Formed for Sacrifice: Gender, Politics, Theology, and the Trauma of Soldiers

Abstract

Moral injury is a wound of betrayal and a rupture of trust in the context of the exercise of hierarchical power. Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon presses toward a consideration of the “political causes of such injuries.” This dissertation examines the good soldier/good wife trope from political theory as a lens for understanding those political causes. The trope shows up legally, politically, theologically, and in the context of the trauma of women and soldiers and reveals the military as subordinated within the nation as a kind of household and the moral and political agency of soldiers within it as akin to that of women in traditional households. In Chapter 2, I argue that this is the political context in which moral injury occurs. Betrayal in the context of war is so significant not just because of the high stakes of war but also because the relationships of domination and subordination in which soldiers are formed for war are gendered and coded in familial terms and oriented toward sacrifice for some higher good. In Chapter 3, I argue that the betrayal of soldiers is further bound up with how American political theology, and Christian theology serve to buttress that moral ecology. The same theologies of sacrifice that are deployed to buttress the moral ecology that undergirds the subordination and abuse of women in the household are mobilized against soldiers. I show how sacrificial political theology inflects the formation of women in the household and soldiers in the military through an examination of the mysteries of May, Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. In Chapter 4, I argue that war trauma and the domestic sexual trauma of women can be seen together (as they are by the likes of Judith Herman and others) precisely because their political situation and moral formation are of a piece. Chapter 5, then, is a theological intervention. The work of feminist and womanist thinkers and activists to upend patriarchal and racist hierarchical relations are key resources for understanding and confronting moral injury in the military context, especially theological and political responses. I draw on feminist, womanist, and Black theology to critique both the mysteries of May as grounded in beneficent sacrificial political theologies and to propose an alternative theology of blessing as a basis for reimagining the political agency of soldiers. I conclude with some potential political interventions.