Military Moral Injury: An Evidence-Based and Intercultural Approach to Spiritual Care

How can spiritual care help veterans struggling with military moral injury? An evidence-based, intercultural approach to spiritual care is proposed. Evidence-based care uses research on military moral injury and religious and spiritual struggles to understand when religious and spiritual practices, beliefs, and values are helping or harming veterans. Intercultural spiritual care recognizes the complex, distinctive ways veterans’ values, beliefs, coping, and spiritual practices are shaped by interacting cultural systems, especially military training and cultures. Pastoral theologian Larry Graham’s (Sacred Spaces: The E-Journal of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors 5, 146–171, 2017) writing on moral injury and lamentation is used to develop two spiritual care strategies: sharing anguish and interrogating suffering. Spiritual care begins with lamenting the shared anguish of moral injury using intrinsically meaningful spiritual practices to help veterans compassionately accept the emotions arising from moral injury so intensely felt in their bodies. The second strategy is sharing the lament of interrogating suffering through exploring values, beliefs, and coping arising from moral injury. A literary case study of a young female veteran based on Cara Hoffman’s (2014) novel Be Safe, I Love You illustrates this evidence-based intercultural approach to spiritual care of military moral injury.