Confessional writing asks for the reader’s sympathy, and its success or failure hangs not merely on the writer’s disclosure but also on his offering something that the reader is willing and able to receive. For a reader to receive what the author offers, he must find himself agreeing not only in matters of fact but in matters of judgment. Robert Keeler’s Sacred Soldier: The Dangers of Worshiping Warriors succeeds and fails, but when it fails, it’s because Keeler does not judge rightly the import of the facts he offers. The point of this book is to atone for his own missteps and to convert the reader away from the worship of American military service members. Keeler’s confession, while no doubt reparative for him, will not manage to convince his reader.
That the book is confessional is clear from Keeler’s own framing. His introductory and concluding chapters present it as a journalist’s offering, “a way of doing penance for [his] ignorance.” He regrets many things from his youth: his ignorance about the Vietnam War, voting for Nixon, and his failure to attend to U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Conversion was the only cure. Keeler was brought face to face with “the essential nonviolence of the Gospel” in the early 1990s through the work of Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization. This conversion led Keeler to realize that the United States of America suffers from an “idolatrous attitude toward the military.” This claim is true. The problem with the book does not lie here but in Keeler’s misunderstanding the origins of this idolatry and thus what it will take to counteract it.
In one chapter, he presents problematic aspects of military-recruitment efforts: approaching high school–aged children, cooperating with the entertainment industry, and promising free education via the GI Bill. None of these observations are particularly revelatory. Where else do we suppose the makers of Top Gun got their aircraft carriers? But Keeler includes them to demonstrate that the military is hard at work burnishing its reputation among the civilian population by painting a picture of professional competence and patriotism that is hard to resist.
Another chapter, on politicians deploying their military bona fides in order to win elections, fails to say much that is meaningful about either the state of American politics or the dangers of military adulation. Indeed, this chapter seems to be written primarily for the purpose of worrying about Tom Cotton and Donald Trump. Keeler admits that military service does not do much to guarantee votes—which contradicts his thesis—and that veterans are a varied group who do not fit “under one convenient label.” A less cynical observer than Keeler might simply say that politicians highlight their time in the military as part of a campaign message that indicates a track record of public service. But Keeler is convinced that “[t]he implied message is simple: You can thank me for my service by voting for me.”
Other chapters prove more insightful and more harrowing. The most powerful chapter deals with the incidence of sexual harassment and assault in the military. Keeler is at his journalistic best when dealing directly with the stories of sexual assault and the obstacles delaying congressionally imposed reforms of the military justice system. But in this chapter and others, Keeler dabbles in armchair psychologizing that dilutes the message of his book. The comments he makes about the motivations of soldiers are a good example: “Keep in mind that when paratroopers jump out of perfectly good airplanes, defying the laws of gravity and common sense, a key force impelling many of them is not intelligence but the need to prove masculinity by doing something that looks brave.”
It is hard to take seriously Keeler’s claim that his goal in calling out idolatry is to help military service members when he portrays soldiers as dupes living out fantasies of manliness. In his concluding chapter, he registers some surprise that public opinion about the military has shifted so little in recent years, given that so much has been written about the military’s internal problems and the failures of politicians to use the armed forces effectively. Instead, he laments, “In today’s America, it is an institution esteemed above all others.”
The disjunction between the flow of books and articles that are critical of the military, war, and warriors and the continued trust and respect Americans have for the armed forces is interesting, because it shows a fundamental flaw in the way books like this one attempt to argue for their conclusions. Keeler’s book attempts to argue with the world on its own terms rather than offering new ones. He has accepted the idea that the way to convince Americans that idolatry is wrong is to show them that the military and its service members are not worthy of worship because they are ineffective or corrupt. The problem with this assumption is that it presumes that were the military better at fighting wars, less prone to tolerating abuse, or more adept at recruiting young Americans without dangling economic incentives in front of them, that this sort of “near-idolatrous worship” might be the appropriate response. This approach fails to wrangle with the deeper, abiding issue: that the United States’ politics of war remain so convincing.
This is where the Church can contribute to the conversation about war and peace. Keeler was not, he admits, convinced as a young man by the plentiful evidence of militaristic excess staring him in the face—the kinds of evidence he presents to his readers now. Instead, he was converted by a nun who preached the Gospel to him. The Church offers an alternative to the politics of the world by showing that there is another form of life, a Heavenly City, that lives by life and not by death. This offer fails to be received exactly to the extent that the Church fails to be an alternative to war. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas diagnoses this problem in an essay called “America’s God,” in which he claims, “Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.” The same can be said of Catholics in the United States.
Another way of putting it is to say that the earthly city seems more real to American Christians than the city of God. If, to quote Hauerwas again, “war is America’s altar,” then Marines and soldiers are its sacramental priesthood, asked to sacrifice themselves and others to a strange god. The state can and will demand that you die and kill for it. The Church probably will not, and it seems less serious by contrast. Christians ought to oppose idolatry of the state and the military by being an alternative to the politics of war. To do that, the Church must engage in practices—giving and receiving the sacraments, preaching effectively, serving others—that form people who understand that their homeland is heavenly and that they belong to a kingdom that is not of this world.
Service in the military is compelling in part because humans are political animals. People join the military, as Keeler points out, for economic reasons or to prove themselves or because they have been recruited. But they also join to take an active role in American political life, to be a part of something bigger than themselves. The various branches of the armed forces encourage this view of military service and shape new recruits to understand themselves and their service in exactly this way.
It is no surprise that the Marine Corps comes in most often for Keeler’s specific criticism; it is the branch of the United States military that has most explicitly embraced this view of military service as a higher calling. The Marine Corps has a “mythology,” and Keeler is repeatedly struck by the “powerful allure of the Marine Corps dress blues.” Marines speak of their formation in baptismal terms, imprinting the heart with an indelible mark that makes them different from others—not only during their term of service but forever. Most Christian Marines would have a clearer grasp of the sacramental quality of their military training than that of their actual baptism.
When I say that the politics of this world are more substantial to the average American than are the politics of the Kingdom of Heaven, I mean that the Church has its work cut out for it. Arguing against the lionization of soldiers by attempting to show that they are not particularly heroic or smart or worthy of the nation’s respect is a mistake. There is glory and honor in serving your country, and it requires discipline and self-sacrifice to take part in your nation’s wars.
For the Church to truly be an alternative to war it should not deny these obvious truths about the military. It should instead relativize them through its worship of and witness to the God “who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness” (Isaiah 40:23). The earthly glory, honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice of the military will continue to attract people until the Church shows the service of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, to be more compelling than the sacrifices made for the god of war.
Sacred Soldier
The Dangers of Worshiping Warriors
Robert F. Keeler
Interlink Books
$20 | 248 pp.
