spiritual fitness essay

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Spirituality as strategic ambiguity, positive psychology, spirituality, and the management of contradiction.

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Strategic Spirituality: Positive Psychology, the Army, and the Ambiguities of “Spirituality Fitness”

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Steven Weitzman, Strategic Spirituality: Positive Psychology, the Army, and the Ambiguities of “Spirituality Fitness”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion , Volume 89, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 240–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab010

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In the wake of increased mental health issues resulting from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, psychologists affiliated with the field of positive psychology developed a resiliency training program for the US Army that included strengthening “spirituality fitness” as one of its goals. The initiative represents what may be the largest single effort to use spirituality to intervene in people’s mental health, but it also represents an intervention in the semantics of spirituality, an attempt to make it signify in new ways. This study treats this intervention as an exercise in “strategic ambiguity,” the use of unclear language to balance between contradictory goals, and draws from this approach some inferences about what it is that those working in the field of positive psychology import into the spirituality they have promoted within American military culture.

IN 1998 the psychologist Martin Seligman launched what he referred to as a “Manhattan Project” for the social sciences, a new research initiative that promised nothing less than to make the world a happier place ( Seligman 1998 ). Framed as a corrective to psychology’s focus on illness and suffering, this new field, known as positive psychology , would seek a better understanding of what works well in human psychology—what makes life meaningful and satisfying for people and what traits or skills allow people to be more resilient and to cope more effectively with stress or trauma. Seligman founded the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania as a way to advance new research along these lines, and over the last twenty years, its influence has spread through best-selling books and through the establishment of other centers in the United States, Europe, Israel, Australia, Singapore, India, and elsewhere. The field of positive psychology has had a transformative effect on schools, workplaces, and other institutions. What makes it a focus here is its impact on the religious and spiritual lives of Americans.

Although Seligman would insist that he did not have any religious or theological agenda, he and allied scientists would soon explore religion and spirituality as sources of well-being, partly as a result of a relationship that Seligman developed with John Templeton and the Templeton Foundation, which provided funding for such research ( Seligman 2018 , 230–31). In Christopher Peterson and Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification ( Peterson and Seligman 2004 ), the result of a project that involved some fifty-five researchers, “transcendence” is treated as one of six “virtues” that subsumes spirituality as one of its constituent “strengths,” and more recent positive psychology-related research has built on this connection to spirituality ( Pargament and Mahoney 2011 ; Falb and Pargament 2014 ; Barton and Miller 2015 ). The impact of such research is reflected in the steady flow of books into the maket over the last decade that enlist positive psychology to argue that Christianity, Buddhism, and other religious traditions have demonstrable benefits for one’s health and sense of well-being ( Levine 2010 ; Kaczor 2015 ; McMinn 2017 ; Charry and Kosits 2017 ; Pasha-Zaidi and Odeh 2019 ).

This study focuses on one of positive psychology’s more consequential interventions in people’s spiritual lives. In one of his most popular books, Flourish: a Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being , Seligman describes his experience in proposing a training program to the US Army, “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” (henceforth CSF), that was meant to help its personnel fare better in the face of the stress and trauma of ongoing warfare. What is relevant about this initiative for scholars of religion is that the program included what its authors referred to as “spiritual fitness” among the strengths it aimed to develop, yielding an initiative that represents a still unfolding case study in how positive psychology impacts the meaning and practice of spirituality in contemporary American military culture.

The Army’s spiritual fitness training program has caught the attention of earlier scholars of religion, including Winnifred Sullivan (2014) , who has investigated the participation of chaplains as a part of the initiative, and Shenandoah Nieuwsma (2016) in a dissertation that situates the program as part of a much longer history of the Army’s efforts to use spirituality to promote morale. The present study examines the spiritual fitness program from the perspective of organizational communication, the study of the sending and receiving of messages within organizational contexts as a way to achieve individual or collective goals ( Putnam and Krone 2006 ). Positive psychologists did not introduce the language of spirituality to the Army, but they have subtly adjusted its meaning in ways that serve particular needs of the Army today.

As a way of advancing its argument, my analysis draws on a concept known as “strategic ambiguity,” an idea introduced by Eric Eisenberg in an essay entitled “Ambiguity as Strategy in Organizational Communication” ( Eisenberg 1984 ). Although most researchers and practitioners of organizational communication at the time advocated for clarity and openness as the ideal, Eisenberg noted that such communication was not the only way to be effective within an organization. Clarity is a measure of effective speech if it is the communicator’s goal to be clear, but Eisenberg demonstrated that organizational communication that is vague, indirect, inconsistent, imprecise, or equivocal can work in ways that clarity cannot, allowing organizations to mask internal differences and create the appearance of consensus, keep their options open, deflect blame, finesse the differences between internal perspectives and outsider’s perceptions, maintain deniability, and protect existing privilege and power distributions. Eisenberg’s concept of strategic ambiguity has proven quite generative, inspiring many studies of how companies and other organizations operate beyond the options available within the confines of clarity (e.g., Jarzabkowski, Sillince and Shaw, 2009 ; Risberg and Just 2015 ).

