Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Capt. James B. Magness . March 28, 2003

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Capt. James B. Magness, Chaplain for the U.S. Atlantic fleet:

On televised war:
This is a new phenomenon for our families -- being able to watch everything. When I was a young sailor, an enlisted man in Vietnam, of course, there was some battlefield coverage then. But it was by tape delay, quite a delay -- 24 to 48 hours. Now, with the media being there, they see things real time. We have reporters on decks of aircraft carriers now. And the families see that.

On the navy family:
I continue to marvel at the endurance and the ability of families to keep putting things together and to be supportive of their sailors who are gone and far away. I think that's no accident. We work hard in this navy family to take care of our families, to see that their needs are met, to let them know that they're important, and to assure them that we're not going to take their sailors anywhere that we can't take care of them. We're not going to unnecessarily put them in harm's way. And as soon as we can bring them home, we'll bring them home. I think our families trust us, that we'll do that.

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Jay Magness

On issues chaplains and troops face in battle:
There are issues of fear. There are issues of courage. There are issues of trying to find how the faith is applied to this environment. When someone is facing the hostilities our sailors and our marines, soldiers, and airmen are facing, they face trying to come to grips with some of the most challenging emotions that they'll ever have to come to grips with in their lives.

Some of them are looking forward, in a way, to seeing how they're able to perform in the midst of the crisis they're going into. And that brings to the forefront a lot of their own emotions and feelings, some of which they've never felt before. We see this in people who are able to do things that they wouldn't normally be able to do, to work longer hours than they would normally be able to work, to go without sleep. Sometimes we have to remind people to stop and eat, because they're so engaged in what they're doing. That's a physical and emotional side of things, and there is a very real spiritual side to what they do.

When I first found myself acting as a combatant, as I looked down at my own hands, I realized that I'm part of what's going on here. It's not something someone else is doing. It's something I'm doing. And how do I deal with that? How do I deal with the trauma that I may be inflicting upon another person, upon another culture, upon families, upon lives of people? How do I work with that? What does my faith say about that?

On faith and harm's way:
By and large, in the military we are people of the three great Abrahamic traditions -- Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. All of those faith traditions have something to say about how we deal with life, what it means to take life, situations in which you might take life.

In the Christian tradition, we spend a lot of time talking about what Jesus says about how we ought to deal with one another, how we ought to love other people, how we ought to care for them. It's sometimes a very difficult thing to send someone into harm's way and expect them to behave as faithful people and yet perform some of the acts that they have to perform, when they have to do harm to another person. People of significant faith often have difficulty dealing with that. Maybe not immediately -- it may be months on, sometimes years on that they have difficulty. But at some point or another, they have to come to grips with that. How do they put their faith together with the reality of their lives? That's where we come in.

On the chaplain's role:
We spend a lot of time listening. It's very easy to go in and tell someone what they ought to think and how they ought to believe in [traumatic] situations. And I think these are the most traumatic moments anyone can ever face in life. It's much more important, though, to listen and find out exactly what the trauma is they're trying to deal with, than to help them find what their own faith tradition says about this.

If it's a Muslim, I'd help the Muslim if there's not another Muslim chaplain around to explore what the Qur'an says about killing people, taking lives, hurting other people; what does the Qur'an say about finding forgiveness? And I'd do the same for a Jew as I would for a Christian, for people of my own faith tradition.

The main focus of our chaplains who are forward deployed in the area of operations is to spend time staying with their people. This is not the time that we put on mammoth programs [and] study groups. I recall just recently hearing one army chaplain who is with one of the infantry units say, "It's going to take a lot to separate me from my people. Where my people go, I will be there with them," which is what separates us out from our civilian counterparts. When I was a civilian Episcopal priest in a parish, I didn't know where my people went all the time -- maybe once or twice a year. In this job, I go everywhere that my people go, and so do my chaplains. When it's in the field with marines, our navy chaplains are out in the field with them. When it's aboard ship, they're aboard ship with them, living the same life that they live.

