1.1 Moral injury as it emerges in clinical fields

In the early 1990s, the US Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist Jonathan Shay began to observe that there are aspects of combat trauma that do not seem to be encompassed within the diagnostic criteria of PTSD – that the stress reactions described by the previous terms and diagnostic criteria described the physiological and psychological elements of trauma experienced but were missing something critical. Working with veterans from the war in Vietnam, who he describes as having ‘severe PTSD’, he began to trace commonalities in their descriptions of ‘a leader’s betrayal of “what’s right”’, alongside highly emotive experiences of ‘grief […] guilt […] and loss of humanity’ (Shay 1991: 562). He turned to Homer’s descriptions of the experiences of soldiers in the Iliad and the Odyssey to note that war not only damages the mind and body, but what Shay refers to as themis, or character. In Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002), Shay notes that this sense of betrayal by leaders and the intense experience of the moral emotions that follow – guilt, shame, contempt, anger, and so forth – produce an particular type of injury. Shay initially utilized the term ‘complex PTSD’, a concept that was simultaneously developing in the 1990s in trauma literature, most notably by Judith Herman (1992), to describe this aspect of veteran experience. Shay characterized ‘complex PTSD’ as damage to one’s character and the destruction of the capacity for social trust: ‘the expectation that power will be used in accordance with “what’s right”’ (Shay 2002: 151). Building on this concept, Shay proposed an integrated formulation for what he terms ‘moral injury’, noting that it is present ‘when there has been a betrayal of “what’s right” by a person in a position of authority in a high-stakes situation’ (Shay 2014: 183). Shay’s formulation captures the sense that moral injury involves more than just individual combatants in wartime, but the shared participatory experience of a violation of societal norms that has such profound consequence that it shatters not only one’s moral expectations but results in the destruction of one’s capacity to trust in institutions and authorities to act in moral ways.

A second, parallel development in the understanding of moral injury, largely based on the experience of American veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, culminated in a 2009 definition of moral injury as ‘perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations’ (Litz et al. 2009: 697). This group of American clinicians made a sharp differentiation from PTSD in noting the distinction between the directionality of violence and ‘threat-to-life’ forces: ‘theories of PTSD attempt to explain the long-term phenomenology of individuals harmed by others […] and have not considered the potential harm produced by perpetration in traumatic contexts’ (Litz et al. 2009: 699, original emphasis). They echo Shay in noting that the ways in which combatants encounter experiences – particularly the participation in, and witness to, extreme suffering and human cruelty – that shake ‘their core beliefs about humanity’ (Litz et al. 2009: 695). A key aspect of moral injury in their conception is the inability to find a framework of meaning from which to evaluate one’s agency, responsibility, and sense of complicity. This is critical in differentiating moral injury from the more basic human response of ‘regret’, as the latter can be defined as the guilt, embarrassment, or shame as the result of an action which one knows fundamentally to be wrong within an accepted and understood axiological framework. As Litz et al. ask:

What happens to service members who are unable to contextualise or justify their actions or the actions of others and are unable to fully accommodate various morally challenging experiences into their knowledge about themselves and the world? (Litz et al. 2009: 695)

The concept of moral injury remains elastic and definitional clarity is particularly elusive. While there are dozens of different conceptions of moral injury in the research literature, the Litz and Shay definitions tend to dominate discourse and serve as the grounding points for further development and research. In one sense, the Shay conception takes into account the macro-scale systemic and social features of moral injury, and the sense in which systems and organizational factors produce negative moral outcomes, while the Litz conception focuses on the particular individual experience of moral transgression or failure.

1.2 Expressing moral injury theologically

Moral injury involves the socialization of values and morals, our basic conceptions of self in relation to others and the world around us, and the ‘spiritual’ as well as social and behavioural consequences. As such, a rich interdisciplinary discourse has arisen that has used the conceptual vocabulary of religion and theology to describe moral injury in ways that both illuminate new facets of it and challenge clinical hegemony. To date, the theological conceptions of moral injury follow an approach that appreciates the contributions of clinical science to the development of moral injury while firmly maintaining a line against the medicalization of the concept and acquiescence to purely clinical models of healing and recovery.

Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini began the theological conversation around moral injury by describing those suffering from it as possessing ‘souls in anguish’, and by using a theological grounding to firmly dispute what they contend is the pathologization of ‘the feelings of a normal ethical person’ (Brock and Lettini 2012: 51). Contending that clinical approaches to moral injury ‘tend to view [guilt, shame, and contrition] as psychological neuroses or disorders that inhibit individual self-actualization and interfere with “authentic” feelings and urges’, they argue that what returning veterans suffering from PTSD need most is not psychiatric treatment, but personal and communal engagement around the moral questions raised by moral injury (Brock and Lettini 2012: 51). They argue that religious communities offer a critical ‘place for grace’ that requires ‘courage, honesty and humility in order to hear, acknowledge, and be accountable for the complex truths about war and all that leads to it’ (Brock and Lettini 2012: 108). They acknowledge the power of theology and ritual in recovering from moral injury, but sound a cautionary note about their employment, particularly the notion of forgiveness (see section 3.2 below), noting that religious expressions may bury difficult truths and silence moral pain as well as help contextualize and repair it (Brock and Lettini 2012: 107).

Others have followed, offering conceptions of moral injury that connect with ideas of what is morally right and proper within the Christian theological narrative. Brian Powers has based an expression of moral injury on an Augustinian conception of human willing that notes that moral injury can be framed as a collapse of moral expectations, ‘as the realization that one’s moral orientation, to which one commits his or her willing, is aligned toward a “good” that is ultimately false’ (Powers 2017: 327). Michael Yandell conceives of moral injury as a ‘negative revelation’, using the theological vocabulary of veiling and uncovering to describe the discovery of deeply held moral values through their absence, violation, and negation (Yandell 2022).

