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hi everybody I'm Logan Isaac from centurion's Guild uh this in this video I want to talk about why Centurion Guild exists why what we do is important and just basically our rationale for existing in a moment though we're going to do some word association when you see the next slide I want you to write down the first three things that come to your mind or just think of them but if you do write them down I'd love for you to share them with us at info@ Centurion guild. or in the comments Below in YouTu or on on our blog but don't think about uh what is it you're going to write down there's no right or wrong answer just write down your gut reaction uh I'm not going to hit pause or anything but in just a moment you're going to see um uh what I'm hoping you'll share your word associations with all right are you ready here we

go remember to write down just the first three things that come to your mind with this phrase I'm not going say it cuz I don't want to shape anybody's responses and remember nothing is right or wrong this exercise is just meant to draw out our thoughts and feelings about what you see when you written down three things uh if you want to share them with us on social media um we are on we are @ centurions Guild on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram where you can share it in the comments below we generally like to hear what people think when they see this phrase and we'll talk about it later but I want to make sure that you're you get the write down those three

things so for some the term Christian Soldier has positive moral connotations there's a certain Pride or excitement that is evoked it may even feel redundant as though by saying Christian you also imply Soldier or vice versa for others however the term draws up profoundly negative moral connotations and just seeing it and writing May conjure feelings of indignation or even revulsion the two words may seem mutually exclusive as though by saying Soldier you undermine any null association with the word

Christian to a select few however the term is inescapably personal Christian Soldiers past and present know that who and what they are is complicated that armed service and Christian faith runs deeper than costic ideologies and political divisiveness the phenomenon of moral injury which is becoming popular uh is relatively new and it's a particularly Clinic goal in nature but Christian soldiers have been around for a few Millennia there's a lot of good material on moral injury and post-traumatic stress uh which I won't repeat here but this presentation this video is about gaining greater insight and appreciation for the complex reality of arm service in Christian faith this is important because clinical pharmacological therapeutic and all the other interventions uh that we know of are valuable and necessary but they really need to be accompanied by a rigorous engagement with a person's Faith too often however care for soldiers is religion averse and few veteran services service organizations or government agencies are willing to get theological with soldiers and Veterans and this may be due to anxiety over the Constitution's Establishment Clause or concerns over tax exempt status or well-intentioned desire for the bread that Interfaith dialogue affords at Centurian Guild we really want to mine the depths of the Christian tradition that isn't to say that we shouldn't be doing Interfaith dialogue but each partner in that dialogue should know their tradition as well as possible and that's what we try and do for Christianity moral injuries however cannot be treated the same way bodily injuries are unlike pharmacology generic Solutions do do not ultimately work because they don't go deeply enough avoiding religion and theology is a dangerous oversight when we have in mind the epidemic rate of suicide within military communities so let me explain why this is every few years the Pew Research Center conducts a survey of thousands of Americans from all 50 states about the religious affiliations they call this the religious landscape survey despite widely reported data about the decline of formal church membership and dwindling numbers of Christians attending weekly worship over 70% of Americans still identify as Christian that means that a solid majority of Americans still identify with a specific Faith with particular resources practices and beliefs applying that 70% determined by the RLS to the military Community helps us understand the concentration of Christians who are also veterans assuming most active soldiers receive care directly from the military let's just look at veterans to save a bit of time according to the Department of Veterans Affairs the total population of veterans in the United States is 21.6 million which would mean that nearly 15.2 million are uh Christian veterans sorry I'm repeating the