Photo of
Jay Magness

Not only are they having to deal with the fear of other people, they're having to deal with their own fears. They're having to deal with their own needs for courage in the midst of conflict. Courage may be to them a little bit different. The fear may be a little bit different. "What do I have to say," the chaplain may be asking himself or herself, particularly the new chaplain, "to people who are engaged as our people are engaged, to people who fly the missions off of aircraft carriers? What do I have to say to a pilot who flies a plane? What do I have to say to an ordnance man who loads bombs on those aircraft when I know what's going to happen to those bombs?"

Almost all of our chaplains always survive through this and find a certain reservoir of strength to provide this ministry. They're engaged in this ministry because they wanted to be here. They are particularly invested in being out with people who are on the cutting edge of life, and they're there because of the people. Our faith groups send them there for that reason.

On facing mortality:
One of our chaplains recently made a statement (a navy chaplain serving with marines): "I know that the chapels are full right now. All of our worship services are attended to a maximum amount, and I know afterwards we won't have this. But this is a time of crisis. This is what we're here for."

Our people need to know that their religious beliefs can take them out and beyond the current moment that they're in, that their religious belief can sustain them, that through their religious beliefs they can find courage. They can face their fears and, as well, they can find forgiveness for whatever happens to them in these engagements.

We probably do more baptisms of adult service members out in the field in a combat area than any other place we go. And the same thing is happening aboard ship as is happening in the field. When we come back to the rear area, back to our home bases and the garrison areas, we don't do nearly as many. Baptism, for people in the Christian tradition, and sometimes confirmation, renewal of faith vows, are all very important to people of faith as they're facing their own mortality, looking at the fact that though they know, for the most part, they're going to survive what they're going through, there's the possibility that they won't. And they have to look that mortality right square in the face, and sometimes in ways they never in any other environment have to look it in the face.

On religious protests against war:
There are some people who believe that the protests and the questions being raised by some of the civilian denominations (denominations, I might say, that almost all send chaplains into active duty in the military) don't faze the servicemen. I tend to differ with that. They do hear this. Just as we get news back from the field, people in the field get news on what happens back in the United States. And when they know that they're not being supported, particularly by their own faith communities, it sometimes comes as a very real shock to them.

Nonetheless, that's why we have chaplains, to urge them to find a faith and a belief system within their own traditions that will be applicable to that environment, that's not dependent upon what the leadership of their own faith traditions have to say; that they base their faith in the history, the tradition, and the reason that they were brought up with in that faith tradition.

It's our job to help sustain the young men and young women in the armed forces. Though, I hasten to say, neither is it our role to convince them to go to war or not to go to war, but to perform the best they possibly can in the environment they're committed to working in.

On just war:
Some years ago, I personally came to the conclusion that it's very difficult to apply the just war theory -- that whole body of Augustinian tradition that has been so widely used and bandied about and has received various interpretations by our leadership -- to the engagement in and justification for going into a war. I see going into war as much more of a dilemma than something we can justify. Either horn you can get caught on has negative results, but one is a whole lot less [negative] than the other. Sometimes we have to do things, especially when we're facing evil.

I don't think any man or any woman in his or her right mind wants to go out and kill somebody. Nonetheless, for the perpetuation of freedom, for the perpetuation of our world and to find justice, sometimes we're faced with doing just that.

It's my belief that we religious people are much more in the business of finding ways to help people be forgiven and restored to wholeness and fullness than we are in justifying what they do. In some ways, justifying what they do even cheapens life, I think.

Now, the just war theory does have application in the conduct of a war. We must conduct the war and our behavior in combat in a just and proper way. We don't target on innocent people. We are proportional in what we do. When we're finished with the objectives, when we've achieved the righteous and just objectives, we stop at that point.

On chaplains, commanders, and the ethics of combat:
One of the elements that our chaplains are being trained in year in, year out is how to apply principles of moral theology and ethics to the conduct of combat operations. And as a consequence, our chaplains are expected to be able to be present for our commanders, to be advisors to them.