This is the role I propose for spiritual fitness as (re)introduced by scholars working in the field of positive psychology. As one does not need to explain to readers of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion , spirituality as used by Americans is ambiguous, developing many meanings and connotations over the course of its usage, and I would not suggest that positive psychologists have invented its ambiguities any more than I would claim that they invented the language of spirituality itself. What I do contend is that, over the last decade, the ambiguity already intrinsic to the language of spirituality has taken on a new function, a strategic function, within the context of contemporary American military culture and that it was positive psychology-affiliated researchers who facilitated this development.

This essay is about spirituality as a medium of communication, but it is also about the scholars who helped to shape its meaning. In its background is earlier work that explores the meanings of spirituality as developed in secular settings like hospitals, businesses, and the media, but an especially important influence is Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination , which calls attention to the role of scholars and people’s relationships with scholars in the construction of spirituality ( Bender 2010 , 14–16). Scholarly investigators made frequent appearances in the experiences of the spiritual practitioners that Bender studies; they influenced those experiences in person as observers or through the medium of their ideas and books. Science held a great deal of authority for the participants of her study, even if their understanding of that science reflected misunderstanding, and they were eager to learn from its practitioners, to engage academics like Bender herself, and treated the words of such scholars with a great degree of interest and even reverence. The researchers at the heart of the story recounted here, positive psychologists, practice a different kind of scholarship than the sort that engaged Bender’s spiritual practitioners, but they too function as a kind of spiritual authority, the Army relying on them for its understanding of what spirituality is and invoking their work as a rationale for new practices. This study, therefore, treats such scholars as co-creators of the spiritual, arguing that a focus on their linguistic interventions, their impact on how terms like “spirit” and spiritual” are being used, can help illuminate the influence that positive psychology exerts on spirituality as practiced in secular organizational contexts in America.

Before proceeding any further, it will help to explain how the Army came to embrace spirituality as a quality it seeks to cultivate in its personnel. CSF was an effort to apply the approach of Positive Psychology to a major problem that had beset the military in the wake of prolonged combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, a period that saw increasing rates of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, domestic abuse, and suicide. Between 2004 and 2008, for example, suicides in the Army increased 80 percent, outpacing combat-related deaths ( Lineberry and O’Conner 2012 ; for more recent data between 2011–2018, see Department of Defense 2018 ). CSF was established in 2008 to help protect soldiers against the effects of combat-related stress and trauma by improving their resilience and their ability to cope with adversity and recover from setbacks. In 2012, it was renamed Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2) as it was expanded to include military families and civilian Army personnel, but we will stay focused on its original formulation as a way to better protect soldiers from combat-related stresses and psychological injury.

The inclusion of spiritual fitness training as a part of CSF was not an innovation, but instead emerged from more than a century of efforts by the Army to enlist religion and spirituality as ways to boost and sustain morale. The military’s earliest efforts to test soldiers for psychological fitness and to detect who was most vulnerable to “shell shock” began during World War I ( Street 2006 ), and by World War II, the Army was supporting research showing that prayer helped with combat-related stress ( Stouffer et al. 1949 , 172–88). During the Cold War, Army initiatives like the “Character Guidance Program” sought to stiffen the religious faith of soldiers as a way to counter Communist mind-control techniques ( Nieuwsma 2016 , 61–106), and the language of spiritual fitness first emerged at the tail-end of this era, in the late 1980s, mirroring the increased importance of spirituality within the health-care culture of the day ( Nieuwsma 2016 , 181–230).

For our purposes, however, the story of the Army’s current spiritual fitness training initiative begins with a lunch meeting between Seligman and General George Casey and members of his staff in November of 2008 where they discussed applying Seligman’s approach to resilience to the military’s challenges. Seligman had championed the idea that optimism could be taught as a series of skills, an idea that had been validated through the Penn resiliency program designed by Seligman and others to prevent depression and anxiety among middle school children. This was the program that Seligman now proposed as a model to the Army, and Casey, recognizing a good fit between the program and the Army’s training process, embraced the idea, contracting with Seligman to develop it ( Seligman 2011a , 126–51). Working with Rhonda Cornum, a Brigadier General in charge of training, Seligman commissioned researchers to develop a questionnaire known as the Global Assessment Tool, a mandatory survey administered online to soldiers on a regular basis to assess core areas of strength that included spiritual fitness alongside physical, emotional, and other kinds of fitness.

