Answering the Call: Responses to Gendered Constraints Within Military Chaplaincy

Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with military chaplain women, I offer an exploration of what intersecting individual, interactional, and institutional gender structure constraints exist within U.S. military chaplaincy. Military chaplaincy lies at the intersection of two masculinist institutions, which results in additive layers of gendered constraints for the women within it. After identifying the gendered constraints present within military chaplaincy, I then assess how military chaplain women navigate them, and why they engage in the type of agentic action they do. This study extends past research for women within military contexts, as it shows that women military chaplains respond differently than women within the broader military context because of the religious influence present. This work emphasizes the importance of agency for religious actors to be conceptualized to where autonomy exists alongside a prior act of personal surrender to a divine authority (Mack 2003:156). This research also provides a new angle for how women act as agents within structural and cultural limitations that are outside of their own religious belief systems. This extends past understanding of the constraints and agentic action for women within religion. Analysis shows how the women’s personal understandings of religious absolute truth is not the only determining factor impacting agentic action, but that the intersecting constraints of the gender structure and their career path prior to entering military chaplaincy also impacts agentic action.