provocative,
simply presented, and clearly written. It contributes to our understanding of both the present situation of army chaplains and the role of religion in contemporary social institutions. However, the report does raise several questions that merit comment. First, data on civilian clergy and military commanders certainly are important complements to chaplains’ responses, but so too are the views of enlisted men. Though they exercise no authority over the chaplains, enlisted men do influence chaplains’ behavior and attitudes; client influence over professionals is not rare in other institutions. Second, the research questionnaire seems to assume that the prophetic and legitimating tasks of the chaplain are mutually exclusive; the respondent cannot rank both tasks as equally important, even if he judges them so. Third, Abercrombie clearly states that theories of attitude change do not explain variation in chaplains’ &dquo;militariness&dquo; because cleargymen who become chaplains do not change their original clerical attitudes; religion for the civilian clergymen has changed, but for the chaplain it has not. The evidence for this proposition, he admits, is not conclusive in any formal manner, even though this argument constitutes the main thrust of the study. How was it that the author did not prepare his questionnaire so that he could test his main hypothesis?
-Thomas M. Gannon, S. J. Loyola University of Chicago