Liminality and Loyalty: Identity Management for American Military Chaplains in the Vietnam War

Military chaplains, by design, live and work at the intersection of many communities. They operate between the sacred and secular, civilian and military, officer and enlisted, and between various faith groups and denominations. During the American War in Vietnam, these diverse communities could often pull chaplains in different directions, threatening, according to most sociological literature, to induce severe role conflict in chaplains. Role conflict theory suggests that the most common response to divided loyalties and incompatible identities is cognitive dissonance or privileging one role over another. Most of the literature has argued that this resulted in chaplains identifying more closely with their military identities than their religious ones. The examination of role conflict for military chaplains assumes a fundamental incompatibility between a chaplain's military and religious identities. Yet evidence from chaplains’ experiences in the Vietnam War—when these tensions might have been heightened given the intensity of religious protest against the war—suggests a more complicated story. Chaplains did sometimes feel a pull between their religious and civic loyalties, but their responses were neither uniform nor predictable. This paper uses chaplains’ first person accounts and official records to examine the multiple ways in which military chaplains managed their potentially-divided loyalties, while also acknowledging that many chaplains did not experience intense role conflict but instead integrated their identities to emphasize and preserve their liminal status.