slide trying to determine the number of veterans who identify as Christians who also suffer from some form of combat stress would need to incorporate conflict specific trauma rights last year I set out to do just that but I calculated the stress rates prior to applying the Pew data it may be confusing but you can find this on my website I am lmi.org the blog entry is called how many Christian Soldiers live with PTSD I think but hopefully I've taken some screenshots that will give you some idea of how complicated it can be now there are no Living World War I veterans anymore but I found that World War II has 1.7 million living veterans at a 27% trauma rate so about 459,000 World War I veterans live with combat stress furthermore the Korean War has 2.3 million living veterans at a 27% pts rate and you'll see that I site my uh where I'm getting these numbers uh on my blog which is hyperlink so something like 621,000 Korea veterans live with uh combat stress of some kind moving forward the the Vietnam War has 7.4 million living veterans at a 30% trauma rate so there's probably 2.2 million Vietnam Vets living with combat stress the Gulf War in the early 90s has 2.3 million living veterans at a 12% rate so there's likely 276,000 Gulf War veterans living with pts or combat stress and my generation of veterans of O and OE uh has 1.95 million living veterans at a 15.5% trauma rate so my peers so about 302,000 of my peers live with combat stress before we move forward it's important to note that all these numbers are very conservative estimates they only count formal diagnoses um often through the VA um but private uh medical insurance does or medical uh experience does offer PTSD diagnosis um but 60% of veterans do not receive care through the VA and therefore would not be receiving formal diagnosis through the VA um and diagnoses and uh private practices are less uh less common so that that number is uh very conservative no less than uh estimate so if all that is true then we can total the raw numbers for an educated guess as to how many veterans of any conflict are currently living with some form of combat stress if my math is right then we can reliably guess that almost 3.9 million veterans are currently living with combat stress let that sink in for a moment if there are 322 million Americans that's almost 10% of the population who are veterans and who live with combat

stress now let's think about how this relates to the church as I said the Centurion Guild is a particularly Christian um educational organization uh and veteran services organization if Christians are as well represented in the military Community as they are in the general American population and that isn't uh you know that isn't a a purely reliable statistic this is just to get us an educated guess then the number of Christian veterans living with pts would be about 70% of the total number of veterans living with combat stress that means that there's likely about 2.7 million Christian veterans who are living with combat

stress moral injury is an important concept but it's an incomplete model for care injuries are so IC they require a body treating injuries assumes a number of skills that take years to master paramedics have to be experts in anatomy physiology and all kinds of other bodily Sciences but with moral injury we don't often hear talk about the moral person or body upon which a moral injury is inflicted if you're into the antiquarian books like I am you'll find that psychological is just the latest way to say psychical from psyche which mean which explains why we call moral injuries so wounds and why mental health experts are consulted however an overemphasis on the DSM can have the unintended effect of mistaking people for their diagnosis I have a diagnosis but it's not what I am when people make the subtle mistake of assuming that pts is my primary feature I become a walking privation I am what I lack for example if you want to lead a small group or offer spiritual direction for vets and you side a learning objective as I don't know say resiliency then you're reinforcing the dangerous stereotype that veterans are not already resilient now maybe it's my ego but I suspect that boot camp Airborne training Air Assault school and 14 months in combat have pretty well established that I can take a beating and a half in fact in the 10 years since I've been a vet myself I don't think I've met another vet deficient in resilience self-esteem or the Myriad other qualities we're often implicitly told that we lack this is a danger of focusing too much on diagnosis and it's why the church needs a constructive account of what it means means to be a Christian Soldier not based on caricatures or stereotypes but on the witness of our diverse history and traditions the church cannot safely speak of injuries until we can accurately identify features of the moral body upon which the infliction of moral injuries is possible in the first place centurion's Guild provides a constructive way of thinking about Christian soldiers that situates them within the story of Salvation history to which the church Bears witness we help veteran caregivers ministers and lay people of Faith share sh in the living story of Christian Soldiers through thoughtful conversations and meaningful Community doing so exposes non-veterans to the complicated moral identity and architecture that is damaged when one engages in Acts that violate their religious training and beliefs we train clergy and lay people to think more deeply about moral injury and combat stress by thinking about the moral formation we all undergo in the church as well as the cultural conditioning that affects our self- understanding as Christians the the moral people created by Churches should be shaped by scripture reason tradition experience worship but too often deeply formative Christian practices are lacking I don't mean this as an insult but as a lament I'm familiar with the Matrix of tensions inherent in church life and Ministry in the world in fact my wife is a deacon and youth director at the UMC

