G'Segner, Ford F. (1986, Fall). A chaplain's perspective on the application of values. Military Chaplains' Review, 55-61.
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Evidently the army has (or had, I don't know if they still do or not) annual themes and the one for 1986 was "values.""The Chief of Staff Army "Values" White Paper uses these concepts and expands their application.
The thing is that the military is a "total institution," right? I don't think there's any doubt about that, at least not among experts on the subject. And it can be argued that for Christians the Body of Christ should be like a total institution, too, in as much as it's all consuming and it invades your whole life, right? So how can you live by the ethics of two total institutions at the same time?
Our Oath of Commission, Oath of Enlistment, or Oath of Office, requires that we live by the tenets of the professional Army ethic that we live by the tenets of the professional Army ethic and those Personal values that strengthen and enable us to execute the missions entrusted to us. Values are what we, as a profession, judge to be right. They are more than words -- they are the moral, ethical, and professional attributes of character. Our character is what enables us to withstand the rigors of combat or the challenges of daily life that might tempts us to compromise our principles such as integrity, loyalty, of selflessness. Ultimately, strengthening the values that make up our character enables us to strengthen our inner self, strengthen our bonding to others, and strengthen our commitment to a higher calling.
This is familiar language to chaplains. We are charged to our churches and religious groups to represent these values to soldiers. In addition, we are expected to apply the professional Army ethic with its individual values to our lives and the lives of the soldiers we serve." (p. 56)
I hope you're not going to try to tell me they're exactly the same; the ethics, I mean. You'd have a hard time with that one. Or are you going to try to say they're somehow complementary? I'd like to hear the argument on that one, although I'm very sure there are people who would hold to it. This is, basically, of course, a close cousin to the argument (at least I think it is) to not being able to serve both God and mammon. It's not exactly the same, but I think the logic is similar.
The other thing is that, really, the ethics that the Chief of Staff presents could mimic those found in Christianity, especially the ones found after the "Ultimately, strengthening..." These are: strengthening our inner self, bonding to others, strengthening our commitment to a higher calling."
Matthew 22Here instead of "strengthening our inner self" we have "love... thyself";
King James Version (KJV)36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
instead of "bonding to others" we have "love thy neighbor as thyself";
and instead of "strenthening our commitment to a higher calling" we have "love the Lord they God with all they heart, and with all they sould and with all they mind."
Which "higher calling" takes precedence? Is Jesus Lord of your life or is the Chief of Chaplains lord of your life?
The thing is that I'm doubtful that military chaplains can live without compromising their faith within the military.
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"In a recent newspaper interview Chaplain Patrick J. Hessian, former Army Chief of Chaplains, put the piety and ethic relationship into this perspective.Well, certainly I've changed my values in my adult lifetime. Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development are a well known example of how people might go through stages of value development in life. But, of course, institutions like the army might want to know how to more specifically effect value change. And I assume the Army would reject Martin Buber's approach out of hand because respect for the individual is unacceptable to them.
I attempt to stress the importance of looking at the spiritual belief structure that underlies any values we talk about.
It's important to understand that we don't start with values. We start with beliefs, and we build values on top of that. It begins with primary beliefs, those you larned at your mother's knee. Then you acquire beliefs just in the process of living. It's on this belief structure that your values rest. Once values are entrenched in your being, your attitudes and motivations in life flow from them, and from those attitudes and motivations come behavioral changes.
So, there's a clear path here of changes that start with belief structures, which are very frequently involved with spiritual things. If you're going to deal with values, it's important to understand the why of them -- what do you believe that's causing you to do this or that?
Contrary to a populary view, values can be changed -- if Chaplain Hessian is correct about values stemming from beliefs. (p. 58)
Hessian has, in his interview, beliefs, values, attitudes & motivations, and behavioral changes, which aparently come in that order. Now, in my understanding, researchers and and other scientists generally would hedge this a bit by saying something like, in 90% of cases, or with .05 validity, etc. So I'm going to assume that this is the case here, although Mr. Hessian didn't say that. And I'm not sure where he got this information from anyway. I have the source, though, so I could go try to look it up. It was in some newspaper called "Pentagram" though, and I have a feeling that's in the Pentagon, so I'm not sure that's available to the public or not. Maybe it is.
Anyway, in diagram form, here is what we have:
beliefs => values => attitudes & motivations => behavioral changes
Usually in these kinds of flow charts there end out being back tracks and sometimes skipping a step and things like that so you could have things like this:
Person A:
Beliefs => values => beliefs => values => attitudes & motivations => behavioral changes
Person B:
Beliefs => values => attitudes & motivations => behavioral changes => values => attitudes & motivations
So then it guest quite messy, right? (By the way, person B's value changes didn't require any behavioral changes.)
But that's okay, one size fits all, right?
In my case, my values started changing in Vienna and then in Russia I went through another big values change and contineud that in the U.S., especially when I had such a hard time finding work, and my family just thought I was lazy. Each time, though, I did some serious and extremely conscious and conscientious soul searching, sometimes involving researching, like you're seeing here. I really was just trying to make sense of my life and it did make me mad that I never did anything to hurt anyone and I tried even tried sometimes, when I could, to make it clear that I wasn't interested in anything political.
But as I reacted to the horrible or at least difficult situations, like in Vienna, part of that also included thinking about my beliefs and values especially. And I did change a lot. For those who wouldn't believe me about what happened in Vienna, they just couldn't understand the changes in me. But those who believed me, like my grandmother, understood me better. So that was the key, you had to believe me, or it wouldn't make any sense at all.
Dad was the main one behind the push to not believe me. When mom came to Vienna to help me pack up and saw the different in how they were treating me compared to a couple months prior when she was there and helping teach health at the new English language school, but dad convinced her that a lot of the stuff she had seen (and I have with me in writing from when she was in Vienna helping me pack) was bogus and couldn't be true.
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That's the end of this article.