Alongside these theological developments, scholars have begun to use the lens of moral injury to read scriptural texts. Joseph McDonald’s edited volume Exploring Moral Injury in Sacred Texts (2017) examines moral injury in Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Buddhist scripture, with the view that ‘religious traditions have grappled with moral injury since ancient times’ (McDonald 2017: 9). Hebrew Bible scholar Brad E. Kelle notes how readers might recognize moral injury in the narrative of King Saul in 1 Samuel, as a man who dies ‘amidst the ruins of a morally wrecked world’ (Kelle 2020a: 62). Kelle also explores the function of post-war rituals in mediating morally challenging experiences as well as the space between military and civilian worlds (see sections 2.3 and 2.4 below). He reflects on the question of whether the ancient war texts in Jewish and Christian scriptures might be morally injurious to readers who look to them for moral guidance, arguing ultimately that ‘these disturbing parts of the Bible remind us of our own society’s ongoing brokenness and violence’ in echoing Brock and Lettini’s call for honesty in examining the realities of war (Kelle 2020a: 166, 167).

Each of these exhibit the ways in which theologically based definitions not only illuminate different contextual elements of moral injury, but the ways in which the rich Christian doctrines, belief systems, rituals, and practices can be understood to express frameworks of meaning that are vital in opening pathways to recovery.

2.1 Sin and the good

The most direct conceptual vocabulary that Christian theology possesses to name wrong, wrongdoing, and their effects is that of ‘sin’. Shay, who noted that he sent many of his Catholic patients suffering from moral injury to confession, noted:

If the Church’s ideas on sin, penitence, forgiveness of sin, and redemption are about anything, they’re about the real stuff. What the Church offers is about cruelty, violence, murder – not just the sins you confessed in parochial school. (Shay 2002: 153)

However, the concept itself does carry a heavy philosophical load. Sin names both individual instantiations of wrong, a force that ‘stalks’ humanity from without and against which it must contend (Gen 4:7), as well as a condition that ‘binds’ humanity and from which humanity must be freed. The question that moral injury poses in this regard is essentially: ‘how does the doctrine of sin help provide a moral framework that might help one explore and understand guilt, shame, contempt and anger?’

US literary scholar Joshua Pederson traces moral injury through a broad swath of literature, from the Mahabharata to Macbeth to the works of Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Toni Morrison. He uses the term ‘sin-sick’ from the African American spiritual ‘There is a Balm in Gilead’ to discuss the ways that authors and narratives portray actions, characters, and situations that he notes resonate with modern understandings of moral injury and perhaps inform it. He notes the connection with ‘excess’ in terms of expressed feeling as a key marker of the way in which the morally injured feel a sense of evil that tends to invade and pervade their surroundings as well as affecting a severe moral judgment on themselves or the world (Pederson 2021: 2, 53). In terms of the theological development of the idea of ‘sin’ itself, however, Pederson’s primary usage of it here is to connote a degree of weariness with the world’s evil.

The most extensive work on sin comes from American-British theologian Brian Powers, who employs a modified Augustinian conception of original sin to show a deep resonance with the experience of moral injury in terms of constricted willing as well as a manner of contextualizing guilt in both individual and collective contexts. Augustine provides a way of naming sin both as the larger force that distorts, pervades, and binds humanity as well as the ways that individual humans internalize that larger dynamic and commit sinful acts. Powers also uses his conception of the fall to provide a nuanced view of the ‘good’ as it relates to human sinfulness and willing that may provide scaffolding for more complex discussions of complicity and responsibility (for a fuller description of the themes discussed in this section, see Powers 2017; 2019; 2020a).

In providing a theological account of the fall, Augustine notes that is occurs within the capacity of Adam’s will. ‘Having elevated his own capacity to determine what is good above clinging to that which is truly good’, Adam is thus ‘alienated from that which is truly good, and his will hopelessly bound in pursuit of lesser “goods” that he perceives to be ultimate’ (Powers 2017: 328). The damage from the fall thus occurs in the ‘locus of our agency in the world’, and as Adam contains the seed of all humanity within himself, all subsequent human beings inherit a malformed nature – one with a damaged capacity to will rightly (Powers 2020a: 191). Our willing, as Augustine contends, inclines toward that which we understand do be ‘good’; it is still active,

yet absent the ‘fire by which it can love,’ our will is bound in sinful misperceptions subject to the influence of our near-subconscious perceptions and enmeshed in our historical, cultural, and social situations. (Powers 2017: 330)

Critically, Augustine notes that our sense of what is good is not accessible to us – we do not have conscious control of the way our desires for what is good are oriented. While Pelagius contended that the human will operates always from a neutral position and that we are thus entirely responsible for the ‘wrong’ acts that we commit (as we could have, in each situation, chosen the ‘good’), Augustine contends that our ‘willing’ is not neutral in this regard, but rather, our sense of ‘good’ is enmeshed within the forces external to us that condition us, as well as our internal habituations and personal histories. For Augustine, because our willing is active (we are making choices), even in circumstances in which our willing is conditioned by external factors and our ‘horizons of choice’ are narrowed, we are responsible and take on guilt when those actions have negative moral outcomes. Powers contends that this is the ‘distorting’, ‘disfiguring’ – and following Alister MacFadyen, ‘sequestering’ and ‘colonizing’ power of sin: that ‘our willing can be compelled as those desires and understandings of “good” can be subtly shaped and distorted’ (Powers 2017: 330).

In terms of the meaning of guilt, Augustine holds that because we congenitally inherit a broken human nature after the fall, from birth every human stands blameworthy before God and deserving of divine condemnation. Powers rejects this axiological implication of the inheritance of broken human nature, arguing instead that the congenital inheritance of human guilt best demonstrates our alienation from God and from goodness, and demonstrates the depth of human need of salvation over humanity’s warrant for ‘divinely sanctioned punishment’ (Powers 2019: 8).

For morally injured veterans who often struggle with totalizing experiences of guilt and shame, this conception of the complexities of human willing and complicity may provide a helpful framework. It does not ameliorate veteran guilt but takes it seriously – neither Augustine nor Powers hold that those who experience guilt are innocent – and rather seeks to note that as no individual actions take place in a vacuum, veterans are not exhaustively guilty (Powers 2017: 336). Forces that condition and bind our willing, perhaps as well as other human beings in both society and military leadership, bear complicity also. This framework may allow veterans to discover the ways in which they are complicit, the ways in which their agency was limited, and even a way forward into a new moral identity as a ‘truth-teller’ (see section 2.4 on penance, below) in naming the ways in which society and others are complicit.