Church our ecumenical model is reflected in our mission we help people share in the living story of Christian Soldiers through thoughtful conversations and meaningful Community for the sake of brevity and concision let's just talk about two points we raise that help illuminate how our model complement and enriches other interventions the first is share in nobody exists in a vacuum and that complicated phrase we've been talking about is unintelligible apart from the tradition and Community which birthed it Christian soldiers are Christians first and as members of the body of Christ they are not alone the church shares in their story and it is incomplete without them and the glory that they give to God in their own particular Ways by sharing in we also want to remember that for the church there is neither Soldier nor civilian neither enlisted nor officer nor is there Grunt and Pogue for We Are All One in Christ Jesus soldiers should not exclude civilians neither by the impulse to protect them by keeping their stories inside nor by wielding social Prestige as a weapon lording it over their civilian counterparts on the other hand non-veterans in have a responsibility to own their part in the evils of War as Jewish Theologian Abraham Hessel has said in a representative democracy some are guilty but all are responsible Wars belong to all of us the culpability as well as the pain we are our brothers and sisters Keepers and is up to us not only to multiply the joy of our members but to divide their grief secondly the story of Christian Soldiers alive our history is ours to interpret and assign meaning it is a story that belongs to the whole body of Christ and soldiers should invite civilians in rather than pushing them away individual Soldier stories are all subplots in the story of Salvation history and the whole church inherits the story as of soldiers past by Merit of our one baptism therefore we must take care not to assign positive or negative moral significance without care for to do so injures the whole church not just those who bear the greatest moral weight for the conduct of violence Christian soldiers are not all Cut From the Same Cloth the Canon of soldier Saints in the Bible and in church history is not morally monolithic we cannot write out Cain Samson or Jon of Arc without also excising King David Frances of aisi or nations of lyola all of whom were soldiers who did

violence for the rest of my time I want to share a sample of Christian Soldiers with you I do so within the context of moral injury because Christian Soldiers represent the moral bodies upon which moral injuries may be inflicted my purpose is ideological to treat moral injuries most effectively we need to figure out both its causes and its victims there's a lot more I could say about why story and narrative is important but that will burn a lot more time than we have if you want to read more about the philosophy behind this I'm currently giving a class at Duke University that explains the significance of narrative story identity and culture the title of the course is the virtues of war and it's deliberately provocative just like the beginning of this of this presentation was all my lectures and everything you need to know is on my website which you can find by plugging in this case sensitive URL bit. l/ virtues ofwar I'll give you a second to write it down because I don't think I know how to hyperlink it onto