Spiritual fitness in this context was modeled on physical fitness, a measurable and improvable dimension of performance. The earliest form of the Global Assessment Tool assessed spirituality through a five-item scale where participants were asked to choose among responses that ranged from “not like me at all” to “very much like me”—a process yielding an assessment of whether the respondent “had a sense of meaning, purposes, and accomplishment in life that extends beyond the self” ( Peterson, Park, and Castro 2011 ). If the questionnaire resulted in a score below a minimum threshold, an automatically generated message was sent to the respondent:

Spiritual Fitness is an area of possible difficulty for you. You may lack a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. At times, it is hard for you to make sense of what is happening to you and others around you. You may not feel connected to something larger than yourself. You may question your beliefs, principles and values. Nevertheless, who you are and what you do matters. There are things to do to provide more meaning and purpose in your life. Improving your spiritual fitness should be an important goal. ( Barker and Gaylor 2010 , 2)

To develop their spiritual fitness, participants were encouraged to voluntarily enroll in optional distance learning modules. In the version analyzed by Nieuwsma, these included sections entitled “Spiritual Support,” “Rituals,” “Making Meaning,” “Meditation,” and “Hunt the Good Stuff,” which referred to the importance of focusing on one’s “blessings” ( Nieuwsma 2016 , 273–96). As Nieuwsma shows, the modules encouraged soldiers to focus on the positive, stay true to their core values, practice gratitude, and engage in rituals and meditation to improve their spiritual strength.

This new spiritual fitness training program was different from the Army’s previous attempts to cultivate soldier’s religious faith or spirituality in several important ways, including the fact that it was not delegated to the chaplaincy but was built into the Army’s overall training process and command structure. Participation in the spiritual fitness modules was voluntary, but responding to the spirituality-related questions on the Global Assessment Tool was not, and improving the spiritual fitness of personnel was now the responsibility not just of chaplains and psychologists but of noncommissioned officers known as Master Resilience Trainers who were taught how to impart resilience skills to others. The first 2500 Master Resilience Trainers were trained at the University of Pennsylvania, and instruction has since moved to eighteen training centers nationwide, with two more coming to Germany and South Korea. Another key difference is the way this initiative was informed by research: the Army’s approach to spirituality—its efforts to define, measure, and improve it—was supported by recent psychological research affiliated with or endorsed by Seligman and his collaborators.

Looking back on the program from a decade later, it is hard to tell whether it is working. There have certainly been critics of CSF who point to various methodological and ethical problems ( Eidelson, Pilisuk, and Soldz 2011 ; Smith 2013 ; Denning, Meisnere, and Warner 2014 , 5, 89–91; Brown 2015 ; Howell 2015 ; Scott 2018 ), and some research suggests that spirituality can yield negative consequences, as in a study of combat soldiers that found that practicing positive religious coping—looking for benign meaning in an experience, seeking spiritual connection, engaging in religious practice—predicted greater distress a month later ( Cornish et al. 2017 ), but it is all but impossible to tell whether spiritual fitness training has had any effect, positive or negative (on the inconclusiveness of the data on the role of religion and spirituality in general as a psychologically protective factor in combat, see also Sterner and Jackson-Cherry 2015 ). Not finding any evaluations or reviews from after 2014, I sent an inquiry to the Positive Psychology Center listserv asking whether there had been any recent research assessing the spiritual fitness program in particular, and I received two responses. One was from Seligman himself, who noted that there has not been such an evaluation. 1 The other, from the same day, was from Paul Lester, whose laboratory had conducted the evaluations of the CSF program for the Army ( Lester et al. 2011 ) and he too was not aware of any evaluations of spiritual fitness; although his laboratory was working on its own evaluation, it had not made much progress. 2 The inconclusiveness of the research is not surprising. Although thousands of studies argue for a link between spirituality and well-being, it has long been acknowledged that it is difficult, if not impossible, to measure spirituality in a scientific sense ( Koenig 2008 ; Monod et al. 2011 ; Cragun et al. 2016 ; Laird, Curtis, and Morgan 2017 ; de Oliveria Maraldi 2020 ).

The present study is not an attempt to weigh in on whether spiritual fitness training is good, bad, or indifferent in its effects, but it is important for my argument to note one particular insight that has emerged from recent research into the health effects of spirituality. There is a recognition among some researchers that the language of spirituality—the terminology itself—complicates the picture, exerting its own effects. In fact, this is one of the reasons it is so difficult to measure the effects of spiritual fitness: because people understand and react to the terms “spirit” and “spirituality” in different ways, they respond to questionnaires in ways that can skew the results. This was the conclusion of a 2013 study that found that the use of “transcendent phrasing”—that is, the use of terms like “spiritual”—made the CSF spiritual fitness scale less reliably predictive both for atheists alienated by such language and also for Christian soldiers than it would have been had such phrasing not been used ( Hammer, Cragun, and Hwang 2013 ). Isolating the impact of the language of spirituality is very difficult, but at least in this particular study, the distortional effect of this sort of phrasing on how people responded to the questions seemed so significant that its authors recommended removing it from the questionnaire.

The recognition that the language of spirituality is somehow a part of the story is the starting point for the present study. Indeed, my argument is that the communicative capacity of “spirit” and “spirituality”—what such words signify, connote, or evoke for people—is part of the reason that spiritual fitness training has been so successful within the Army, success defined in this context not as an increase in resilience but as institutional acceptance. To make this case, I will be turning from the psychological study of religion, from whence most of the study of spiritual fitness training has come, to organizational communication, the study of how organizations use discourse to accomplish their goals. From this perspective, as we will see, positive psychology’s role in the story is not limited to the research it has produced or endorses but also includes its impact as a mediator of language, its effect on how the terms “spirit” and “spiritual” are used and understood within the context of present-day American military culture.

