Spiritual Readiness, Pentagon-Style: Who Measures a Soldier’s Soul?

Pete Hegseth (0:01)

Today, at My Direction, I'm establishing the Office of Religious Affairs. Starting today, and for Secretaries of War after me, the Office of Religious Affairs will report straight to the top.

No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary. This is not going to be a paper-pushing shop. It's going to have real teeth. They'll protect budgets, demand infrastructure, and strengthen religious support. The experts, our chaplains, will finally have an advocate at the highest levels.

Amanda Henderson (0:32)

From Religion News Service and the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, this is Complexified, a podcast for the religiously curious and politically frustrated. I'm Amanda Henderson. Soldiers are trained for physical combat. But war also confronts them with death, killing, grief, guilt, and questions of meaning. The military has long employed chaplains to care for those needs, across religious traditions and for service members with no religion at all. Now, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says that system needs more power.

He's created an Office of Religious Affairs with what he calls real teeth.

Its director will report directly to him, oversee funding and policy, and develop tools to assess the spiritual readiness of the force. Hegseth has also made conservative Christianity a prominent part of his leadership in the military. At the speech where he announced the new office, he explained why.

Pete Hegseth (1:32)

We're placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health. Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God. Because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good, evil is not, and America's military must understand the difference.

Amanda Henderson (1:50)

Today, RNS national reporter Jack Jenkins joins us to examine what Hegseth is building. Will this office help service members draw strength from their own deepest beliefs? Or will the Pentagon decide which beliefs make someone spiritually fit to serve? Jack, welcome back to Complexified.

Jack Jenkins (2:11)

Thanks so much for having me.

Amanda Henderson (2:15)

Jack, what exactly has Pete Hegseth announced?

Jack Jenkins (2:19)

So at this speech that he gave before assembled troops and officers, he announced actually a slate of proposals, but one of them was explicitly tied to faith, and that was the creation of what he's calling the Office of Religious Affairs.

As he describes it, this is giving religious leaders and chaplains more direct attention from the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense's office. And the way he introduced it was kind of, you know, dealing with spiritual readiness, and he quoted scripture. The actual memo lays out more that there's an individual in particular that fills this slot of heading up this office and seems to be the person who will do the advocacy to the Secretary of Defense on behalf of this office.

Amanda Henderson (3:11)

And what kind of authority will this Director of the Office have?

Jack Jenkins (3:15)

You're asking great questions.

Amanda Henderson (3:18)

Not many details.

Jack Jenkins (3:20)

Well, there's some details and it's still unclear. I will say, you know, speaking to some of the sources, folks who work with military chaplains, I will say that this memo and this announcement landed with a lot of confusion, because it's worth noting that there already is a chaplaincy corps within the US military. They tend to kind of run things differently, depending on the branch of the military that you're in. But what's confusing about this new announcement is there already is an Armed Forces Chaplain Board that exists, that in some ways the folks I've spoken to serves a similar function to the role of the Office of Religious Affairs, in terms of, you know, being the direct line to the Secretary of Defense, or at least being part of that system that it's supposed to say, how do we get more funding for X, Y, and Z?

The promise of this new office is, you know, it was suggested that there will be increased funding for a lot of these initiatives and better resource allocation. And folks I spoke with were actually celebrating that as an idea. The question is what it will look like in practice and whether it will unseat current chains of command and current ways of doing things, and whether it will make things more or less complicated, among other concerns.

Amanda Henderson (4:35)

So currently, it's a board. Is this a shift to one person who will be the director of this office?

Jack Jenkins (4:42)

So I think that is the idea, is that there will be, there is also a person who represents the board. The board, okay, like a chair. But the idea of being this almost elevated, the way it was put to me is almost as if, not quite, but almost as if they're like another joint chief. You know what I mean? Like at that, almost at that level of advising the Secretariat of Defense, of like this kind of advocate in that space. Again, what that would mean in practice, in terms of how that would shift the day-to-day lives of an average military chaplain, I got a lot of questions back to me from the people I was hoping would know more about.