YouTube so maybe I should introduce myself finally I'm Logan Isaac and I spent over six years on active duty as an army artilleryman after two years as a paratrooper at Fort Brag I transferred to scoffield barracks in Hawaii to pursue my education and will live in Hawaii after a year there I deployed to oif2 and spent 14 months in combat including the transfer of authority in July 2004 and the nation's first free elections in January 2005 being on the battlefield stirred up my faith so I started exploring theology which got me into reading my Bible a lot more closely than I ever had before I very quickly was confronted by the fact that soldiers don't appear to be the most scrupulous characters in Scripture that time of searching led me to some very difficult conversations and decisions one was that I felt being an artilleryman made it near impossible to love my enemies if I was busy blowing them up I read a lot of copis literature that convinced me of that but which failed to convince me of the often repeated assumption that the military is inherently evil my ear and service put me in relationship with Incredible people whose character was frankly far deeper than the folks I knew through church as a Christian though I felt convicted that a gun or Howitzer didn't contribute to the kingdom but I didn't believe that the military was monolithic in 2005 I to be a non-combatant conscientious objector which meant I would deploy again but without a weapon the headline from an article written about my application at the time uh appeared in G's Magazine's winter 2006 issue and the headline was Christian Soldier returns to front lines unarmed the rest of the story gets fair Fairly complicated but I did write a book about it with iniversity press in 2012 called reborn on the 4th of July because I was baptized in a condominium swimming pool in W Kei on Independence Day in 2006 I'll share some about other Christian soldiers in a moment but I should preface that by saying that most of them appear in my second book for God and Country in that order which I authored with Herold press the menite publisher in 2013 both these books are available for $10 each uh if you go to the Centurion Guild Shopify store or if you see me at an event somewhere finally and this is just a technicality my bachelor name appears on the titles because I used to be Logan male at I took the name Martin when I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in 2013 and then my partner and I both took the name Isaac when we got married in 2014 so now I'm Logan Martin Isaac maybe one day we'll go through and update the the covers of the books but maybe not also so the first Christian soldiers are biblical and their story is as complicated and nuanced as the soldier stories that will follow you may already know the centu of great faith from Matthew 8 and Luke 7 but did you also know that in Catholic Mass the last thing the congregation says together before the priest consumes the Eucharist quote directly from him Jesus is amazed at his humility for believing Christ's Authority overrides that of the government saying I'm not worthy to receive you but only say the word and my servant shall be healed but not all biblical soldiers are as good as this Commander some we know are supposed to be cautionary tales examples we are not supposed to follow and yet who God works through anyway meaning that we should not uh immediately see any of these characters in absolutes we should remember Cain was marked by God Not For Shame at killing his younger brother but as protection according to Genesis 4:15 he was marked so that no one who came upon him would kill him including Cain self I imagine his curse in fact of being a fugitive and a Wanderer lasts all of two verses furthermore we must recall that in Exodus there was a reason that there are 10 plagues instead of none God was patient with Pharaoh far more patient than mere mortals might be there are many there are are as many times if not slightly more depending on your translation that the text says Pharaoh's heart was hardened on his own as there are that say God hardened Pharaoh's heart so we should be slow to think of him in absolute terms as it seems even Moses and our god did not do so finally I remember hearing about Mighty Samson as a child judges 16 however is not a hero story but a warning cry Samson is not a revered character within the context of scripture as a Nazarite he is forbidden from touching dead bodies is supposed to refrain from alcohol and to never cut his the hair on his head the first two requirements he breaks in short order when his weakness for women violates a third his revenge is something like a murder suicide an act of terrorism that God paradoxically uses to his glory but we are not called to be like Samson or pharao or Cain for that matter the amazing amount of complexity of biblical soldiers is best summed up in a figure that oral tradition has named longinus this is the earliest depiction of him from a 3rd Century Illustrated Bible in the gospels he has not given a name and is not clear if there are any if there are more than one soldier involved although tradition likely merged two characters um and he hints at the profound Nuance of Christian Soldiers the scene in which he first appears is with a long spear from which he gets his name from lch an instrument used only in battle at the foot of the cross he is a soldier who pierces Jesus aside to make sure he is dead this makes him the single person most directly responsible for killing Christ the only son of the father and let that sink in for a second however the second time he appears is as a soldier who at the exact same place at Jesus's feet looks upon him as the Earth shakes and the sky darkens and proclaims surely this man was a Son of God this claim is noteworthy because it happened several verses and in some cases chapters before any of Jesus's own disciples do the same these two vastly different moral events embodied in one biblical character should Inspire us to think far more deeply about Christian Soldiers St longinus holds a place of honor uh in the Vatican along uh as one of four pillars in the Octagon of St Peter's Basilica and I've spent some time talking about biblical soldiers because not all denominations share in the tradition of Saints or hog geography but in case you're wondering about Christian Soldiers outside our textual Cannon there is plenty more to go around I should note that in retrospect I often gravitate