Between Race and Religion: The Army’s Approach to African American and Japanese American Chaplains during World War II

Scholars point to World War II as the turning point in the establishment of “trifaith America” – the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish triptych articulated by Will Herberg in 1955 and taken as cultural, if not actually sociological, fact since then. Yet the Office of the Army Chief of Chaplains, one of the most significant contributors to the development of this ideal, assumed and pursued “Protestant-Catholic-Jew-Negro” as a functional guideline that mixed certain categories of race and religion while ignoring others.

This paper compares the approach to African-American chaplains and Japanese-American chaplains to examine the ideology, administration, and operation of the Army chaplaincy; it therefore explores how war maintained the racialization of religion and prompted the religionization of race. Classifying African-American religion as its own entity, separate from white Protestantism and Catholicism, reflected prevailing racial thinking; however, the Army—unlike the Navy—also opened opportunities to African-American clergy who, as chaplains, became military officers whose rank demanded respect. In contrast, despite a stated willingness to open the chaplaincy to Buddhists, the Chief of Chaplains did not pursue Buddhist candidates with the same persistence applied to African Americans, although the Army did commission Japanese-American Christian chaplains. The complex stratification of race and religion within the chaplaincy underscores the ways in which religion concurrently mollified and entrenched racial thinking within the complex matrices of war and empire.

This paper therefore complicates the simplistic diagram of tri-partite American religion as well as the dichotomous distinctions between civic and racial nationalism. It recognizes the military chaplaincy as a venue of state religion that anticipated changes in American society, reacted to contemporary understandings of race, and attempted to work out new visions of acceptable American religion.