In an April press conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a prayer for the mission to rescue U.S. airmen downed in war on Iran. He invoked Ezekiel 25:17—vowing, “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger”—though much of the prayer was adapted from a monologue by Samuel L. Jackson’s hit man character in Pulp Fiction. A month earlier, reports had emerged of hundreds of noncommissioned officers complaining that they’d been told by their commanders that the war was part of God’s plan, and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
It’s tempting to write off such utterances as just another deranged aspect of Trump’s second term, but religious zealotry has proved a useful tool of control for military leadership going back centuries, says Jasper Craven. His book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, examines the ways in which brutality and blind loyalty within the armed forces have informed our traditional notions of masculinity.
In fact, Craven writes, early nineteenth-century West Point superintendent Samuel Thayer believed that “Christianity could serve as a powerful binding agent for his military project, an easily imported belief system that would at once form resilience and motivation in his boys and help them elide the major moral questions at the heart of the burgeoning imperial project to which they belonged.”
During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Craven and I discussed the tensions between morals and manhood within a military context.
Lorraine Cademartori: Did the Hegseth speech surprise you?
Jasper Craven: None of this surprises me. Pete Hegseth is the perfect embodiment of many of the different threads and histories that I have been tracing for the last three years as a part of book research. Religiosity has been core to military training since the founding of this country. We see from the earliest days of American military education—mandatory chapel, fire and brimstone sermons—and then most concretely with the founding of the U.S. Air Force Academy just after the Second World War: a strong evangelical subculture that has permeated the upper ranks of the military and is largely oriented around America’s supreme firepower. Obviously, the last two and a half decades have been marked by what President George W. Bush, in the days after 9/11, called a “crusade.” There is rhetoric that has long pervaded our military involvement in the Arab world. This is just the latest example in a long history.
L.C.: Is the framing of this war as “end times” a new development?
J.C.: [It] is definitely a ratcheting up of this rhetoric. I see it as a result of the fact that the American public and the American military at this point is very wary of conflict.… At this point the stakes must be ratcheted up to motivate the mission. When it becomes this existential, I think Hegseth and his deputies hope that it will animate the men fighting below them.
L.C.: Right—you say in the book that “since America’s founding, military brass have painstakingly developed and refined a military curriculum that breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence, all the while convincing the public that conflict is a hardwired male instinct.” But the Founding Fathers had a fair amount of reticence toward the idea of even forming a military academy, or establishing a quasi-professional fighting force, correct?
J.C.: These are people who endured a frustrating, and at times abusive, occupation by the British monarchy. The rebellion itself was a rejection of such tactics and such power. At the same time, this paradox forms in which the only way out of occupation is amassing of military power by the colonists. This tension has really marked America profoundly in the centuries since.… The Founding Fathers were generally really focused on ensuring that the soldier was never elevated above the citizen.
L.C.: Eventually the Continental Congress votes to fund West Point in 1802. It sounded like there was a fair amount of back-and-forth about a vision of education of this “fighting elite.”
J.C.: There are a series of scuffles culminating in the appointment of Thayer as superintendent to West Point [in 1817] that demonstrate the push-pull over what a military officer should look like. Thayer’s major nemesis, and also his former frat brother at Dartmouth, is Alden Partridge. [Partridge] offers, in his time as West Point superintendent, a more gentle approach, at least by military standards. He spares [cadets] the worst punishments and has a more relaxed approach toward military education.
Thayer is someone who, through his experience in the War of 1812, watches in disgust as the men below him demonstrate incompetence, don’t always listen to his orders, sometimes defect. He wants obedience, and he believes very strongly that only a quasi-authoritarian environment can breed the right kind of soldier. Thayer imposes dozens and dozens of new rules that strictly limit cadet behavior. He brooks no dissent. He’s in charge for a fair amount of time, and I think his ethos disseminates [within the military] through the years.
L.C.: One of the core arguments in your book is that the military has been profoundly effective in reaching out to children—young men, younger than 18, particularly through Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, and through the growth of military academies. Tell me about this ecosystem.
J.C.: Yeah, there’s a really interesting fight that plays out in the early twentieth century, in which military leaders and superintendents of military academies come to feel existentially threatened by the public school system, and by public school teachers, many of them women, pacifists, Quakers. This line of messaging emerges that viciously derides the female influence on the young American schoolchild. The military takes a number of actions to inject mandatory military trainings into public middle schools, especially in New York—which was where their power is concentrated, thanks to the allyship of corporate figures, like J.P. Morgan, who believe that creating obedience in young schoolchildren has an added benefit of [preparing] them to serve in corporate environments.