One of the things we know today in [advising] senior commands is the value of people coming out of liberal arts traditions, such as the majority of our chaplains come out of. People with liberal arts backgrounds tend to think differently. We incorporate all the sciences and the classic traditions of the world together to make our decisions, to think with, to reason with. That's become a very valuable commodity today, because the armed forces are not just in the business of conducting combat operations today. We're in the business of putting things in place so that, ultimately, we can bring people together and reconcile people of varying traditions, varying races, and varying religions, so that we find ways of living together.

Photo of
Jay Magness

On peacemaking:
One of the major goals today of the armed forces is peacemaking and peace building, so that others can come in and do nation building. We understand that there have to be governments and structures in place so that people can find ways to bring races, cultures, religions together.

The earth has gotten quite a bit smaller than it once was. And it's the conviction of a lot of us that, unless we find ways to do effective peacemaking, we stand [with] the potential of killing every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth. And none of us wants to be the last one standing on this world. We want to live together in as much peace, as much harmony and mutual respect as we can have for our fellow human beings on this earth.

On humanity, responsibility, and combat:
We bring a human face to what we do. We keep humanity in the game. We keep humanity out in front. It's not to say that our commanders don't do this, but our commanders are very busy. And the commanders look to us to find a reminder that we're always dealing with human beings.

About 15 years ago, I was a chaplain on an aircraft carrier. We were engaged in combat operations. The night before we were to launch our aircraft, I went down to the bomb loading area, and I was talking with a young ordnance man who was loading bombs on the aircraft. And as frequently is the case, they were writing their bravado-laden slogans on the bombs. The next day, I came down after the attack had taken place. From our perspective, it was very successful. Yet I found that instead of being jubilant, this young ordnance man had a sense of sadness. When he could catch me alone without any of his friends around, he came up to me and asked, "Chaplain, I wonder if my bombs really did what we intended for them to do. What if they did kill people?"

It's up to chaplains to have an answer for that; to help people work through that, to be restored to wholeness, so we don't leave people jettisoned aside because of what they do in service of their country. Those ordnance men who load the bombs and build the bombs are every bit as much in combat as the pilots who fly the planes, as the marines who walk across the sand.

Sometimes in the twinkling of an eye, when they never expected it to come, they feel that sense of responsibility. For most of us, it came as a great surprise when we realized we were responsible. And often for our young men and our young women, it's the difference between being an adolescent and being an adult. And at this point, it's our responsibility as chaplains to "birth" them into spiritual adulthood.

I was recently talking to the deputy commander of marine forces, Europe. And one of the things this major general said was, "In all of my staff meetings, one of the things that's most important to me is to be able to turn to my chaplain after I've turned to everyone else and say, �Chaplain, how do you evaluate the situation? What do you see happening here? What's your perspective on what we're about to do? Are we doing the right things? Are we missing something, Chaplain?'"

On tolerance of religious diversity:
Indigenous religion today has become a very real part of what we do in foreign operations. We have heard a term begin to surface in our language, and that's "faith-based conflicts." I think it is "faith-based distinctives," quite honestly. All of the places where we do operations these days overseas have some "faith-based distinctive" to them. We've had ways of coming to grips with that which haven't always been as effective as we've wanted them to be.

Our chaplains are engaging in this in a big way, trying to find out what else we need to know about indigenous religions, about cultures, about how we ought to work and operate and engage with other cultures where we go overseas and do operations. How do we treat people when we capture prisoners who are of other faith traditions? How do we treat them justly and fairly?

Certainly, we'll [observe] the Geneva Convention, but we can even go beyond that [with] some of the religious traditions that these people embrace, as we've shown over the past months and since September 11, 2001.

There are some people who think that religion is the problem. I think people use religion as the excuse. The same religion that's been used to do destructive things around the world has also been used by people who are creative to do constructive things, uplifting things. Certainly, religion has been a bias for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be that way.

I go back to the basic understanding of the three great Abrahamic traditions. We have common foundations, and we've been able to build on those common foundations when we're willing to, when we're secure enough in ourselves. [It] is very important, because the whole world is at stake right now, and we've got to build on those traditions.

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