As scholars have long recognized, the terms “spirit” and “spirituality” are contested terms, hard to pin down in their meaning and capable of being understood in many different ways. Doing a deep dive into survey data, for example, sociologist Nancy Ammerman identified several different ways that Americans understand the language of spirituality, including a theistic association of spirituality with the belief in a personal deity; an extra-theistic conception of spirituality that locates it in naturalistic accounts of transcendence; and an ethical approach that associates it with compassion ( 2013 ). A more recent 2018 study found seven distinct views of spirituality circulating among Americans ( Steensland, Wang, and Schmidt 2018 ). Even within the confines of a particular institution, the terms “spirit” and “spirituality” can be construed differently, as Wendy Cadge shows for its use by caregivers in a hospital setting ( 2012 ).

For researchers in the field of spirituality and health, the ambiguity of the language of spirituality is a problem that has to be overcome for scholars to be able to track the effects they seek to demonstrate or to compare the results of different studies. Within the day-to-day life of many organizations, however, it is not possible simply to impose a particular definition of spirituality. One encounters people from a variety of religious and secular backgrounds, and the resulting differences of perspective cannot be solved or overcome even by those invested with authority within the organization; they have to be negotiated or worked around. This is what Cadge found in a study of how chaplains maneuver within health-care settings: they learn to mitigate differences between their own perspective and those of the people they are working with by stressing commonalities rather than differences, or by “code-switching,” adopting the language and practices of others ( 2015 ). The study of Joseph Hammer, Ryan Cragun, and Karen Hwang noted earlier shows something similar happening within the Army: it is not able to overcome differences of perspective among its personnel by imposing an official definition of spirituality ( Hammer, Cragun, and Ryan 2013 ). Personnel with different backgrounds and beliefs bring their own understandings of spirituality with them in a way that shapes how they respond to the Army’s use of such language.

What Eisenberg’s study of strategic ambiguity adds to this picture is the possibility that ambiguity itself can serve organizational ends, that is, that organizations can benefit by not resolving its contested meanings. I have not found much research that applies this insight to the ambiguities of spirituality, but one pioneering study in this regard is Jennifer Considine’s dissertation from the field of communication studies in which she analyzes the discourse of spirituality as used within a hospice organization ( 2006 ). Considine draws on Eisenberg’s notion of strategic ambiguity to illumine how talking about spirituality works within the context of the hospice she focuses on, concluding that its management and employees utilized the ambiguities inherent in the language of spirituality to accommodate the varying perspectives of patients, family members, donors, and other organizations. By not pinning itself down to a single clearly defined notion of spirituality, hospice personnel were able to appeal to a diverse audience, including both the religious and the nonreligious, and to pursue multiple goals at the same time, though not without leaving some staff and community members feeling that the hospice was not Christian enough.

Considine’s study is a model for a different approach to the Army’s spiritual fitness program, one that focuses on how the organization communicates about spirituality. Although it represents a much larger organization than Considine’s hospice, the Army is faced with similar challenges about how to promote cohesion among a diverse assemblage of people pulled in different directions by their personal backgrounds and views and how to reconcile divergent organizational goals that can run counter to each other. Thanks to an intervention by scholars working in positive psychology, the Army has come up with a similar strategy for addressing such contradiction, a way of managing internal contradiction and inconsistency, and the ambiguity of spirituality is the key to this strategy, allowing the Army to maneuver in ways that would be far more difficult without such language.

Before seeking to substantiate this claim, I want to be clear that by calling the Army’s use of the language of spirituality “strategic,” I do not mean that it is the result of a commander’s conscious calculations in the way that a conventional military strategy is. The benefits to be described here seem to be an emergent byproduct of a strategic decision made for other reasons, the result of the still imperfectly understood collective cognition that drives so much of organizational culture ( Malone and Bernstein 2015 ). Henry Mintzberg and James Waters, researchers in the field of management studies, have developed a typology of different kinds of organizational strategies distinguished by how they form within an organization ( 1985 ). At one end of the spectrum are strategies produced by deliberate decisions and realized as they were intended by the leaders or managers who devised them. At the other end are “emergent strategies” that are realized despite or in the absence of intention, forming more organically as a response to environmental pressures that restrict an organization’s options or push it in a certain direction. Strategic behavior can also fall between these extremes, and that seems the best way to situate the strategy described here—a mixture of decision-making by the Army’s leadership and its scientific consultants and unplanned patterns of behavior imposed by the Army’s circumstances or set in place by its prior history. Although this study does not claim the Army intended to utilize the language of spirituality in the ways described here, it does aim to show that such usage is strategic in the sense that it advances the Army’s interests in identifiable ways.

