Last week, for the first time, a sitting U.S. Army chief of chaplains, Major General William Green Jr., was fired by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The move came four months after Hegseth scrapped the “United States Army Spiritual Fitness Guide,” which Hegseth said promoted secular humanism and which Green oversaw to publication. “Our chaplains are chaplains, not emotional support officers, and we’re going to treat them as such,” Hegseth said. The move is part of a larger push to “make the Chaplain Corps great again.” In a video posted in March, the secretary said that in the army, “faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care.” This has rendered military chaplains institutionally weakened and misfocused from their primary mission of being a “pastor and the shepherd of the souls entrusted to [their] care,” he said. In all these actions, the secretary has raised an issue with immense implications not only for the American profession of arms but also for the nation and its future. Possible Interpretations To better understand this, let’s first examine the media campaign. Many have dismissed the secretary’s public announcements as examples of either one of two underlying realities. First, some see this as another expression of Hegseth’s religious predilection toward a robust, public Christianity within the Department of War. As evidence, they point to his renewed emphasis on monthly Pentagon prayer services incorporating clergy from his denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches; his penchant for referring to imprecatory psalms; and his habit of ending his prayers in the name of Jesus Christ. Others are concerned that in making these announcements, the secretary overtly borrowed political language from the administration’s 2024 presidential campaign and thus puts at risk the apolitical heritage of America’s commissioned military officers. But both concerns miss the broader criticism the secretary is leveling, which isn’t at the military chaplains alone but at the wider culture of the American profession of arms. Essentially, Hegseth is excoriating the contemporary militaries for neutering their chaplaincies from caring for the souls of their people—as he sees it, their primary calling. An important qualifier is in order here: Hegseth isn’t only targeting reform of the army chaplaincy but also those chaplaincies in the navy, marine corps, air force, and space force. His goal is broad and ranges across the entire Department of War. In this effort, he’s accurate. From Chaplains to Self-Help Advisers Hegseth’s claim that a warrior has a soul is often contested in the modern American military, yet it was never questioned in historical theology or philosophy. In essence, Hegseth is decrying that the armed services have lost any sense that their personnel possess both temporal and eternal being and worth, as captured, for instance, in the Judeo-Christian ideal that each person is created in the imago Dei, the image of God. Hegseth is excoriating the contemporary militaries for neutering their chaplaincies from caring for the souls of their people. How and when did this occur? Two trends occasioned this phenomenon. The first resulted from the landmark 1979 case Katcoff v. Marsh, where two Harvard Law School students sued the army over the constitutionality of its military chaplaincy. Though the army (and hence the United States government) won the case at the Second Circuit Court in 1985, the Chaplain Corps entered a period of inexorable decline as to its moral authority and pastoral calling to the force. Instead, the chaplaincy institutionalized a reflexive prioritization of its First Amendment responsibilities to ensure the “free exercise of religion” rights of soldiers and families. However, neither the original district nor circuit court rulings stipulated such a rebalance. Rather, the army chaplaincy reacted—as do many organizations under perceived threat—by shifting its priority almost solely to free-exercise maintenance for personnel rather than balancing that against its calling to shepherd the souls of soldiers. This coincided with the general trend in American society of the late 1980s toward an implicit trust of all things clinically therapeutic, particularly under the umbrella term of “mental health.” Scholars such as Carl Trueman have rightly traced this trend to a philosophical imbalance in the anthropology of contemporary American culture, and the army wasn’t immune to this phenomenon. From Self-Help Advisers to Irrelevance As the institution began to slowly and then rapidly consider mental health as coequal with physical health in assessing individual soldier readiness, it gradually pushed out of its collective thinking any genuine consideration of the spiritual health of its force. When the clinical professions within the army (e.g., psychiatry, psychology, licensed clinical social work, and more recently, behavioral health) successfully linked mental health to the army’s primary peacetime mission of maintaining force-wide readiness for war, the army chaplaincy further receded in relevance. It has been struggling to reestablish a link for the army between spiritual readiness and force-wide readiness ever since. Thus, the secretary’s larger problem isn’t one of reforming the military chaplaincies, though such reform is much needed. His latest effort to remove chaplain rank insignia from uniforms and firing Green are efforts toward that end. Rather, his greater challenge will be to change the military culture concerning not only their chaplains but also the nature and worth of the people whom chaplains serve. In his December message, the secretary hinted at this when he said he was ordering “a top-down cultural shift, putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as mental and physical health.” Time for Change Effective cultural change of large, complex organizations, especially where attitudes and predispositions have become embedded over time, takes more than a series of signed memorandums or directives. The army gradually pushed out of its collective thinking any genuine consideration of the spiritual health of its force. Edgar Schein, a foremost academician on managing business change, has rightly noted that culture becomes slowly entrenched and requires an organization-wide, focused, and consistent program of change to correct. Though not a profit-oriented entity, the American army isn’t immune to such a need. Changing the minds and actions of those leaders in charge of such a vast enterprise as the Department of War, including relative to chaplains—particularly about concepts so vital as the nature of warriors, their purpose, and their relationship to God—will take decades of consistent institutional reform. Neither this secretary nor this administration has such time, so how they embed this change remains a critical but open question. With the nation now embroiled in a self-chosen conflict against a nuclear Iran and facing increasingly technologically dominated future battlefields, the debate that Hegseth has begun needs clarification, immediate leadership resolution, and disciplined consistency to achieve the results our warriors, their families, and the nation needs.