When Civilian Theology Consumes Its Own Conscience

When theologian George Kalantzis joined me on Grunt God, he said something startlingly honest:

“What I want to propose is that actually for families, we should have services of lament and repentance—not for them to repent and lament—but our complicity that makes it necessary for their children to be at war.”

In that moment, he named what most veterans already know in our bones: that our trust has been betrayed, that civilians have become a distinct class whose comfort depends on the suffering of a minority. His words resonated because they cut through the moral fog that passes for conscience in the church.

But when the microphones went silent, the courage did too.

The Disappearing Act

Following the Secretary of Defense's rambling speech to military generals, he urged his social media audience to “consider seriously the topic of war and violence” by reading texts by avowed pacifists who had no service experience of their own;

To my knowledge, he never posted about our #GruntGod conversation, suggesting he never saw me as intellectually trustworthy, as someone his audience should check out. George performed the same civilian theology he had just condemned.

That silence was its own sermon. The message? Veterans’ presence and witness is valuable only as performative spectacle, not as experiential truth. George could preach against complicity, but he could not bear to repent of its practice.

When I wrote to him directly, I asked a simple question: "How am I any different from Pete Hegseth?" If civilians owe veterans lament for their complicity, then surely that debt is owed to all of us, not only the palatable or well-behaved. His reply confirmed what I had feared: the system runs on appearance, not accountability.

“Obviously, you are free to do as you wish and publish as you please,” he wrote. “I stand behind everything I said during our enjoyable discussion…”

He then repeated, almost word for word, his earlier call for community lament—as if saying the right thing (again) absolved him of doing the right thing.

The Theology of Distance

This is what I mean by Entitlement Religion. It is the faith of the dominant class—the civilians who believe they can consume the fruits of soldiers’ labor while remaining morally pure. It manifests as toxic pacifism, a theology that elevates innocence above responsibility.

Pacifists like George and the "theologians" whose work he promotes, insist on lamenting the evil of war without ever confronting the evil of exclusion. They will fast from the Eucharist but never break bread with the people they claim to mourn. Their so-called “peace witness” is (believed to be) safe because it is bloodless; their compassion is ultimately performative because it costs them nothing. It is merely a show, a δρᾶμα (drâmă)

This is how isolation works. Veterans are told they are either too broken to be morally competent agents or too dangerous to be trusted with moral language. And civilians are told they are neutral, as if neutrality itself were not an act of power.

What Isolation Feels Like

Many of you reading this know that feeling: you serve, you return, and the world that sent you pretends it doesn’t know you. They hold conferences about war, write essays about violence, and never invite those who’ve lived it. They quote Augustine and Basil while ignoring the people their theologies depend on.

When George wrote that he was in a refugee camp and had no time to respond, I believed him. When he later found time to restate his thesis in polished form, I realized it was never about time—it was about proximity. Entitlement Religion keeps its hands clean by keeping its subjects at arm’s length.

From Lament to Reckoning

George’s original idea still holds a spark of truth. The church does need a public lament. But lament without relationship is theater. Repentance without repair is vanity. The very word ecclesia means a public assembly; yet the church has turned the public square into a gated seminary, where only the credentialed may speak of conscience.

Veterans do not need pity or applause. We need truth-telling communities that recognize that the freedom civilians celebrate was not conjured from ideals, but carried home in the bodies of people they no longer recognize.

So when you feel alienated from the institutions that claim to speak for you, know this: you are not alone. What you’re feeling is not weakness—it’s clarity. It’s what it feels like to wake up inside a culture that confuses performance for faith.

The Real Public Service

George’s words—“We should have services of lament and repentance”—were right in spirit, he just refuses to execute them. Real "service" is not liturgical, it’s relational. It begins when civilians stop outsourcing conscience to clergy and start asking what it means to share the cost of the freedom they inherit.

Until then, we will be ruled by Entitlement Religion—pious on the surface, hollow at its core, terrified of accountability, allergic to proximity.

But the truth is still public. And it does not need a degree to be spoken.