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In the Balkans in the 1990s, I happened upon a “morale swingometer” at the entrance to a military headquarters. Its commander was rumored to nudge the arrow to the right before visits by his superior officer. Is that perhaps all that needs to be said on the ethics of morale? Certainly, temptation among British generals to just nudge the arrow would have been understandable following the publication of the latest Armed Forces Continuous Attitude Survey results.1 Since 2007, these surveys—underpinned by the usual statistical witchcraft—have attempted to measure how British personnel view military life. The 2018 results indicate that three-quarters of personnel are proud to be in their service but just two in five are satisfied with service life in general. Two-thirds perceive the morale of their service as low, a higher proportion than last year, with a decline in high self-morale over the last decade evident across all ranks and services. Such a situation is particularly sensitive given that military doctrine lists “maintenance of morale” as one of the seven foundational Principles of War.

Discussions of morale are complicated by the genealogy of the word.2 It was Cicero who invented the Latin word moralis to translate the Greek ethikos. Much of the early use of “moral” in English implied “practical”: it took the Wars of Religion and the Enlightenment to reinforce morality as a domain separate from the religious or the legal. Morale finally emerged in the 18th century simply as a variant of moral, with the spelling indicating an emphasis, rather like rationale relates to rational. English translators in turn projected the term onto Carl von Clausewitz in his distinction between the mood of an army as a transient thing and the spirit of an army that keeps its cohesion regardless of adversity.3 A refracted version of this Clausewitzian theory had reached the British high command by the time of World War I, helping to stimulate belief in the importance of moral factors in war.4 Finally, and largely due to the wars of the 20th century, morale as a predominantly psychological construct expanded from the military into wider social, political, and industrial life.

However, let us assume that what morale has referred to since the mid-19th century—confidence, hope, zeal, willingness—are attitudes that soldiers have always required and wise commanders have always monitored. From Homer to Helmand, a soldier’s lot has certain constants. “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus,” wrote Saint Paul to Timothy.5 Let us also assume that religion historically has had the power to undermine or reinforce this morale. Regimental chaplaincy itself arose from the need of the 8th-century French army to have enough priests to hear soldiers’ confessions on the eve of battle. In the 19th century, the Duke of Wellington appealed for more “respectable and efficient” Anglican chaplains for his army in Portugal to curb Methodism in the ranks. In World War II, evidence from across the British and American armies suggests that religion frequently provided crucial personal support, especially at times of crisis.6

Making those assumptions, then, what firstly would be the implications for chaplaincy if religion ceased to be an influential factor in British cultural life? Callum Brown has claimed that “Britain is showing the world how religion as we have known it can die.”7 If so, then British interoperability with other religious chaplaincies could become a huddle for warmth. Secondly, what would be the implications for chaplaincy if the morale of soldiers ceased to be a primary consideration for military planners? Morale for now retains a central place in British military doctrine, but its relegation does not seem improbable if in deadly environments soldiers were to be replaced by robotics. If the first question arises from the growth of secularism and the marginalization of the divine, then the second question arises from the growth of autonomous weaponry and the marginalization of the human. The implications of both range well beyond chaplaincy of course, but for present purposes chaplaincy may offer a useful lens—albeit largely a British Christian lens—through which to glimpse that wider future landscape.

World War I

The current core doctrine of the British army understands morale as a will to win that depends on strong leadership. It deems it to consist of fighting spirit, moral cohesion, discipline, comradeship, pride in self and unit, confidence in equipment and sustainment, and a firm spiritual foundation.8 Field Marshal William Slim is quoted to the effect that “only spiritual foundations can withstand real strain.”9 The doctrine then relates that spiritual foundation to belief in a cause, whether religious, cultural, or political. It notes that spiritual support is provided in many forms, but chaplains are mentioned first of all.10 It is a doctrinal connection of chaplaincy to morale that was reiterated as recently as 2017. In most modern walks of life, to propose involving clergy to raise group morale might just raise everyone’s eyebrows. Yet the notion has somehow endured within the military ever since it took root on the Western Front.

