“A Free and Open—and Heated!—Debate”: The Military Chaplaincy, the Supreme Court, and Selective Conscientious Objection to War

Navy Chief of Chaplains James. W. Kelly was flummoxed as he prepared for a press conference in early 1968. Aware of the growing antagonism to an escalating war in Vietnam, the Catholic priest asked his military subordinates a somewhat unusual question: did they “consider American participation in the war in Vietnam to be morally right or wrong”? Few questions of conscience were as fraught as the constitutional and theological viability of selective conscientious objection to war. By 1968, the military itself could not avoid discussing the moral debates over intervention in Vietnam. 

What exactly counted as conscience, and what its sources and foundations needed to be, rattled antiwar activists and local draft boards alike. Through several Vietnam-era draft cases, the Supreme Court redefined conscience, slowly removing its ties to formal religion and crafting a generous interpretation open to believers, agnostics, and atheists alike. As civilian religious litigants pressed the Supreme Court to enable selective conscientious objection to war, religious groups debated the acceptability of such stances for their laity and their clergy. The chaplaincy became a critical battleground for religious groups trying to work out their stance on selective conscientious objection because clergy received automatic exemptions from the draft. They—unlike all other draft-eligible American men—could object to Vietnam, rather than war in general, and abstain from military service.

This paper examines the parallel battles over the selective conscientious objection to war that occurred in the courts, within faith group, and among chaplains during the Vietnam War era. It argues that divergent views of selective conscientious objection stemmed from different planes of moral reckoning: while inter-religious debates centered on individual conscience and chaplain debates on responsibility to men, the Court underscored racial and class equality within the nation.