2.2 Anti-life, metanoia, and negative revelation

The concept of repentance, in the Greek metanoia, connotes a ‘turning from’ one thing and the implication of ‘turning towards’ another. Michael Yandell (2022) employs this framework in describing moral injury as a ‘negative revelation’ of that which we truly value through its negation and absence. Hereby, he names an experience hinted at or implied in accounts of military moral injury. Former US Marine and Iraq war veteran Tyler Boudreau recounts, for example, the recognition that the US civilian populace struggled to understand veteran moral injury because they could not easily recognize the humanity of the Iraqi people. Yet the undeniable humanity of those killed and violated was precisely what haunted those who had done them harm (Boudreau 2011: 751).

Yandell develops a concept of ‘anti-life’, which he describes simply as ‘an assault on life’ akin to Barth’s understanding of ‘nothingness’, or that which ‘can be present and active within creation only as an absolute alien opposing and contradicting all its elements […] offering only menace, corruption and death’ (Yandell 2022: 18). He argues that this is a force that can be thought of as the ‘logic of war’, a force that rejects the fundamental conditions of life – particularly that death is a natural part of life (Yandell 2022: 31, 11). Anti-life is thus a force that seeks to ward off the fear of death through domination of others, the pursuit of supreme and total security through the objectification of all those ‘not us’, and disfigures both adherent and perceived enemy. Again echoing Barth, Yandell perceives it as a parasitic and seductive force that ‘masquerades as life’, devouring his own love for Americans, and converting it into a hatred for those that harmed Americans on 9/11. He ties it to the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’, noting that it is ‘the production of death’ by reducing the humanity of the enemy other to an ‘idea’ and replacing the dynamism and inexhaustible mystery of life with a static logic in which ‘their deaths are exhaustively explained by the premise of dominance masquerading as freedom and life’ (Yandell 2022: 31).

Drawing upon Simone Weil’s concept of ‘affliction’ in which ‘that which one most longs for is felt as most distant’, Yandell notes that a pivotal part of moral injury is the eruption of the desire for life in the midst of its absence: a recognition of the ‘fragility’ of life that cannot be subsumed and negated by anti-life (Yandell 2022: 59, 60). It is a painful moment of acceptance that one has bought into and internalized the logic of anti-life, but also one of revelation, albeit in the apophatic tradition, wherein one ‘despairs of oneself as one betrays individuals […] and the world’ (Yandell 2022: 77).

The conception’s importance also comes in the idea of metanoia, of turning to something new that follows. Following Emmanuel Levinas, Yandell describes that the moment of dawning realization is the humanity of the other, the confrontation with the other that breaks the illusion that they are a reductive ideal or object of policy. ‘The face of the Other teaches me, it reveals that anti-life is not life, is not light’ (Yandell 2022: 106). The disclosure of the ‘good’ is not what is revealed through moral injury but a revelation of the poisoned evil of the relationship with the other that anti-life demands and that one has, until now, accepted.

Critically, Yandell uses this idea of negative revelation, and of turning to ‘life’, to critique a key assumption in clinical discourse in the US surrounding the treatment of moral injury. He notes that Litz et al. in Adaptive Disclosure (2016) contend that the fundamental values and ethos of the American military are so pivotal and formative in the life of military members and veterans that those experiencing moral injury should expect to reclaim or reconcile with those same military values. Yandell quotes their argument: ‘Fighters are what they are, so to try to become something else means a great loss’ (2022: 110). However, the idea of moral injury as negative revelation critiques exactly this claim: ‘One aspect of moral injury […] is seeing one’s values in the military find their end or telos in an unjust war’ (Yandell 2022: 110). More directly, Yandell sees potential gain for the veteran precisely where Litz et al. see loss – in the freedom to become something else, to become freed from the demands of anti-life, and to embrace the new relationality with the other that is possible and for which one yearns.

Yandell builds this sense of conversion on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s language of regret and desire – the more positive embrace of life as ‘a creative space in which one no longer acts on the world and others from one’s own understanding of goodness and justice […] but receives’ from the other (Yandell 2022: 111). Echoing the Barthian rejection of liberal theology’s embrace of Schleiermacher’s inward-focused theological development, which led to the embrace of the German war effort in the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in 1914, Yandell reappropriates Schleiermacher to reject this assumption of Adaptive Disclosure, identifying himself through the process he is describing as ‘a veteran who sees becoming something other than a fighter not as a great loss but as a great gain’ (Yandell 2022: 110, original emphasis).

2.3 Lament and hope

Many researchers note that modern Western society is nearly devoid of rituals that ancient civilizations employed to mediate transitions, particularly in the movement from civilians to warriors and back again. Mediating rituals, particularly engaged within a participating community, can provide veterans with ‘meaning-oriented interventions’ that may help the veteran contextualize their past experiences and move into a future with a sense of purpose (Currier, Holland and Malott 2015: 238). After noting the ways in which ancient Israelites held purification rituals for soldiers and weapons in post-war environments, Kelle argues that rituals for modern veterans need ‘help soldiers acknowledge and face war’s wounding effects’ (2020a: 72).

Thus, practical and systematic theologians have focused on the capacity of Christian rituals to mediate experiences of moral injury and contextualize it. Religious rituals, as Zachary Moon notes, ‘highlight many complex human experiences and connect them with religious meaning […] recognition and remembrance ceremonies, rituals of purification, talking circles, rituals of rebirth and renewal’ (Moon 2019b: 102). There is a prominent asymmetry of ritual in the military experience – initial training is profoundly formative in establishing a moral identity, but upon leaving a combat zone or separating from service there is no concomitant ritual that serves to reorient into noncombat or civilian life (Brock and Lettini 2012: 42; Kelle 2020a: 56).

Several scholars have focused on the concept and practice of lament and its capacity to express moral injury as well as perhaps its capacity to make connections toward further spiritually beneficial contextualizations. Larry Graham makes the case that there are ‘three interacting poles of lamentation – sharing anguish, interrogating causes, and re-investing hope’ (Graham 2017: 139). Spiritual caregivers can carefully utilize practices of lament for those who have experienced moral injury as it allows them to ‘question, complain, protest, and assess responsibility for what happened’ in order that we might ‘devise ways to name and frame what happened so that we might bear the costs and heal from the consequences of the wounds to our souls and communities’ (Graham 2017: 142). Carrie Doehring notes that ‘veterans experiencing military moral injury will often have a hard time revisiting memories or exploring meanings until they can tolerate the intense emotions – typically anger and guilt’ at the heart of their experience (Doehring 2019: 30). Both scholars seize upon the capacity of lament to mediate the individual experience of moral anguish that veterans may experience with the communal bearing of moral burden.