Building from Eisenberg’s notion of strategic ambiguity, the communications scholars

Shirley Leitch and Sally Davenport have proposed a concept that can sharpen our understanding of how the ambiguity of spirituality functions within the Army’s organizational culture ( 2007 ). In a study of a policy debate in New Zealand over the role of biotechnology, they noticed that the same word—“sustainability”—kept appearing in documents related to the debate, though it was used in a variety of ways. The word signified an environmentalist value for all who used it, but when conjoined to the word “development,” it was also invoked to justify pro-growth economic policy. Thus, the opposing sides of a struggle between the organic farming industry and the genetically modified food industry were both able to use the language of “sustainability” as a justification for their positions, one side using it to signify environmental concerns, the other, business interest. The word “sustainability” was so open-ended, in other words, that it could be applied to contradictory values and goals, and this is why the government used it so often, Leitch and Davenport argue—its vagueness allowed the government to appear consistent as it pursued conflicting policy goals.

This is how the term “spiritual” functions for the Army, I would contend—as a strategically ambiguous keyword that has helped the Army to pivot between contradictory positions and goals. Where scholars in positive psychology fit into this story is that their research helped to repurpose the language of spirituality so that it could better function in this way. Scholars working in positive psychology did not introduce the language of spirituality into the Army—as Nieuwsma shows, it has been using such language since at least World War II—but they did reintroduce it in a way that newly legitimizes its use by recasting spirituality as a scientifically validated dimension of human performance. Along the way, they have also intervened in the meaning of spirituality, not changing that meaning in any noticeable way but accentuating certain connotations and combining different meanings, and it is this under-the-radar semantic intervention, I am arguing, that has allowed the language of spirituality to function as a vehicle of strategic ambiguity.

To support this claim, I focus the remainder of my analysis on the publication that helped to launch the use of the notion of “spiritual fitness” in the army: “Building Spiritual Fitness in the Army: an Innovative Approach to a Vital Aspect of Human Development,” published in 2011 by Kenneth Pargament and Patrick Sweeny in a special issue of the American Psychologist devoted to CSF ( Pargament and Sweeney 2011 ). With a preface composed by General Casey himself ( Casey 2011 ), the issue included articles on the various dimensions of soldier fitness written by Kornum, Seligman, and others. Pargament and Sweeney—the former, a psychologist known for work on the health effects of religious beliefs; the latter, an organizational psychologist and long-serving Army officer, and both with connections to the field of positive psychology that predate their role in CSF—had been tapped to develop the spiritual fitness dimension of the program. The purpose of their American Psychologist article was to introduce it to fellow psychologists—to define what they meant by spirituality, explain and justify its relevance for a contemporary military context, and preview the online modules they were introducing to help strengthen the spiritual fitness of soldiers. It was through publications like this that scholars working in positive psychology not only made a case for their approach but inserted their particular way of using the language of spirituality into the Army’s organizational culture.

The American Psychologist article was not the first or only attempt by scholars involved in the development of CSF to define what they had in mind by spirituality, and it would make for an interesting study in its own right to trace how the meaning of spirituality shifted from one publication to the next. For our purposes, however, the American Psychologist article stands out as a representative document. As part of a special issue of a journal that officially introduced the program to the scientific community, the article bears the hallmarks of what Chahrazad Abdallah and Ann Langley refer to as a strategic planning document ( 2014 ), a text used by an organization to make public a specific plan for the future. Composed with the goal of appealing to multiple audiences, both internal and external to the organization in question, such documents often engage in strategic ambiguity, communicating in a vague and equivocal fashion in order to send different messages to readers with different perspectives. The American Psychologist article is such a document—the rolling out of a plan addressed to a large readership beyond the Army—in this case, the American Psychological Association, which in 2011 was comprised of more than 150,000 members ( American Psychological Association 2012 , S27). It is certainly understandable that an essay published in such a context, addressing a broad audience, would avoid going into too many specifics, but my point is that the ambiguity of Pargament and Sweeney’s article runs deeper than that, permeating their description of spirituality itself.

This ambiguity may not be obvious after a single reading of the article, which appears to operate with a very commonplace conception of the spiritual. The “spirit,” as they use the term, refers to the deepest part of the self, the true self. It is associated with a person’s sense of meaning and purpose in life, and a desire to be connected to something larger than oneself. Spirituality is the process of discovering and realizing this true self, pursued through religion but also though art, loving relationships, communing with nature, study, philosophy, and other activities—all in line with a commonplace view of spirituality in contemporary American culture and with how it is understood by others within the psychological community (cf. Helderman 2019 , 43–46). Any vagueness in the article’s description of spirituality seems inherent in the concept, not something the authors have come up with on their own but part of what they have absorbed from the broader culture. To recognize what is strategic about it, we need to read it in the context of organizational challenges that have beset the Army in recent decades.

