Hutcheson, Jr., J. R. (1975). The chaplain's two institutions. In Hutcheson, Jr., J. R., The Churches and the Chaplaincy (pp. 17-37). Atlanta: John Knox Press.
This copy was actually from Northwest College Library in Roseville (St. Paul area) Minnesota. Some of the religious materials are from there because I couldn't get them at the state univeristy library. Northwestern College is a Christian liberal arts college.
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"George H. Williams, author of the excellent brief history of the military chaplaincy included in the Cox volume, saw clearly that the ministry of chaplains is 'fundamentally different from that of his pastoral colleagues' because of the chaplain's relationship to the non-rigious institution in which he serves. But he noted the different primarily in terms of procedures by which the chaplain is chosen and installed in his work." (p. 18-19)
I don't know about you, but for me it's hard to imagine that the difference between military chaplains and civilian pastors is just how they are installed and everything else is the same. That is, once they are installed the military leaves the chaplains alone and lets them act exactly like civilian pastors and the military chaplains aren't affected by the military chaplains aren't otherwise affected themselves by the military environment, including the fact that their sheep and potential sheep are in the military.
No, I'm not sure why Mr. Williams ended with chosen and installed as being the end point of military influence on the military chaplain, but if he knew so much about military chaplaincy it's hard to imagine that he really meant that to be the real end point of military influence.
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"To the extent that there is validity in Williams' hypothesis (not pressed, but repeatedly suggested in his historical essay) that the Army and Navy have taken the place in denominations for chaplains, it is probable that it is the Chaplain Corps of his service, rather than the service itself, which has so operated." (p. 21)
Some of these texts need to be considered in the time they were written, and this was written in 1975. We haven't looked at enough of these yet to place this in a proper setting, but I remember from my initial reading that there were some things going on that required some chronological consideration. It's just that it's been long enough that the details are fuzzy. So I have to read through them again.
In any case, it looks like for a significant number of chaplains in the Army and Navy leading up to 1975 the Chaplain Corps had for them pretty much taken the place of their denomination. I suppose they had held on to their denomination enough to keep credentialed, but otherwise the Chaplain Corps was actually more their home. I can see that because that's where they'd find people who could understand them better once they'd been in the chaplaincy for a certain number of years.
If this was the case, does it mean that they would sort of meld with the military? The chaplain corps has all kinds of religions, so their particular faith might get watered down some, it seems if they made the Chaplain Corps their religious home.
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"A third element which extends the institutional environment of the church into the military world is provided by the denominational structures which oversee the chaplaincy. Each denomination has officials who visit, counsel with, and provide ecclesastical supervision for chaplains. Each denomination requires reports from its chaplains. Each denomination either encourages or requires periodic attendance at meetings of church courts or conventions. While these denominational relationships are not so pervasive in the everyday life of the chaplain as the chapel program and the Chaplain Corps subsystem, they do serve to keep him continually reminded of the non-military institution which establishes his vocational goals and to which he owes his primary professional allegiance.
Although it is true, then, that a chaplain is a church professional whose ministry takes place in a secular institution outside the church, it is not true that he has 'left the church and entered the military.' In a real sense he takes the institutional environment of the church with him into the military. A substantial part of the perceived world in which he lives and works is determined by church norms rather than military norms." (p. 22)
So the thing is that, yes, the chaplain's sending church is still involved with him, but, like the author says, it's not where he is day in and day out. I think the author sounds like he paints a pretty accurate picture. Of course, there are probably a million variations, depending on the regime, the leadership, the chaplain himself, whether its war time or not, etc. But it's something to start from anyway. We also have more articles to compare this with.
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"Denominational interest in establishing control over the chaplaincy lagged far behind the development of corps identity and organization within the services. The first evidences of interest came during the Civil War. Several southern denominations took an active interest in recruiting chaplains for the Confederate Armyman and there was some evidence of similar interest in the North." (p. 25)
The thing is that we're getting into church and state issues here (which is a different file). Also, the fact that they wanted to take it over means they wanted the chaplaincy to be just one faith. So you would only have Baptists, and no Methodists or Presbyterians, for example.
So I guess before this time the military saw the chaplaincy as something helpful/useful for their soldiers, but the churches, really didn't care about it, except for the individuals that joined and became chaplains. I could see how with the Civil War churches would be sending off young men from their churches to go serve in the war and in some cases the war might be even fairly close or at least people had family or friends near where there was fighting, or at least new people from local churches where the fighting was. So maybe that kind of thing helped encourage the new interest in the chaplaincy.
So it was clear that either they didn't care about church-state separation and church involvement in the military, or they hadn't thought it thought very well or these values/issues were less important than other more pressing issues, so they decided to vie for chaplaincy, but ecumenicism was not to be part of that effort.
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This is an interesting article in general - not just the parts I chose to discuss - but I have to be selective and try not to go too far afield from what might be relevant to making sense of my life. These things in the Military Chaplaincy file are intended to try to understand the 2 chaplains in the Vienna mission, who comprised the entired H.R. department. Since they are the most likely link to my father (who worked at Boeing as a manager in SDI), I thought it might be helpful to understand military chaplains better. They are the ones who instigated (or at least told me about) my having been sent back to the USA and they are the ones through whom the Vienna leadership might have found out about my dad and any possible instructions about how to deal with me.