GruntGod 2.6.5: The Invisible Ruck
Veteran Privilege, Civilian Bias, and What the Church Gets Wrong About Both
This is drawn from the revision of the P(s)aul chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
Peggy McIntosh's 1989 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" introduced a framework that higher education has been arguing about ever since. Her metaphor: privilege is an invisible, weightless knapsack—full of maps, passports, codebooks, and blank checks—that some people carry without knowing they have it. The essay is about race. But the metaphor applies more broadly than McIntosh intended.
The SEED Project makes Peggy McIntosh’s papers on privilege available online. Click for source.
Some Americans are issued rucksacks and told to carry everyone else's weight. That's not the same metaphor—it's the inverse. The knapsack gives you advantages you didn't earn. The rucksack gives you burdens you didn't choose. Military service, at its worst, is both at once: a rucksack of sacrifice and an invisible knapsack of moral authority that civilians occasionally borrow from veterans and, less frequently, veterans wield against civilians.
I've been tracking this dynamic for fifteen years. Not formally—no IRB approval, no longitudinal study. But over more than a decade, I averaged more than one soldier or veteran per month coming to me privately about civilian bias or mistreatment. Teachers. Bosses. Pastors. Professors. Therapists. Civilians who were supposed to be helping them, who instead used veteran status as a diagnostic label—unstable, damaged, a liability—rather than engaging with what the veteran was actually saying.
The pattern I observed is consistent: the complaints were legitimate. The decision to keep them private was rational. Because the moment a veteran goes public with a grievance against a civilian institution—especially a church or seminary—they become the problem. "Triggered." "Can't handle civilian life." "Probably has PTSD." These are the weapons of people who don't want to be challenged. They work because the cultural narrative about veterans is strong enough to override the individual's actual behavior.
This is not a coincidence. It's a function of how civilian privilege operates in ecclesial contexts. The church—at least the educated, progressive, mainline church that does most academic theology—has largely absorbed a pacifist framework that treats military service as at best a necessary evil and at worst a moral failing. That framework doesn't leave much room for a veteran to simply exist in a congregation or classroom without their service being treated as something requiring explanation, apology, or therapeutic intervention.
Carl Forsling has written about the flip side—veteran entitlement—with enough specificity to be worth citing. Veteran entitlement is real. Some veterans weaponize their service as a trump card in any moral argument, or treat civilians as fundamentally inferior for not having served. That's a real problem. But Forsling's point, and mine, is that entitlement and bias exist in proportion to each other. You don't get veteran entitlement without civilian guilt and civilian guilt-tripping. They're a closed loop.
Acts 22 gives us a first-century version of this problem. Lysias, the tribune, paid a large sum for the politeia—the freedom—that Psaul was born with. Paul uses that birthright citizenship to protect himself and, by implication, his community. He doesn't pretend the privilege doesn't exist. He doesn't apologize for it. He doesn't try to give it back. He uses it strategically, in service of people who have less of it than he does.
entitlement and bias exist in proportion to each other
That's the model I've tried to follow. When I was in Christian academia, surrounded by book-smart pacifists who privately asked me for advice on veteran congregants or estranged military family members—while publicly maintaining that Christian faith and military service were in fundamental tension—I had a choice. I could play the role of the token grunt, perform enough gratitude for their inclusion that they'd keep including me, or I could say what I actually saw.
I said what I saw. The reception was instructive.
The church's problem with military families is not primarily theological. The theology is complicated, but it's workable. The problem is cultural: the civilian church has largely outsourced its understanding of military life to its most anxious members, who project their own discomfort with violence onto the veterans sitting in their pews. The result is a community that says it supports troops while making it very difficult for those troops to tell the truth about what service actually costs.
"Play the game before it plays you." That NCO advice, offered to me at a low moment, is not cynical. It's virtue ethics in fatigues. Know the terrain. Use what you have. Don't pretend you're something you're not. And don't let the institution decide who you are before you've had a chance to decide for yourself.
The second edition of God Is a Grunt is an attempt to play that game—to use whatever credibility I've built in theological spaces to make room for people who've been told there's no room for them. The church has always included soldiers. The archive is thick with evidence. The question is whether the contemporary church wants to remember that—or whether it prefers a more comfortable story about its own pacifist innocence.