Chaplains at the outset of the Great War were simply required by King’s Regulations to conduct services and perform burials. Anglican chaplains in particular tended to be based in rear echelons, establishing canteens and organizing recreations. This earned them no reputation for courage, but such activities forged preliminary links between chaplaincy and morale. As the war persisted, chaplains were increasingly valued for their cheerful spirit and care for the troops.11 From December 1915, when Douglas Haig was appointed commander in chief, maintenance of morale right up to the frontline began to dominate the army’s expectations of its clergy. Of Presbyterian stock and with a strong sense of divine guidance, Haig drew inspiration from his personal chaplain, whose preaching of a manly Christianity “could make anyone fight.” For Haig this was the prerequisite quality of a chaplain. As he noted in his diary, “Any clergyman who is not fit for this work must be sent home.”12 General Herbert Plumer retrospectively considered that Bishop Llewellyn Gwynne had done more than any other individual to secure victory.13 From the American perspective, too, General John Pershing said of his chaplains, “Their usefulness in the maintenance of morale through religious counsel and example has now become a matter of history.”14

Gary Sheffield, who has argued that British soldiers’ morale was at least as important as new technology in the Allied victory of 1918, acknowledged recently that he had neglected the role of Christianity in sustaining that morale.15 Even at the time, some chaplains wondered to what extent Christianity really underpinned their work. “An amateur stretcher bearer or an amateur undertaker, was that all that Christian priests could be in this ruin of a rotten civilization?” asked Woodbine Willie himself.16 Most chaplains, however, do seem to have been able to rationalize their morale-raising activities as extensions of their faith. The British army, unlike its American and French allies, may not have created a central organization focused on morale.17 Nevertheless, “the work of the army’s chaplains was systematically harnessed to the maintenance and promotion of the army’s morale, a process which was initiated and closely monitored from the highest levels of the army’s command.”18 British soldiers may not have been voluntary churchgoers, but they had been raised through Sunday school and the likes of the Boy Scouts to be respectful of the church. Essentially, the General Staff’s confidence in chaplains’ potential was grounded in a shared Christian culture.

Secularization

In Britain, that culture can no longer be taken for granted. Relatively few British people now belong to a church or attend regularly. The influence of church leaders, let alone their ability to discipline the wider population, has been hugely diminished. Within the military itself, the assumption that soldiers would have a broad if vague Christian value system faded during the 1990s. Recruits reaching the army’s training regiments were perceived to be more concerned with rights and rewards than responsibilities and commitments. Core values such as courage, loyalty, and discipline had to be codified, accompanied by a utilitarian “Service Test” that judged conduct by its impact on operational effectiveness.19 As an institution associated with traditional Christian values, the military reeled under new legislation, capped by the European Court of Human Rights ruling against its ban on gay service personnel in 1999. In that same year, an army report on spiritual values confessed “a degree of uncertainty and confusion about the role of chaplains.”20

In 2006, I wrote that “Britain’s rapid secularisation [sic] since the 1960s, combined with encroaching professionalism and fiscal accountability, has left chaplains lacking sure legitimacy within a culture that no longer deems Christian discourse normative.”21 Picking up on those remarks, Callum Brown observed that “it is this cultural collapse of Christendom that in the end needs explaining from the 1960s.”22 In retrospect, though, I am much less certain that this collapse has happened, at least within the British army. The Spiritual Needs Study of 1999 still affirmed that “chaplains are a crucial resource for commanders and soldiers.”23 It led to funding for 20 percent more chaplains and investment in their professional education. Despite concluding that “a moral code in the United Kingdom based on Christianity can no longer be taken for granted”—a conclusion that chimes with (perhaps self-fulfilling) church pronouncements since the 1960s—the report acknowledged that almost 97 percent of the army was listed as Christian.24 The figure has declined since, but in 2017, 72 percent of all ranks across the services still declared a Christian religious identity, with the army probably closer to 80 percent.25

As for that image of the army as a bastion of traditional values under siege, the past quarter-century has if anything witnessed a moral renewal, not a collapse. By the 1990s, observers were likely to perceive the army as racist, bullying, sexist, and homophobic. New recruits may have been importing individualistic values, but much more serious cultural issues confronted an institution that, since national service ended in the early 1960s, had ossified in its isolation from wider society. Christians like General Lord Richard Dannatt, former chief of the General Staff, would come to welcome human rights reforms as ending discrimination and boosting the army’s legitimacy in the eyes of the society it served.26 The codification of the moral component may not have achieved one of its original objectives (namely, preventing the encroachment of civilian law into the military), but it nevertheless provided an enduring guide for soldiers’ conduct. British chaplains remain at liberty to draw on Christian narratives to flesh out the army’s generic core values (which also include integrity, selfless commitment, and respect for others). Indeed, chaplain and theologian Ian Torrance has been credited as one of the moral component’s architects.27