The challenges I have in mind all have to do with the role that religion plays as a part of Army culture. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of studies that speak to different aspects of religious culture within the US Army—studies of the Army chaplaincy and its development over the decades, the role of prayer and other religious practices on the battlefield, the Army’s increasing religious diversity, and First Amendment issues as they relate to the military, among other topics—and one of the lessons of this research is that religion imposes on the Army certain dilemmas that are ongoing, as we will illustrate below. Some of these challenges are driven by the question of how to govern a large population of military personnel that is increasingly diverse in terms of personal belief and practice. Others are generated by the Army’s conflicting responsibilities as a fighting force, a steward for the well-being of those under its authority, and as an extension of a government subject to Constitutional limits. A point worth emphasizing is that none of these dilemmas has ever been resolved, nor is it likely they will be resolved in the foreseeable future; they are born of conflicts that can only be mitigated or finessed. This is the context in which spiritual fitness training was developed, and framing Pargament and Sweeney’s article in this context helps to reveal what is organizationally opportune about its language of spirituality, how its intervention reworked it into a strategically ambiguous keyword.

The first of these challenges emerges from a conflict between the Constitution’s prohibition against state-sponsored religion and the Army’s use of religious practice to build and sustain troop morale. In a certain sense, spiritual fitness training and its use of rituals to prepare soldiers psychologically for warfare continues an age-old tradition of military practice that can be traced back to classical antiquity, if not earlier. Greek and Roman military leaders like Xenophon and Julius Caesar recognized that a commander’s ability to arouse emotions such as enthusiasm and confidence could make a huge difference to the outcome of a battle, and they used prayers, ritual, and religiously infused oratory to help prepare their troops psychologically for battle and to encourage them in the face of danger and despair ( Lendon 1999 ). In keeping with this tradition, American military commanders have likewise relied on religious practice to sustain the morale or mental health of their troops. General George Patton believed, for example, that if his soldiers did not pray, sooner or later they would “crack up” ( Keane 2012 , 148), and data published in the Studies in Social Psychology in World War II series shows that many soldiers did indeed rely on prayer, along with other rituals and magical practices, during combat ( Stouffer et al. 1949 , 172–88). Such behavior remains a part of American military culture in the twenty-first century as evidenced by the Iraq War, where studies have documented soldiers using prayer, Bible-reading, and other ways of securing or ascertaining supernatural support as their predecessors did during earlier wars ( Walters 2013 , 105–30; Hassner 2016 , 110–26).

As much as soldiers may rely on such practices, however, official encouragement of them comes into conflict with the Constitution’s restrictions on the military’s ability to promote religion. Already in the 1940s and 50s, the Army felt a need to avoid appearing overtly Christian, tailoring its rhetoric and policies accordingly, but the pressure to avoid endorsing religion greatly intensified in the 1960s and 70s, the Vietnam war era, in the wake of legal decisions and shifting attitudes. As an example, it was once required of those in the various service academies to attend religious services, but that practice was ruled unconstitutional by a US Court of Appeals in 1972 ( Anderson v. Laird 1972). Such legally mandated changes occurred even as a rising suspiciousness of the association between the military and religion within the broader culture led to increased complaints against chaplaincy-run programs ( Nieuwsma 2016 , 119–80. For more on the Constitutional issues raised by spiritual fitness training, see Lakin 2011 ).

The American Psychologist article does not confront this contradiction directly, but it does address it indirectly by casting spirituality, paradoxically, as a secularized religiosity—a mode of thought and practice that is and is not religious at the same time. Beyond explicitly distinguishing “the spirit” from a theological conception of the soul, defining the former as the human essence, the article subtextually communicates the distance between the categories of spiritualty and religion by barely using the words “religion” and “God,” only using the word “religion” once in the context of a list of spiritual pathways that also includes nature, exercise, music, loving relationships, scientific exploration, work, art, philosophy, and study ( Pargament and Sweeney 2011 , 59). Somewhere in the background of their definition is a long history of using the language of spirituality in opposition to religion as a way of signifying something other than religion. Indeed, even some American courts, to the very limited extent that they have addressed the meaning of spirituality, seem to have endorsed this conception, treating beliefs and practices described by their practitioners as spiritual as something other than religion, not the same thing, and therefore not necessarily subject to the same protections ( Miller 2016 , 837–39). Such a classification would seem to explain why the Army’s legal advisors signed off on spiritual fitness: from this perspective, it plausibly passes muster as a secular practice.

At the same time, however, the very use of the language of spirituality evokes religion, as Pargament and Sweeny were able to recognize from earlier research that demonstrated a large degree of semantic overlap in the minds of many people. In a study co-authored by Pargament, ( Zinnbauer et al. 1997 ), participants were asked to define the relationship between spirituality and religion, and the vast majority associated the two: 41.7 percent responded that spirituality and religiousness overlap though they are not the same; 38.8 percent, that spirituality is a broader category but includes religiousness; and 10.2 percent, that religion is the broader category but includes spirituality. Only 6.7 percent felt the two could be distinguished. Even as the American Psychologist article worked to distance spirituality from religion, its authors deployed a word evoking religion in the minds of 90 percent of Americans according to Pargament’s own research.

