The U.S. Military’s Masculinity Problem

A conversation with Jasper Craven about military education, abuse, and the uses of religion as a form of control.

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........

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