toward examples that challenge assumptions often held by either Patriots or pacifists or to inspire other Christian Soldiers to remember that many Saints have made enormous controver contributions to the church despite crippling combat stress there's no shortage of saints that challenge Patriot assumptions about loyalty to our Union a large number of early soldiers became military Martyrs in the first several centuries after Emperor Diocesan tried to purge the military of Christians who were accused of atheism because they refused to worship the Roman gods Max Milan of Tessa for example was a conscript from North Africa who refused to be measured for a uniform and would not even allowed dog tags to be put around his head the magistrate tried to persuade him reminding him that the military life was one of fun Travel and Adventure but Max Millian didn't care reminded that refusal was a capital crime he gladly stretched out his NE before the sword and was killed insisting that a soldier of Christ could not kill another more recent example is fron Yager I probably said that wrong a farmer who also refused conscription rather than the Roman Empire France faced down the Third Reich defying even his own Bishop who encouraged the middle ground of passive resistance but he insisted that survival is not a virtue that he would not serve in the Nazi army he was beheaded and the Catholic Church made him a saint in 2007 now that we've heard of some saints that push back against patriotic impulses we may have let's talk about some that challenge paist assumptions which often absolutize an ethic of non-cooperation Jonah Arc is one such Saint and a woman at that after hearing from Michael the Archangel and Saints Katherine and Margaret telling her to reestablish her King to the French throne and overthrow English tyranny she did just that military sexual assault is as real a danger today as it was then and in order to to avoid being raped she had to wear a suit of armor later when the English managed to capture her and put her on trial she was claimed to she claimed to have preferred carrying her flag over wielding a sword she was killed for crossdressing but sainted posthumously and the English clergy clergy involved in a trial were antiz or condemned for using political power to advance evil in this case the martyrdom and of literate woman who only ever referred to herself as a maid if we believe her count she was called by God and the angels to lead her nation in battle and her Victory suggests God's mysterious blessing another Christian Soldier forces us to rethink anti-military bias in the church is Ignatius of lyola a Spanish Knight and author of the spiritual exercises that bear his name after suffering a debilitating wound in battle he began reading the gospels and the lives of the Saints upon his conversion he took the he took some time to abandon military life entirely but he did eventually leave his sword and armor at the foot of a statue of the virgin Mary at monserat in Spain where the stained glass window is still found after that he went to Seminary and became a priest founding the Jesuits not long after that but his military training was put to good use and his order was the first to include a vow of obedience as a requirement for their initiation and to this day the Jesuits are known as God's Marines and like the military they are also known for the things that they have not done so well including being the Vanguard of the Spanish Inquisition but currently many of the Catholic educational institutions the United States are Jesuit and they have a a very uh wonderful Mission overseas particularly around education so I won't spend much time on inspirational Christian Soldiers and I'll just assume that there are not as many soldiers and Veterans watching right now as there are civilians and caregivers but there are a number of individuals who knew who we know well for their Evangelical exploits but we often Overlook the profound effect that military service or combat had upon them we all know about Francis ofi for example who preached to the animals but none of it would have happened had it not been for his experience in battle of peria in which he was one of only nine survivors he spent a year as a prisoner of war and when he was ransomed by his wealthy family he wandered the streets at night and was known as a vigilante he tried to return to battle but was stopped twice by dreams that convinced him to finally turn back and go home he did eventually find God who told him to repair the church after trying to be martyred by prizing to a Muslim Sultan he began an order The Franciscan eight of the first 10 of his followers were Veterans of the same war in which he fought most of them former enemies as for the animals we might ask in light of the emotional support animals provided by the VA if he was ministering to them or if they were ministering to him finally a few well-known modern Christian soldiers that help remind my peers that there is hope are important to cover maybe you've heard of quanti of farms in Georgia started by Clarence Jordan an Roc Cadet who saw racism in the South and decided the military wasn't for him or maybe you've heard of John M Perkins the Civil Rights champion and founder of the Christian Community Development Association or ccda who spent three years in the Army in okanawa during the height of the Korean War he describes his military service not in dismissive tones common and Progressive circles in which he runs but as the first place in which he had a trusting relationship with white men so that's it for now just a little bit about Christian Soldiers past and present and why they're significant in terms of moral injury and combat stress or even just in terms of the raw numbers of American veterans and soldiers who identify as Christian and why our mission is so important uh right now in uh in a time in which uh our conflicts are ongoing and the the veteran services don't frequently delve into theological issues Centurions Guild does just that it's our bread and butter and we look forward to hearing from you or your loved ones if if there if there's anything that we can do uh to help uh by sharing in the The Living story of Christian Soldiers either through meaningful Community or thoughtful conversation leave your questions below or in the comments or just write us at info@ centurions g.org we look forward to hearing from you and I hope you'll continue to watch these as they get posted