Narratives of Trauma and Moral Agency among Christian Post-9/11 Veterans

Serving in the military is often a disruptive event in the lives of those who join, precipitating a reassessment of the service member’s ethical sensibilities or, tragically, resulting in lasting moral injury and trauma.

Serving in the military is often a disruptive event in the lives of those who join, precipitating a reassessment of the service member’s ethical sensibilities or, tragically, resulting in lasting moral injury and trauma. The military experience compels them to navigate multiple identities, from citizen to warrior and back. Their religious identity, sometimes rooted in a civilian religious community, can be altered by military participation. Through a series of inductive, in-depth qualitative interviews, Suitt explores how varied religious resources and potentially traumatic events affect the lives of post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian. Adding to existing research on moral injury, it traces how military chaplains, ethics education, just war theory rhetoric, and formal religious practice supplied by the military alter the course of service members’ moral lives. These narrative trajectories reveal how veterans use Christian faith or other systems of meaning-making to understand war and their identities as service members and veterans.