Spiritual Fitness and Moral Responsibility in the Contemporary United States Military

Abstract

Abstract In an effort to increase resilience and decrease moral injury among servicemembers and veterans, the US military has in recent years invested in the promotion of “spiritual fitness” among its members. The military’s definition of spiritual fitness relies heavily on a popular contemporary American conceptualization of spirituality as essentially individual. Military materials strongly imply that spiritually fit servicemembers adopt military values as their own and consequently act in ways that serve the military’s interests. By tying morality so closely to the individual “spirit,” the concept of spiritual fitness serves to locate moral responsibility for harmful acts performed during war within the individual servicemember, obscuring the role that military leadership and the military as an institution play in shaping and constraining servicemembers’ values and actions. This case shows that an ethics-focused approach adds a crucial dimension to religion scholars’ critical analysis of how categories like spirituality are deployed by powerful institutions.