[But] back in those days, people like John Dewey were making the argument that the best way to create peace is to establish, among children, the possibility, and to show them how it can be done, and they will be the great agents in changing this violent mindset of humanity. I think the military understood that, too, and that’s exactly why they fight to control boys at such an early age.
L.C.: You even came to this book through reporting on youth in the military, at Valley Forge Military Academy and College in Pennsylvania—where cadets suffered widespread abuse and trauma.
J.C.: I’d been been covering the military and veterans’ issues for a while when I started investigating the Forge for Mother Jones, but that work helped me illuminate for the first time the pedagogy that pervades the Pentagon, pervades military training—and really this network—that maintains real power. I mean, there are 5,200 JROTC and ROTC programs in America. Seeing the raw, mutant, violent strains of masculinity that were leading to terrible abuse at Valley Forge made me want to write a book that could forcefully push back against this enduring idea that the military is this perfect catchall system for lost boys. Really, it just creates more dysfunction.
L.C.: There have been periodic attempts at reform, going back to well into the nineteenth century. I was struck by the tale you relate in the book of Oscar Booz, a West Point cadet who died from chronic hazing in 1900, but who never told on his abusers, and many others. [Among other abuses, Booz was forced to chug Tabasco sauce, resulting in tuberculosis in his larynx, and to participate in the academy’s underground fight club.] The top brass often say the right things when these tragedies occur, but nothing changes. Is that because the model is simply irreconcilable with reform?
J.C.: To inculcate loyalty, to motivate violence, you need to use pretty harsh tools, and I’ve lost count of the times military school leaders have, in the face of severe hazing scandals, or cheating scandals, or administrative corruption allegations, pledged to end hazing, to reform these programs, to impose accountability—to fully embody the very pure ideals that these places claim to live up to—but it’s never happened, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Creating these perilous conditions is vital to establishing a man’s desire to get out of them: to secure power, to secure validation. I think that is what’s most effective at forcing men to engage in really risky, violent, traumatic behavior.
L.C.: How did you reach the conclusion that “American masculinity is predicated on the wobbly assumption that man is violent by nature”?
J.C.: There are a number of underlying principles that Americans are in broad agreement with as they relate to American manhood. The subtext of many of these principles is very dark and fatalistic and violent. Sacrifice, for instance, is this big idea that you see many self-help gurus or manosphere figures preaching about: Man is expected to protect his family and to protect this country should threats arise. That is the pinnacle of American manhood.
But it’s incredibly devaluing for man’s lot to essentially be there to take the arrows that may rain down upon him in some imperial battle. And so to justify that, what needs to be argued is that man is violent, that it is man’s inherent duty to fight and to kill. We continue down a violent path toward male validation that is playing out in so many of the domestic crises that this country is seeing today, whether in school shootings or domestic abuse or the opioid epidemic or anything else. I mean, military service is now the number one predictor of violent extremism in America. And it just doesn’t have to be that way.
L.C.: Circling back to the beginning of our conversation—do you take anything away from the number of anonymous complaints? Does it tell you anything about the state of the military internally?
J.C.: Things are very fraught at the Pentagon now. I do think there are a lot of enlisted and officers who deeply value the political neutrality of the military, who have no interest in waging more war in the Middle East, who recoil at the idea or the actions of militarizing the southern border and deploying the National Guard into American cities. The problem is this abiding mentality of loyalty. I just look to the history of the American military, and I see situations in which gross war crimes were being committed, in which constitutional violations were occurring, and most people in the military sit idly by or participate in those activities. That’s due to a number of factors, including that there is also a long pattern of whistleblowers standing up and not seeing their issues heard or remediated. But I really wish that there were figures out there who were forcefully pushing back against what’s occurring. It makes you question all of this rhetoric that those who serve in the military are the most courageous among us. I’m not seeing much courage from people with skin in the game right now.
L.C.: Had you heard that Valley Forge Academy is graduating its last high school class this month?
J.C.: I do think that the story of Valley Forge is instructive, because what you can see is that when cadets break from the expectations foisted on them to be stoic, to endure unrelenting abuse, that space can really open up for reform. I mean, the reason that Valley Forge is in dire straits is because cadets and their families have relentlessly been voicing concerns for many years.… You can see tangible impact from them coming forward. They have had to subvert the ideology that has been drilled into them. And there is something that is very touching and beautiful about that.
At the same time, the ideology is very well funded, and it will take a lot to undermine it forever.