Graham has argued that the experience of lamentation is not a singular event, but rather one that must be sustained as ‘a means of living as well as possible in spite of what is forever lost’ (Graham 2017: 9). Shawn Fawson utilizes poetry – particularly the reading of ‘witness poems’ – in community to create a space that can sustain the experience of lamentation and shared moral burden between individual and community. ‘Witness poems about war’, she contends, ‘do not simply represent the losses incurred by war; they also weep, interrogate, admit complicity, embrace, lament, and bear out on the page traces of extremity’ (Fawson 2019: 45). The communal reading and expression of these poems may help break out of the individual cycle of isolation that plagues many morally injured veterans, and as such, ‘cuts against the privatization and self-enclosure that moral injury’s shame, secrecy, and feelings of failure often lock veterans and their families in’ (Fawson 2019: 45).

The movement between sustained lament and reinvestment of hope, however, can become problematic. Shelly Rambo contends that the depth of moral woundedness and the difficulty in collectively bearing those wounds is not something that American society deals with well – and the Christian narrative of redemptive suffering invoked is counterproductive in doing so. Focusing on the concept of wounds themselves, she notes that through comparison of veteran woundedness to that of Jesus in the spiritual imagination of the US, ‘while meaning is attributed to the idea of suffering, veterans often feel like the reality of their suffering is not welcomed’ (Rambo 2017: 113). Here, there is a disconnect between the theological meaning ascribed to their wounds by an American civil religion that holds that like Christ, those wounds must ‘be marks of victory that ensure salvation’, yet to the veteran, they are harmful – and the narrative ascribed by civil religion adds weight to the societal expectation that veterans view their own wounds in a redemptive manner (Rambo 2017: 113). Through the work of a veterans group in Ohio, Warrior’s Journey Home, Rambo traces a reconfiguring of the notion of salvation in the ‘saviour-soldier’ narrative, arguing that civilian attention to veterans’ wounds in honest and open exchanges allows them to become sites of healing – with ‘razors’ that continue to damage veterans from within allowed to escape in the process of a difficult and ‘messy’ movement towards a different and hopeful future (Rambo 2017: 143).

Similarly, Powers notes that the experience of moral injury must refocus theological thinking about the concepts of lament and hope, noting that the two are not opposites but both faithful Christian responses to experiences of loss and trauma. He notes that the expressions that oppose hope are ‘suppression, silence, and […] “toxic positivity”’, whereas that which opposes lament is ‘apathy, acceptance of the status quo, and acquiescence to injustice’ (Powers 2025: 7). His argument seeks to begin to buttress the practical work done by Graham, Doehring, Moon, Kelle, and others with systematic clarity. As Powers contends, lament is the faithful response of the Christian ‘when turned to the world, hope is a desperate and faithful expression of that same individual turned toward the resurrection and eschatological future of God’ (Powers 2025: 7).

2.4 Penance

Often coincident with this ‘loss of meaning’ and a moral scaffolding through which one can evaluate one’s own actions, those who have experienced moral injury also can come to make a global self-judgment on their own character – seeing themselves as ‘bad people’ rather than people who have committed a ‘bad act’. For while the latter may be reconciled with others they have offended and envision a future of worth and value, the former can easily lapse into an understanding that they are fundamentally ‘immoral, irredeemable and un-reparable’ (Litz et al. 2009: 697). Recent research in social psychology has suggested that grounding ourselves in a narrative of moral growth and changed identity can allow us to contextualize past misdeeds and make peace with them. If people are able to view themselves with a strong sense of ‘identity discontinuity’, i.e. that they are no longer ‘the same person’ that committed those past misdeeds, they are able to confess to them more freely, attempt to justify them less, and presumably seek to make amends (Helgason and Berman 2022).

Similarly, Adaptive Disclosure, the most extensive clinical treatment model for moral injury, prescribes that in situations of ‘perpetrator’ moral injury that involve a strong sense of guilt and/or shame, the therapist should help the morally injured person examine a broader array of their moral choices, encouraging them to focus on positive and beneficial things they have done in their lives as well as the actions causing them moral distress (Litz et al. 2016: 120). Yet, as Shay argues, the problem is that the experience of war by its very nature ‘ruins character’ and deeply damages our sense of moral self (Shay 1994: xiii). Most suffering from the guilt and shame that characterize self-directed or ‘perpetrator’ moral injury, in other words, would likely have trouble accepting either approach outlined above because sufferers believe the morally injurious event has unmoored them from their former conception of self. Rather then benefit from a positive ‘identity discontinuity’ by which they can see that they have become a better or stronger person since their past misdeeds, many experience a negative ‘identity discontinuity’ by which they judge their current ‘self’ much more harshly than their past self.

The practice and rite of penance in the broad Christian tradition may hold a novel capacity to mediate the transition from self-blame and condemnation to a sense of self-worth that may enable those suffering from moral injury to live into a new identity, find self-forgiveness, and begin to restore social trust. The Western Christian tradition provides an extremely rich, profound, and evocative practice around penance. It will be beneficial to distinguish two key terms – the concept of penance (often synonymous with repentance), and then the penitential acts that might be suggested before the absolution of the penitent’s sins is pronounced. The Roman Catholic sacrament of penance today entails four steps that carry forth the power of the ancient tradition: contrition on the part of the penitent person, the ‘confession of sins, the act of penance or satisfaction […] and absolution by the priest’ (Del Colle 2006: 244). This represents the enactment of the idea of repentance, from the Greek metanoia, a turning from one thing and a conversion into a new way of being. Indeed, the Orthodox Church emphasizes repentance as not focused on past wrong, but a progressive ‘revelation’ of God’s grace and an invitation into the new life promised in the resurrection (Chryssavgis 2006: 215). This section will refer to the larger concept or trajectory as penance, and the acts assigned to the penitent as ‘penitential acts’. Both are of value in helping individuals recover from moral injury, but not without examining and pruning what millennia of Christian tradition have given to us.

