Spiritual Readiness, Pentagon-Style: Who Measures a Soldier’s Soul?

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Soldiers are trained for physical combat. But war also confronts them with death, killing, grief, guilt and questions of meaning. The military has long employed chaplains to care for those needs—across religious traditions and for service members with no religion at all. Now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says that system needs more power. He has created an Office of Religious Affairs with what he calls “real teeth.” Its director will report directly to him, oversee funding and policy, and develop tools to assess the spiritual readiness of the force. Hegseth has made own conservative Christianity a prominent part of his leadership of the military. At the speech where he announced the new…