Crossroads -- Asking faith questions about future U.S. soldiers

Are Bible Belt families and pastors still enthusiastic about sending children into the armed services?

Try to imagine an America in which families that have, for generations, urged their children to serve in the armed services stopped doing precisely that.

Would that be a big news story?

One would think so. With that in mind, take a look at the numbers in this chart posted on X by the Missing Data Depot Substack feed.

Here’s the written summary from that tweet:

Military families have soured on the military. The % of military family members who would recommend service to their children dropped from 55% in 2016 to 32% in 2023.

Relatedly the military fell 41,000 recruits short of its 2023 goal & it is now at its smallest size since 1940.

Clearly, economic issues — think slow-rising salaries, housing costs for military families, day-care costs and more — are affecting recruiting. You can read all about that in this report by Stars and Stripes. These are logical, valid angles for reporting.

However, during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, we focused on some of the cultural, moral and, yes, religious themes that almost certainly loom over these military recruiting woes. Are journalists asking “religion ghost” questions?

Yes, many conservative American have voiced concerns about “woke” military policies that are frequently linked to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) debates, as well as LGBTQ+ issues. At the same time, it helps to ask practical questions about what kinds of families have traditionally produced American soldiers. Pay close attention to the following, drawn from a 2023 Wall Street Journal report (hat tip to Rod Dreher’s “Military Families Losing Faith” Substack post):

The children of military families make up the majority of new recruits in the U.S. military. That pipeline is now under threat. …

“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”

The big “Crossroads” question: Do many of these families come from specific pews and zip codes?

The WSJ report notes that, with the end of the draft, the leaders of America’s armed services built programs that relied heavily on “military families to develop the next generation of recruits, especially in the region known in the military as the ‘Southern Smile,’ a curving region from the mid-Atlantic and down across the southern U.S.” Also, don’t forget that: “Today, nearly 80% of all new Army recruits have a family member who has served in uniform, according to the service.”

Thus, here is a question about the religion data in that equation: Can Episcopal and liberal mainline Protestant churches in the Northeast produce as many future soldiers as Baptists, Pentecostals and nondenominational evangelicals in the Bible Belt?

Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.