At heart, the early practice of repentance reflects the fundamental view that after receiving the grace and forgiveness of God offered in baptism, we also receive the power to cease sinful behaviour and live fully into divine grace. The practice of penance was an additional restorative measure – it involved demonstrations of humility, public confession, public acts of humiliation, and eventual proclamation of absolution, welcome, and inclusion back into the church. As Eugene TeSelle notes, the purpose of the larger formal and public practice served a role not only in restoring penitents, but also to ‘maintain the church’s purity so that it might fulfil its role as the body of Christ in the world’ (TeSelle 2010: 938).

It may be said that while the ritual holds a perhaps unequalled raw power in symbolizing and communicating moral repair, a brief survey of its abuses illuminates the difficulty of the church to faithfully embody, in TeSelle’s words,

how justice and forgiveness are to be played out in the private life of Christians and in the life of the church, whether it is viewed as a ‘refuge of sinners’ who seek forgiveness and struggle for justice, or as the ‘body of Christ’ which manifests both God’s forgiveness and justice in the world. (TeSelle 2010: 938–939)

Throughout its history and evolution, we might then identify pathogenic aspects of the practice of penance and penitential acts that certainly inhibit its successful contemporary efficacy in restoring feelings of self-worth and social trust. The Roman Catholic Church has wrestled with, nuanced, and continues to grapple with many of these; however, in terms of the capacity of the Christian ritual to restore social trust, the damaging perceptions of several of these categories persist and serve as reminders as to how the appropriation of this powerful psychological ritual can go wrong.

The church’s use of public penance to maintain its institutional purity does create a tension with its capacity to model justice. The early and medieval church often followed rules for penitents that reflected status quo societal injustices and reified distinctions between peoples – privileging men over women, those with access to funds over the poor, and perhaps most egregiously, the clergy over the laity. Basil of Caesarea, writing in the mid to late fourth century, recommends fifteen years of exclusion from communion and the church for fornicators amongst the laity, for example. To wit, he contends that ‘a deacon who commits fornication after his appointment to the diaconate is to be deposed […] but, after he has been rejected and ranked among the laity, he is not to be excluded from communion’ (Basil of Caesarea 1994: 228). This recognizes a dual-edged aspect of the church’s need to maintain purity – while the power of the ritual certainly culminates in the welcome of the penitent back into the good graces of the church, at heart it can be perceived that a group of excluded sinners is ostracized from a group of holy people who live entirely in a state of grace. The Roman Catholic Church’s more modern understanding of social sin has certainly evolved the official doctrine away from this binary, as Ralph Del Colle notes that ‘[t]he ecclesial mark of holiness does not deny the need for purification, repentance, and renewal but demands it’ (Del Colle 2006: 243). Yet in an increasingly polarized contemporary world that lends itself to moral binaries and absolutes, this historical concern still merits attention.

The juridical model of atonement, dominant in the Western church, can influence the practice of penance such that the penitential acts are viewed as a means of making satisfaction – or suffering divine punishment, imposed through the agents of the church – a condition for the efficacy of the priest’s absolution. There is a danger that the practice of penance becomes understood as transactional rather than transformative. Indeed, for Martin Luther, what he viewed as the transactional nature of the sixteenth-century practice of indulgences became a theological flash point for the Reformation in Germany. By the sixteenth century, the inertia of the initial need of public penance to maintain the purity of the church, the idea that human effort was necessary to make satisfaction through penitential act, and the church’s focus on ‘true contrition’ in order to make absolution efficacious had combined to produce what might be understood as a ‘flourishing’ of lay piety. Luther understood that the accompanying lay piety, taking all manner of forms of self-negation, humiliation, and buying indulgences, was ‘a sign of deep fear that no amount of penance could ever be enough to satisfy the divine judge’ (Del Colle 2006: 243).

While Luther certainly railed against the sacrament of penance as practiced at the time as corrupted, he had no intention of abolishing it because he seemed to recognize its profound value in assuaging those who believed that their wrongdoings rendered them ‘irredeemable’ and ‘unforgivable’ and who struggled with self-condemnation. Indeed, his own personal struggle with self-worth, as well as the power of confession in warding off self-condemnation, can be glimpsed in a 1522 sermon ‘I would have been strangled by the devil long ago if confession had not sustained me’ (Del Colle 2006: 195). Luther seeks to move away from a theological emphasis on the ‘true repentance’ of the penitent in making the sacrament efficacious in the absolution of sins by emptying it of any tie to salvation. The act of penitence for Luther was thus ‘a response of gratitude, of acted-out love for God’s grace given as a salvation already won; it is not a response of fear of hell’ (Purves 2006: 254). Luther here seizes the ‘minority report’ of the desert ascetics in the early church, viewing a penitent disposition in life as a response to grace, not a precondition for receiving it (Purves 2006: 253). The efficacy of the sacrament of penance, in Luther’s eyes, is its value in providing a source of consolation and worth to the penitent.

In his exhortations to clergy, Luther’s safeguards reveal the depth of pastoral concern for the upbuilding of self-worth that is at the heart of confession. He encourages pastors to ‘exhort their parishioners to seek out private absolution frequently’ lest Satan ‘tempt them to believe that their sins were too great to be forgiven by God, and thus lead them into despair’ (Rittgers 2006: 198). Luther reconfigured confession as a private practice, and as such, clergy were to ‘avoid shaming’ people lest they cause them to avoid the sacrament, and notes in the 1533 church order that pastors were absolutely never to ‘probe the souls of the laity in search of hidden sins’ (Rittgers 2006: 197, 198). The purpose was not to ensure that all sins had been covered by the absolution – but to experience to power of the welcome back into the fold and the assurance that they belonged.

A critical moment for rebuilding social trust in moral institutions occurs at the most basic interaction of confession from a service member or veteran suffering from moral injury to the chaplain or member of the clergy. A critical component is the capacity of the chaplain or clergy to listen without explicitly or implicitly communicating judgment, disappointment, personal revulsion, or discomfort at the confession. Chaplains may be familiar with wartime narratives, but many priests and pastors without this experience may not be prepared to listen to the stories of violence that trouble the conscience of veterans. Yet whether seasoned chaplains or new clergy, the human fact remains that stories of violence, murder, rape, suffering, and cruelty are not easy to hear, and will impact the one listening to the confession. Indeed, this act can be understood as a form of embodying divine justice in imitation of Christ – willing to expose oneself to moral unrest in order to restore another.