Ironically, my observations in 2006 about the chaplaincy struggling for coherence were penned just as Great Britain was about to embark on a campaign that would reinvigorate the specifically religious role of chaplains. Deployed to Helmand as the British Task Force Chaplain in 2010–2011, I experienced first-hand how greatly religious support was valued by those closest to danger, and how commanders recognized it as crucial to morale and operational effectiveness. Religious language resonated anew with soldiers in relation to death, repatriation, and remembrance. “Vicarious religion” was at play here,28 but in the toughest locations soldiers’ own religious practices (not infrequently assembled from their memories of movies) became accentuated: “Circumstances alter cases . . . the young men serving in Afghanistan bucked the statistical trends.”29 The opening up of British combat roles to women, and the reality that women are already “more religious than men over a wide variety of indicators throughout the Christian [W]est,”30 suggests further interesting statistics may lie ahead.

The British military could therefore prove surprisingly resistant if not immune to secularization. The American military shows similar signs. International collaboration between chaplaincies—with religious commonalities outweighing variances in military culture—remains a worthwhile endeavor with no obvious sunset clause. Historian John Keegan once commented that “wherever the light of religion has not died out from armies, men seem to hunger for its consolations on the eve of action.”31 Maybe religion has not died out in armies precisely because men (and women) do hunger for its consolations. Indeed, might secularism in wider society have gained ground at least in part because the modern British public has not had to countenance being mobilized militarily? Callum Brown traced the death throes of Christian Britain to 1963. Perhaps not coincidentally the last national servicemen left the armed forces that year. There is now neither political experience nor societal fear of existential war. Should existential war lie ahead of us, it is troubling to reflect that neither Britain nor America has yet had to wage such a war without the sustenance of religion. Potential adversaries are on a very different trajectory, from a rejuvenated Russian Orthodoxy to the religious cult that is North Korea.32

History teaches that existential wars have reenergized the religious life of our societies. It teaches too that our big wars have been won not by preexisting professional soldiers but by rapidly recruited civilians. Moreover, in Michael Burleigh’s assessment of World War II, “most soldiers in Western armies remained civilians in spirit and came from societies that had not encouraged them to hate.”33 Should Christian cultural memory be reduced to embers, though, less wholesome forms of religion might well spark into life. Such religion may neither provide a firewall against hate nor highlight Saint Augustine’s lesson that war is ultimately a cause for lamentation, not triumphalism. Chris Hedges of the Occupy movement has observed that “because we in modern society have walked away from institutions that stand outside the state to find moral guidance and spiritual direction . . . the institutions of state become, for many, the centre [sic] of worship in wartime.”34 He meant that as a warning. However, insofar as chaplaincy does survive within state institutions like our armies, the churches too may retain a voice. Chaplaincy could in time prove vital for the maintenance of religious and moral memory, and not only for the military but also for the wider society.

Autonomous Weaponry

The optics of chaplaincy can nevertheless magnify aspects of soldiering that civilians find unsettling. A defining image of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns remains that of the chaplain conducting repatriation services. Such ceremonies clearly addressed pastoral needs of bereaved families and comrades alike and struck a chord with the wider British public, too. By and large, the public differentiated between the decisions of politicians and the duties of soldiers, with enormous sympathy for the latter. However, this stoked a narrative that now predominantly treats the soldier as a victim or potential victim of politicians, hampering the government’s ability, as in the case of Syria, to put “boots on the ground.” Of course, politicians and commanders have always aimed to reduce the casualties on their side. If a safer, more efficient means of killing an enemy can be invented, it will be. Nevertheless, our own potential casualties have increasingly become our center of gravity. The pressure to replace service personnel with artificial surrogates has grown accordingly.

