MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Although the Katkoff vs. Marsh case of 1979 was a lower court ruling, it had a resounding impact on the chaplaincy and rationale for its existence. The case questioned the constitutionality of state funding for the military chaplaincy, claiming that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The final ruling determined that the chaplaincy was in fact constitutionally compliant since it functioned to support the Free Exercise Clause. (US Court of Appeals, Second Circuit January 22, 1985) This case is situated within a broader legal legacy which charts a shifting interpretative emphasis from separationist to free exercise (Sullivan 2014), and helps to highlight a movement away from earlier attempts at a unifying, common civic creed (Stahl 2017 and Cooperman 2018), and toward the construction of a pluralism that provides space for free exercise across diversity. Diversity in this model of pluralism has at least two ontological limitations that will be explored in the proposed paper. For one, it reflects a particular anthropology that imagines the American person as innately religious; and secondly, it defines religion (and its collocate, spirituality) in limited theistic terms. These ways of understanding a person and their religion then impact the way in which a chaplain performs their role in the service of free exercise. The proposed paper will examine the Military Chaplains’ Review, a publication produced by the Department of the Army from 1972-1992, in order to gain a sense of what impact the Katkoff case may have had on the discourse and performance of the military chaplaincy during this time. Additionally, drawing on legal literature and current scholarship on the chaplaincy, this paper will consider the ways in which the legacy of the Katkoff case had broader implications for American public religion across the variety of institutions in which a chaplain serves.