Any sense of revulsion in this moment of profound vulnerability, natural though it may be, may reinforce the most negative aspects of the penitential rite of the church. Effectively, it may confirm the idea that the soldier/veteran’s offence places them outside the realm of forgiveness and remind them of rules that exclude them from inclusion in the church while welcoming those who take far lesser moral risks. Listening without judgment, however, may communicate that the church is a place that engages with the world, recognizes even its own complicities, and has the capacity to engage with and offer a way through the darkest moral tribulations.

3.1 Agency and responsibility

Moral injury, particularly in military veterans, points to the complex ways in which our values, morals, and senses of duty and honour are deeply culturally and socially conditioned. In this manner, it provides a compelling way of understanding the intricate modes in which we inhabit moral worlds and how one person can – both over the course of a lifetime as well as far shorter periods of time – occupy shifting positions of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. At the same time, in blurring the firm axiological boundaries of individual and community, moral injury illuminates difficult questions of agency – particularly when attempting to describe the doctrine of original sin, descriptive as it may be of the mechanisms by which moral injury operates. American theologian Joy Ann McDougall phrases the challenge as ‘how to maintain the realism of humankind’s bondage to sin, while also retaining a sense of human agency and moral responsibility’ (McDougall 2011: 475). The last point is perhaps the most crucial: what is at stake in the articulation of agency is the notion of responsibility. If we hold the conditioning power of forces beyond ourselves to be ultimate, then we may either implicitly or explicitly absolve individual actors of any sense of moral responsibility. If we do not attend to the attenuating power of those forces and focus on individual agency, we risk shifting blame for societal/communal moral trajectories onto individual actors while those forces continue to exert hegemony on social values.

In the case of military moral injury, combatants in modern armies undergo intensive training that conditions not only their physical skills and capacities but also orients their sense of self and moral worldview. In Adaptive Disclosure, Litz and colleagues go so far as to say – not uncontroversially – that for many, this inculcation is so profound that their identification with military ethos, their units, career fields, and branch of service ‘may be more fundamental to their personal identities than their ethnic background, race, or even gender’ (Litz et al. 2016: 32). At the same time, military training also instils a strong sense of personal moral responsibility into its members. The US Code of Conduct prescribes how military members are expected to act even under duress in captivity: ‘I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions and dedicated to the principles which made my country free’ (Executive Order 10631, 1955; amended by EO 12633, 1988). Combatants are thus highly conditioned and yet also personally bear the weight of upholding the nation’s moral principles through the exercise of their own (at least perceived) individual agency.

In theological terms, it might be said that militaries often prepare combatants for what in reality is an Augustinian world of war, in which their values, honour, and commitment to a ‘good’ may face distortion and corruption through powerful forces beyond their control. Yet they do so by instilling within them a Pelagian sense of moral order, by which they are fully responsible for their actions and responsible in total for their failure to make proper moral choices. All US service members take an oath to obey the lawful orders of the officers appointed over them, indicating that their will is also structurally constricted and not free. Yet particularly through the inclusion of the qualifier ‘lawful’, they formally place the burden of responsibility on the individual member to continually discern which orders are lawful and which are not. This tension between Augustinian reality and Pelagian preparation informs the modern military experience of moral injury, whereby combatants and veterans often experience the loss of personal agency alongside a totalizing sense of guilt and shame for failing to act differently than they did.

Similarly, these tensions in navigating personal agency have consequences for how we understand collective responsibility and complicity, particularly in democratic societies. In one sense, recognition of the forces that condition the agency of combatants emphasizes the humanity of those combatants and the way their ultimate actions are often a manifestation of a will or purpose larger than their own – a national, societal, or cultural objective. To this end, Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon notes that the experience of moral injury in individual combatants is not simply a manifestation of burdensome knowledge about themselves and what they have done and are capable of, ‘but also one’s society’ (Wiinikka-Lydon 2016: 227). Thus, we might understand the experience of moral injury to be one that questions the larger societal values and aims that combatants are asked to carry out at the proverbial ‘pointy end of the spear’.

Wiinikka-Lydon quite helpfully seeks to return Shay’s conception of broken social trust to the forefront of conversations around moral injury, particularly in light of the experience of American combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Wiinikka-Lydon’s argument, one might contend that if the military mission is the manifestation of societal will, then the experiences of sustained and enduring negative moral emotions by those carrying it out might call into question the values animating that collective will and force difficult societal conversations. While this conception is immensely valuable in framing collective values, Dutch scholar Tine Molendijk is careful to note that in doing so, we can elide the experience of personal guilt into the collective in a way that eviscerates personal autonomy and responsibility, ‘romanticizing’ the phenomenon of moral injury amongst combat troops. Her argument is that attention to the broader forces that constrict agency and the prophetic social elements can ignore and minimize the real desire amongst morally injured troops to ‘take responsibility’ for actions, since this focus has a tendency to ‘completely release them from responsibility’ (Molendijk 2022: 2). In other words, totalizing a sense of collective moral responsibility and social values risks cheaply ameliorating the guilt that combatants feel on an individual level, and, in a theological and pastoral sense, attempting to contextualize it more broadly risks emptying the power of conceptions and practices that engage such guilt and take it seriously.

Powers’ work on Augustine (summarized above in section 2.1) is an attempt to navigate this tension through recognition both of personal agency and its constrictions. In noting that our agency, even in constricted situations, is still active, we might observe that we are making choices even when the differences between available actions might be small and our control of the outcomes minimal. Precisely because we are making choices, we invest our personal agency into the decisions and thus feel responsible for the outcomes; nevertheless, the forces under which our agency and horizon of choices are constrained bear some of the responsibility. What this framing intends to offer is a way of describing agency that takes combatant guilt seriously – it does not attempt to declare those who feel it as ‘innocent’ or ‘not at fault’. To do so would, as Molendijk says, inauthentically truncate agency and cut off morally injured individuals from the helpful and prosocial aspect of guilt that drives us to take responsibility, repair relationships, and make amends. Yet it may also involve ways of naming other factors, individuals, forces, and institutions that bear responsibility, thus contextualizing individual guilt as real and yet not total.