In a defense of the program, Seligman is very clear that the spirituality questions were not about religion, noting that he was told government lawyers validated such a distinction as well ( 2011c ). At a connotative or associative level, however, the language of spirituality positions the program between the religious and the secular, as confirmed by the inconsistent messaging in the online educational modules. These also work to distinguish spirituality from religion, making the point that one does not need to be religious to be spiritual, but as Nieuwsma notes of the modules that she inspected personally, they also implied an equivalence with religion by including images of people at prayer or placing them in church-like settings and by citing testimonies from soldiers affirming their belief in God ( 2016 , 288–97). In a slide advising soldiers to “connect with your deeper purpose and human spirit,” for instance, the image pictures soldiers holding hands and bowing their heads, with the bottom of a Christmas tree visible in the background ( Nieuwsma 2016 , 288). Despite Seligman’s insistence that spirituality is not religion, those who implemented the program also conceded their near equivalence by making the modules optional in contrast to the other dimensions of fitness training, implying a recognition that mandatory spiritual training would likely be construed as religious compulsion.

I am by no means suggesting that the inconsistent understanding of “spirituality” as both an antonym and a synonym for religion is new to Pargament and Sweeney’s article. Especially as developed in the wake of the New Age and spirituality movements of the 1960s, the term has often been used in ways that transcend distinctions between the religious and the secular or that place it somewhere between those categories ( Huss 2014 ). But the fact that the article taps into an existing ambivalence does not make that ambivalence any less useful as a way to finesse organizational contradiction. As an heir to a tradition of military thinking where prayer and other religious practices serve as a way to encourage soldiers and to build unit cohesion, the Army has something to gain operationally by being able to tap into such practices, but officially promoting them or teaching personnel how to engage in them seems to run afoul of the First Amendment’s establishment clause that limits the Army’s ability to endorse or entangle itself in religion. The ambivalence of spirituality, the term’s ability to move back and forth between the categories of the secular and the religious without being pinned down as one or the other, offers a solution to this dilemma in a way that seems to help empower the Army to pursue both of these goals at the same time—to tap into the power of prayer and other religious practices used to elicit divine intervention while also sustaining the Army as a secular, Constitutionally compliant institution.

A second conflict that the language of spirituality addresses arises from the increasing religious diversity of the Army. Recent histories of the Army chaplaincy corps by Kim Hansen Anne Loveland and Ronit Stahl illustrate the challenges the Army has faced as its personnel grew more religiously diverse after World War II ( Hansen 2012 ; Loveland 2014 ; Stahl 2017 ), and those challenges have continued as the military has become more accepting of non-Christians. A 2009 survey, “The Religious Identification and Practices Survey,” administered by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute to roughly fifteen thousand military personnel, captured the situation within the military at the time that CSF was initiated ( Hunter and Smith 2011 ). Christian identity was the single largest category of religious identity (65 percent), but the second largest was the non-religiously affiliated, around 25 percent ( Hunter and Smith 2011 , 3). Christians still predominate today—and even more so in the Army chaplaincy, where the first Buddhist chaplain only began his work in 2008 and where in 2017 there were a mere five Muslim chaplains out of 1400 active duty Army chaplains ( Wagner 2017 )—but the number of non-religiously affiliated in the Army is increasing as is the number of religious affiliations ( Peck 2013 ). So much variety has emerged that in 2017 the Defense Department expanded the number of religious identifications that it recognizes from just over 100 groups to 221 ( Winston 2017 ).

This growing religious diversity brings with it the potential for more tensions, grievances, and disputes, and the challenge of balancing the interests of different religious and non-religious groups is further exacerbated by an increased expectation from both kinds of groups that their perspectives will be accommodated. Robert Tuttle, an expert in military-related church-state legal issues, predicted in 2008 that litigation would increase as personnel become more assertive in advocating for their rights ( 2008 ), and there is reason to think he was right. Among grievances filed against the military are complaints from secular organizations like the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a civil rights organization alarmed by what it sees as the Army’s pro-religious bias, along with protests and lawsuits from religious personnel seeking accommodation of their customs or modes of worship, as in a lawsuit won by a Sikh soldier that has compelled the Army to allow the wearing of beards, turbans, and hijabs ( Lilly 2016 ). The Army finds itself caught between voices protesting the Army’s alleged promotion of religion and those protesting its perceived hostility to religion (e.g., Family Research Council 2017 ).

Once again, the ambiguity of spirituality proves opportune, in this case because of the way it can slide between Christian and non-Christian perspectives. The very concept of spirituality developed out of Christian theological tradition and retains clear Christian associations in many contexts, but since the nineteenth century, it has also been used to signify various non-Christian modes of religiosity, including a universalized religiosity transcending sectarian difference, an Orientalized religiosity associated with Hinduism and Buddhism; and increasingly since the 1950s, a non-theistic orientation grounded in an experience of nature, beauty, or the interconnectedness of human beings ( Sheldrake 2007 ). Because the language of spirituality can be applied to perspectives all along the spectrum of American religious life, an organization like the Army, seeking to manage the conflicting needs and expectations of a religiously diverse community, can draw on it in ways that seem to align it with Christian, non-Christian, and non-theistic perspectives all at the same time and without appearing inconsistent.

