Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America by Ronit Y. Stahl (review)

Ronit Stahl's Enlisting Faith probes the crucial contradictions surrounding the development of the American military chaplaincy. Why did a government constitutionally prevented from establishing religion end up employing its own cadre of religious professionals through its military? And, once in operation, how did that chaplaincy fulfill the United States' constitutional guarantee of free religious exercise to a religiously and racially diverse population of soldiers? As Stahl's engaging, well-argued monograph demonstrates, the ways that the chaplaincy attended to these questions affected all U.S. citizens—civilian and military alike—while the demographic and social changes roiling civilian society also influenced the protocols of the chaplaincy. This history underscores not only the U.S. government's investment in the religious life of its citizens, but also the shifting, contested parameters of its religious toleration.

While Enlisting Faith does not exclusively address Jewish participation in the chaplaincy, Stahl's careful attention to the Jewish dimensions of this story—combined with her extensive training in American Jewish history—make this monograph an indispensable contribution to the field of Jewish studies. As the first non-Christians to be incorporated into the chaplaincy, American Jews provided an important test-case for the possibilities and limits of American religious pluralism. While the first Jewish chaplain performed his duties as early as the Civil War, the military systematized Jewish participation during World War I as it divided up its soldiers according to a tri-faith structure and offered them the option of registering as Jews, Catholics, or Protestants. This process legitimized Judaism as an American religion, a move that reverberated back to the lives of civilian Jews. It also forced Jews to adjust their own organizational structures and work trans-denominationally in order to accommodate the military's requests for chaplains, a need that led to the development of the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB).

Discovering how the chaplaincy legitimated and integrated Jewish Americans, but did not necessarily offer the same consideration to other religious or racial minorities over the course of the twentieth century, also offers important insight into Jewish identity and status in the history of the United States. During World War II, for instance, the U.S. army, as Stahl put it, "operated according to a 'Protestant-Catholic-Jewish-Negro' logic," through which white Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish chaplains were able to minister to any soldiers of any race or faith, while black chaplains could work only with segregated black units. Meanwhile, though Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh soldiers served in the army, the chaplaincy remained exclusively Judeo-Christian through most of the twentieth century.

Stahl also traces how the chaplaincy responded to the imperative of including women in their ranks in the 1970s, a move that had important reverberations in the civilian world. When the military began recruiting women chaplains, they had to look toward civilian religious groups to supply them with candidates. Many of those groups, however, either did not ordain women or had just started ordaining them, leaving the army with a very small pool. This conflict, as Stahl notes, almost tore apart the JWB, an organization comprised of Jewish denominations that both did and did not ordain women. Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, for instance, waited seven years for the JWB to decide on whether they could endorse her candidacy as a Jewish chaplain before she was finally enlisted as the first Jewish woman military chaplain. In order to mitigate the conflict, the JWB decided to restructure itself, allowing each Jewish denomination to endorse its own candidates. That way, the JWB would not give the impression that the Orthodox movement authorized women rabbis.

As the story of Rabbi Koppell and the JWB reveals—and as Stahl astutely points out—the military chaplaincy was not only a force for social conservativism in its interactions with its soldiers or the American public. On the contrary, the chaplaincy actively...