This does not fully resolve the tension between forces and individuals, nor between democratic societies and the personal combatants who often end up bearing the moral burdens of national policies. Positively, theological reflection on this matter provides a framework of meaning and a set of terms that may be helpful in finding and illuminating the contours of this tension without seeking to resolve it in one direction or the other. If it does so authentically, it provides an axiological structure through which those experiencing moral injury might understand ways of making sense of their own responsibility.

3.2 Forgiveness

Explorations of recovery from moral injury from the perspective of pastoral care, both in clinical and religious discourse, have focused on the idea of forgiveness (see Purcell et al. 2018). As moral injury is commonly associated with self-blame and condemnation, forgiveness in recovery is primarily aimed at one person’s forgiveness of themselves for actions they have taken. Clinically, this is often seen as a critical first step that limits the self-sabotaging behaviours that come with the idea that one does not deserve success, contentment, or joy, and it has the effect of opening up more complex explorations of moral complicity, repentance, and making amends (Purcell et al. 2018). Clinical discussions of moral injury often look to religious leaders, or ‘compassionate moral authorities’, to work with morally injured persons and explore guilt and forgiveness in more profound ways (Litz et al. 2016: 124).

Theologically, however, the move to forgiveness in situations of moral injury is one that comes with dangers that risk undermining its efficacy. As Brock and Lettini (2012) note, the well-intended offer of forgiveness can truncate the communication of necessary truths and bury tensions that must be surfaced for authentic engagement and moral repair. For the civilian who has not been to war, offering forgiveness to a veteran who confesses guilt and shame can be a way of avoiding their own moral discomfort and complicity, and simply serve to ‘protect the forgiver from having to understand moral injury and a society from having to face the unalterable tragedies of war’ (Brock and Lettini 2012: 103). Conversely, they note that ‘facile forgiveness interferes with veterans facing the truth of what they did’, as a cycle of surface-level forgiveness ‘relieves moral responsibility temporarily instead of building the lifelong strength to live with it’ (2012: 103). Their concern is that a more authentic moral accounting is necessary – particularly in Western societies – that involves deep listening to veteran testimony, understanding the levels of agency and complicity in democratic societies, and ‘remembering the truth of what we did and who we are, so that we might reweave our moral fibre as people and as a nation’ (2012: 115).

The complexity of agency, complicity, and responsibility to which moral injury attests thus complicates efforts to offer authentic notions of forgiveness that effect moral repair in veterans while acknowledging our own capacity to slide back into violence against others. Yet the centrality of forgiveness as a response to human guilt in the Christian theological imagination, as well as its benefit for those experiencing profound shame and moral anguish, means it cannot be abandoned.

Miroslav Volf articulates a version of this same tension as being ‘caught between two betrayals – the betrayal of the suffering, exploited and excluded and the betrayal of the very core of my faith’ (Volf 1996: 9). Volf subsequently argues both for the necessity of remembrance and for a posture of forgiveness that conceives ‘forgetting’ wrongdoing as its eschatological end – lest, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, the past becomes ‘the gravedigger of the present’ (Volf 2006: 161). Working through his own experience of betrayal and abuse, Volf contends that forgiveness is the final goal of the process of enacting the justice embodied by Christ on the cross. Along the way, wrongs must be carefully remembered in order to be named, and if the perpetrator then repents, forgiveness can be offered and accepted. It is only when these conditions are met that reconciliation and a transformation of relationships can occur, when both victims and perpetrators can shed their identities as such (Volf 2006: 66–84). Absent these conditions, we must relegate the hope of reconciliation to the secure eschatological future of God (Volf 2006: 143).

While Volf’s concern in noting this is rightly the safety of the victim in a world where a posture of forgiveness might well lead to a tacit encouragement of sustained acceptance of abuse, veterans suffering moral injury might find themselves on the side of the repentant perpetrator seeking forgiveness. The idea of shedding the identity of perpetrator may be compelling, yet often their victims are ambiguous, dead, or otherwise not present. For an authentic understanding of forgiveness in these situations, the question becomes: to whom do they owe a moral accounting?

For combatants of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, an authentic answer to this question often extends far beyond ourselves and our national communities. Yandell’s description of the encounter with ‘the Other’ as transformative (in section 2.2 above) demonstrates the recognition of the humanity of the enemy and our moral obligation to them as well. Similarly, Boudreau (Boudreau 2011) describes his participation in of violation of the dignity of the Iraqi people as being what drives his own guilt.

The primary and most obvious theological answer from a Christian perspective is that we owe a moral accounting to God in Christ, as God is the source of ultimate truth and the divine law, and that divine law is revealed in and through Jesus Christ. Thus we might say that, first and foremost in constructing our moral identity, we hold that a primary understanding of wrongdoing is transgressing a divine commandment and thus sinning against God. Rowan Williams offers an articulation of this by which the guilty might seek forgiveness from Christ the ‘pure victim’, who holds all betrayals and memories within himself and as such is able to offer absolution (Williams 1982: 61, 72–76). Yet here there is a risk of coming ‘full circle’ to the concern that drives Marjorie Suchocki – that if we understand our sin as primarily concerning God and only secondarily our real victims, we risk absolving our consciences without the transformative reality of changed identity (Suchocki 1994). As such, although the exploration of penance in situations of military moral injury (section 2.4 above) certainly offers a way of navigating some of the tension named here around forgiveness, it does not resolve it.

3.3 War

Perhaps above all, the experience of moral injury in military veterans and the attendant moral questions it raises challenge historic Christian perspectives on conflict and war. The majority of positions within the tradition broadly fall into one of two categories – pacifism and just war theory – with the caveat that during the eleventh- and twelfth-century crusades and in a few times since, theologians have embraced a more sacramental view of war we may designate as a ‘holy war’ stance, wherein participation in conflict against an enemy is a penitential act.

The pacifist position generally holds that the teachings of Jesus Christ, in addition to his refusal of violence in the face of persecution and death, mean that Christians are obligated to refuse to participate in warfare, and that wartime violence itself cannot be justified theologically. The primary contention in most articulations of Christian pacifism, whether implicit or explicit, is that faithfulness to the commandments and to the example of Christ must take precedence over arguments for war that hinge on its necessity or our responsibility to ensure particular outcomes through use of violence.