I have already surmised that the religious dimension of human conflict (including chaplaincy) is likely to persist despite the growth of secularism. Humanists in particular may find that dispiriting. Should autonomous machines occupy human terrain, however, humanists face the even bleaker prospect of humanism itself being undermined. In his forecast of humanity’s destiny, Yuval Harari puts it like this: “Humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.”35 This does sound like science fiction. Whereas some scorn religious affairs, others dismiss intelligent robots as the stuff of Blade Runner or Westworld. However, retired General James Mattis, for one, is disturbed enough to be reconsidering his own assumptions. The character of war might be chameleon-like but its nature, he previously believed, was fundamentally a human endeavor, encompassing courage and fear and cowardice, and aiming at human solutions to human problems. Now, confronted with the rise of artificial intelligence, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense has admitted, “I am certainly questioning my original premise of the fundamental nature of war that does not change. You have got to question that now. I just don’t have the answer.”36

Where Haig and Pershing sought to sustain morale among human beings waging increasingly technological warfare, leaders like Mattis face the waging of war by technology that would require no human morale. Early 20th-century chaplains responded practically to the first challenge. Philosophically, a British army chaplain of the 18th century may help to illuminate the future challenge. Adam Ferguson, a central thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment who had served as chaplain to the Black Watch, advocated establishing a citizens’ militia in Scotland. This was eclipsed by Adam Smith’s case for a standing army, but Ferguson’s thought nonetheless endured to influence the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.37 A classical republican concern of Ferguson was the decline of martial spirit among citizens. Autonomous weaponry may raise the specter of its decline among the military class itself. American rhetoric of the warrior, which has made recent inroads into Great Britain, will be challenged by this. Moreover, Ferguson’s twin concern about the centralizing of state power and its potential for dictatorship may acquire new relevance. Technological mastery by a state or corporation in autonomous weaponry could carry with it new potential for tyranny. As President Vladimir Putin has concluded about artificial intelligence, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”38

Clearly, we have not yet reached the stage where machines can outperform human brains and bodies across all areas. Older fashioned ways of war will not disappear overnight. Indeed, medieval barbarity is thriving on contemporary battlefields. Full autonomy, and what could be perceived as clinical warfare, may be a long way off. Moreover, the position at least of Britain’s Ministry of Defence is that “we do not operate, and do not plan to develop, any lethal autonomous systems.”39 Types of human-machine teaming are nevertheless developing rapidly. A recent study by the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom anticipates “fewer points of human consciousness”40 and stresses the need to optimize the remaining “human and mental capacity within such a force.”41 The paper reckons that the last military roles likely to be automated will be “where personnel conduct activities that demand contextual assessment and agile versatility in complex, cluttered, and congested operating areas.”42 Resilience seems to be increasingly a matter of systems and networks, not human hearts and minds—let alone souls. Tellingly, despite emerging from a defense doctrine center, and despite its focus on an issue with profound implications for military men and women, that paper makes no reference to morale. Yet modern military chaplaincy has been built on a doctrinal foundation of morale. If that foundation becomes unstable, what happens to chaplaincy?

Chaplaincy Conclusions

Given the rate of technological development, this instability may soon become a matter of practical concern and not just academic conjecture. At one level, chaplains may have fewer people in their care as machines assume more roles within the military; at another level, they may even discover that aspects of chaplaincy itself are deliverable autonomously. Unlike the earlier reflections on how chaplaincy emerged from the First World War, these concluding speculations on how it will adapt to 21st-century conflict and technology remain precisely that—speculations. Nevertheless, pointers to how artificial intelligence could have an impact are beginning to appear, and it would seem that none of the central pillars of chaplaincy—the religious, the pastoral, and the moral—will be left untouched. By way of conclusion, a few of these emerging effects are briefly mentioned, before recommendations are offered regarding theological themes to which chaplaincy internationally should give renewed attention.

Church of England statistics indicate that 1.2 million people are now engaging with the church’s online presence, compared to the 1.1 million who actually attend church at least once a month.43 The church also launched a new “skill” for Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa in 2018, enabling users to access religious material and advice. The app is activated by stating “Alexa, open the Church of England.” (As artificial intelligence grows in power, might it become unwise to state “Alexa, close down the Church of England”?) Alexa can offer a grace before meals and prayers at bedtime, recite the Ten Commandments, describe Holy Communion, explain how to arrange funerals, and answer questions like “Who is God?” and “What do Christians believe?” Feedback by users—or worshippers—is positive. Such apps are being introduced with the best of intentions. The housebound and elderly may value them. Those in closed institutions such as prisons or the military might, too. One consequence, though, could be to further magnify trends of belief being separated from belonging and of religion being provided vicariously. Chaplains can struggle as it is to transpose soldiers’ sense of regimental belonging onto church, or to prevent themselves simply becoming agents of vicarious religious ritual.