Conversely, just war theorists hold that as God has ordained governments to keep the peace and enforce justice in the earthly realm, there are times when conflict may be necessary in order to properly love our neighbours and protect citizens. Augustine noted that military conflict against a belligerent neighbour was a form of ‘harsh kindness’ by which the military victory was a manner of both protecting one’s own people and correcting the error of the neighbour. While the tradition has evolved over time, it generally can be said to prescribe criteria (right authority, right intention, chance of success) which must be met in order to conduct war justly. For some, just war theory can be read as intending to limit the scope of conflict, narrow the conditions under which war can be justified from a Christian perspective, and generally counter societal trends towards militarism.

The ways in which combatants suffer moral injury challenge just war theorists and pacifists alike to nuance their language and define their moral stances on wartime violence, and Christian participation in it, with more clarity. In terms of pacifism, the Litz definition of moral injury notes that the negative moral emotions of guilt and shame may attach not only to direct actions, but to the ‘failure to act’ in critical situations. Pacifists tend to hold that ‘obedience’ and ‘faithfulness’ to divine commandment are safe havens for the conscience torn in different directions by conflict, even in extreme circumstances. In Discipleship, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes that a renunciation of violence is a necessary way in which one can eliminate evil by willingly bearing suffering rather than returning it upon another (Bonhoeffer 2003: 133). As evinced in the early writings of Bonhoeffer, the notion is often that the church (or, more precisely in this case, the person/group taking the pacifist stance) will be the one to suffer for it. Yet as the guilt and shame evinced from ‘failure to act’ notes, this stance can be deeply morally difficult for humans to hold when others around them suffer for their choice, particularly when they possess – as modern Western combatants, militaries, and societies often do – the means to act on behalf of others. Arguably, the moral difficulty in recognizing that European Jews – not the Confessing Church in Germany – were the group most likely to suffer for the pacifist stance of Nazi-resisting Christians was the factor that motivated Bonhoeffer to shift his stance on violence and nuance his Christology (a point given more depth to follow).

Conversely, just war theorists seek, to varying degrees, to describe ways in which Christian combatants may recognize their actions – however difficult – as just. Many within the just war tradition acknowledge that in attempting to responsibly obey Christ’s injunction to ‘love one’s neighbour’, conflict may be a lesser evil – the least bad moral option amongst many in a fallen world. In the stream of Augustine’s view of conflict as ‘harsh kindness’, British theologian Nigel Biggar, for example, argues that the Christian process of reconciliation ‘involves two moments of forgiveness, one inaugural and one conclusive’, and that in between the two, there is room for appropriate and proportionate ‘retribution’ in order to adequately address injustices done (Biggar 2013: 66). Similarly, American ethicist Marc LiVecche seeks to create a framework in which combatants suffering moral injury can understand their actions – particularly killing – as simultaneously necessary and justified as well as worthy of lament that it is such (LiVecche 2021). However, some modern just war theorists also reject the idea that Christians should accept evils of any kind, and attempt to narrate the tradition of just war and the participation of Christians within it in positive terms. Rejecting the notion that Christians should be engaged in pursuit of ethics involving a discernment of ‘lesser evils’, Daniel Bell seeks to retrieve the practice of just war as ‘a form of following Jesus’ (Bell 2009: 36).

However, philosophers and theologians have noted that the moral injury, ambiguity, and dissonance experienced by Western combatants from Christian societies may be exacerbated by the difference in their experiences of negative moral emotions and the ethical expectations of a tradition that names war as ‘just’ in the first place. American philosopher Robert Emmet Meagher notes that the entire just war tradition creates a moral expectation that ‘those who serve in [just wars] do no wrong […] as long as they serve the cause and follow orders’ (Meagher 2014: xv). If the church’s expectation of war is thus, then it would seem to have little to offer besides condemnation for those who suffer guilt and shame in pursuit of those causes and in obedience of its orders. If moral injury is experienced as a betrayal of a culturally conditioned notion of ‘what’s right’, by both organizations, units, and nations as well as individuals themselves, then it would certainly seem to challenge the moral certainty of ardent just war theologians. Similarly, American religious scholar Kelly Denton-Borhaug critiques the way that Christian conceptions of sacrifice are often uncritically integrated into US nationalist narratives in ‘invisible’ ways (Denton-Borhaug 2011: 14–15).

It is Bonhoeffer, perhaps, who thinks through the implications of violence in extreme situations with the fullest recognition of the moral implications of either position. Modifying his initial pacifist position after his (albeit indirect) participation in the Abwehr plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1940, he notes that any attempt to find a pure, ‘clean hands’ position within Christianity in terms of violence is misplaced. Instead, he argues that following Christ into the world with authenticity means that, on occasion, we must take risks in acting responsibly for the sake of others. In limited situations, we must be willing to break a divine commandment – even one against violence – and in doing so, we imitate Christ who took on guilt for the sake of others. Bonhoeffer recognizes that this means renouncing a firm and comfortable ethical position, and that as we have violated a commandment we may stand in a position of judgment before God. Yet, he argues, it is precisely in taking this existential risk for the other and placing our own salvation in jeopardy that we perhaps embody the closest thing to ‘sinlessness’ in imitation of Christ. Contra just war theory, however, he notes that, importantly, this does not justify the ‘responsible act’ of breaking the commandment. Such an act cannot be justified, as for Bonhoeffer justification of our own actions is the height of sinfulness: the Christian is to live purely in the hope of God’s grace and mercy, never certain that his actions are justifiable, in the moral discomfort of this space.

Yet the existential danger of moral injury exposes a difficulty in Bonhoeffer’s position. Moral injury is often experienced as an inability to find a moral framework by which we can make sense of our own actions – even if to judge them negatively in order to move towards moral repair and amends-making. Bonhoeffer seems to propose that the proper state for Christians to live is one of moral injury, abandoning the hope of finding moral clarity this side of the eschaton, wherein God in Jesus Christ will put all things to rights. While Bonhoeffer’s nuanced and careful theological exposition commands respect in terms of the authenticity with which he addresses the central theological questions of violence, pacifism, and justification, research on moral injury suggests that it is incredibly difficult for human beings to live in the state he suggests is most fitting for Christians (see Powers 2020b for a fuller discussion of Bonhoeffer, justification, and moral injury).