The artificial intelligence of Alexa is to be exploited further by the Church of England “to ensure users can find more answers to faith questions and to explore on other platforms in future.”44 For some, this amounts to artificial spirituality; for others, artificial spirituality is a handy definition of Anglicanism. Either way, it is not difficult to see a more mobile robotic platform offering such religious support. Pastoral care in such a form is looking less unlikely, too. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has suggested that the 2020s could see robots and artificial intelligence take on a quarter of British doctors’ workload and nearly one-third that of nurses.45 This is described as time freed up from administrative and repetitive tasks for better care, but evidence from Japan indicates robots are encroaching on the caring professions’ core territory as well. Eric Topol, a U.S. geneticist currently reviewing Great Britain’s National Health Service, has observed of Japanese robots, “Senior people are developing an emotional relationship with them and they are getting a tremendous amount of support.”46 The IPPR report itself envisages a Britain where “Home Help Robots” enable people in old age to experience “better, longer, and more fulfilling lives.”47

Where the political imperative to care for aging citizens is one of the drivers of robotics in health service, the imperative to care for soldiers is one of its drivers in the military (with the need for battle-winning technology having primacy as always). Replacing soldiers on the frontline with machines is one approach. Another is to use machines in the frontline to provide care to soldiers. Here again it is not that difficult to picture a medical “care-bot” that incorporates an advanced version of Alexa’s religious app. Indeed, given the legal and ethical controversy surrounding autonomous weapons, such care-bots may appear long before their killer cousins ever do. No soldier need be without a prayer of their faith in the face of death anywhere on the battlefield. Morally, too, such a robot might more reliably report misconduct than a chaplain who felt inclined to close ranks with the soldiers. Humanity itself could prove to be the moral weak link, incapable of navigating the accumulating nonbinary judgments of the yet-to-be-invented field of quantum ethics. Conceivably, “highly automated weapons could actually be more able to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict principles of proportionality and distinction,” thus making it difficult for a state to justify not using them.48

Far-fetched as these speculations about robotics may still sound, chaplains like others within the military need to start questioning their basic assumptions. Where First World War chaplains maintained the morale of soldiers who were natives of factories and mines, fighting industrial war on the frontline, today’s soldiers are digital natives who may end up fighting among machines online. Traditional chaplaincy will not disappear overnight. In barracks it will still involve caring for people in all the complexity of their lives and relationships. Religious practices will endure as well, albeit mixed up with startling new equipment, which may indeed offer new resources for maintaining morale. A platoon sergeant in Helmand checking his men’s kit for a patrol would still have been recognizable to his First World War or even Homeric counterparts, notwithstanding the inclusion of retinal scanners and DNA swabs among the weapons and rations. On the battlefield beyond, however, the technology will literally begin to stand on its own feet. With that prospect, and by way of resistance, three cardinal themes of Christian military chaplaincy commend themselves as worthy of further study.49

First, chaplaincy needs to deepen its sacramental roots. While spiritual resources may be available online, soldiers in conflict hunger for the visible and tangible. Chaplains who are mainly ministers of the Word may be vulnerable to the machines. Second, chaplaincy needs to deepen its incarnational roots. While machines may be able to venture where human chaplains struggle to follow, no robot will genuinely share the risks of soldiers. God became man, not machine, with all the risk that entailed. And third, chaplaincy needs to deepen its penitential roots. Psalm 51 was a core text of medieval military liturgies: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” While robots may prove effective moral policemen, soldiers can also require forgiveness—not generally for killing the right people, but for killing the wrong people, or the right people in the wrong way. As noted in the concepts paper on human-machine teaming, the last people in the military to be automated will be those who “conduct activities that demand contextual assessment and agile versatility.” The challenge of maintaining soldiers’ morale across the sacramental, incarnational, and penitential demands of the emerging battlespace suggests that chaplains will be among them.