It should be noted that the language of spirituality does not feel inclusive to everyone. We have noted that atheist soldiers can be alienated by its Christian or supernatural associations, whereas Christian soldiers have found it too empty of genuine religious content ( Erbach 2013 ; Koyn 2015 ). Considine found a low grade of resistance in her study of the hospice, encountering people frustrated or disappointed by the bland, relativistic, or New Age quality of the spirituality that the organization was promoting and sometimes countering it with language or practice that was more specifically and substantively Christian ( 2006 , 82–99).

A similar kind of resistance to spiritual fitness training in the Army takes the form of complaints that the program is not Christian enough or is forcing Christians to learn pagan rituals ( Griffith 2011 ). In one example I came across, a thesis submitted to the evangelical Alliance Theological Seminary, the author, a Christian chaplain in the Hawaii National Guard, felt he could strengthen the spiritual fitness of personnel by incorporating more explicitly Christian content into the program, a response similar to that of hospice workers who wanted the communal prayers of the hospice to be more explicitly Christian ( Mueller 2017 ). Although spiritual fitness training has instigated some pushback, the elasticity of the language of spirituality nonetheless allows it to be embraced by varied perspectives, ranging from the Christian ministry Cru Military and publishers of a “Spiritual Fitness Guidebook” that aims to provide guidance to Christian military personnel, to Captain Thomas Dyer, a Baptist-turned-Buddhist chaplain who in 2013 founded a Dharma Center in Afghanistan dedicated to Eastern spiritual practice.

In this regard too, the authors of the American Psychologist article have not invented a new meaning for spirituality, but they have given its melding of multiple Christian and non-Christian resonances a new strategic role as a vehicle of what Eisenberg (1984) refers to as “unified diversity,” the balance that organizations strive to achieve between the cohesion needed to survive and the flexibility to allow individual members to maneuver on their own. Spirituality, as described by Pargament and Sweeney, works in support of this balancing act. To strengthen one’s spirit is to cultivate qualities that subordinate one to something larger and higher—loyalty, duty, the capacity for self-sacrifice—but because of its capacity to encompass both Christian and non-Christian resonances, the language of spirituality also accommodates diversity, allowing an Evangelical to interpret it in one way, a Buddhist in another. Maintaining unified diversity is an ongoing management challenge, but the polyvalence of spirituality helps by fusing allegiance to a higher authority with an ability to accommodate different belief systems, Western and non-Western, institutionalized and individualized. Its use provokes some degree of resistance, but not nearly enough to threaten the operational coherence of the Army and far less than would likely be provoked if the Army less ambiguously aligned itself with either a secular or a religious perspective, a Christian or a non-Christian one.

A third way that the ambiguity of spirituality works strategically within the article is as a way of managing a contradiction between the military’s therapeutic and military roles. As Seligman’s account makes clear, CSF is meant to be salutary for individual soldiers—to better protect them from the traumatizing effects of combat so that they do not commit suicide, engage in domestic abuse, become drug addicts, or fall into homelessness. But Seligman’s account of the program’s genesis in Flourish offers glimpses of other motives and beneficiaries as well, including reducing costs for an overburdened military health-care system (“If it works . . . I know it will cut my budget,” noted the commander of the medical corps during Casey’s meeting with Seligman) and strengthening the Army’s ability to continue fighting in an age when it can be ordered to engage in combat operations over an extended period with no clear end-point. This last point is hinted at in General Cornum’s explanation of the program to Seligman:

The American soldier has rotated between combat and home for more than eight years. The army has incurred a cumulative level of stress that degrades our soldiers’ performance and—in many cases—ruins their home front relationships. . . . It is my responsibility to ensure that our soldiers, their families, and army civilians are prepared both physically and psychologically to continue to serve and support those in combat for years to come . ( Seligman 2011a , 128–29; italics mine)

CSF, in other words, is meant to generate benefits on both an individual and an organizational level—to improve soldiers’ personal lives and relationships on the home front and also to benefit the Army and its mission by improving its collective performance and resilience. Note that there is nothing in Cornum’s statement—or in Seligman’s later account of how CSF was created—that suggests one goal was more of a priority than the other; to the contrary, strengthening the well-being of the individual soldier helps to strengthen the well-being of the Army as a collective.

Spiritual fitness training as depicted in the American Psychologist article also works at both levels at the same time, benefitting individual soldiers and the Army concurrently. Drawing on the language of personal growth, health, and well-being, Pargament and Sweeney describe the training as a way to help soldiers cope with the stresses of everyday life, to develop their personal potential, and to aid them in their recovery from trauma and injury, but they also see the initiative as benefitting the collective needs of the Army as well. Spirituality has been identified as an important factor in mission preparedness, they explain, and what its strengthening improves is not just the soldier’s personal sense of meaning and purpose but also the cognitive skills needed to be a more adaptive and resilient warrior, such as the ability to accept the reality of a situation and the motivation to persevere ( Pargament and Sweeney 2011 , 59), and the latter is something that benefits the Army as a whole. In other words, spiritual fitness training, like CSF in general, is meant to achieve two distinct goals : supporting the well-being of personnel as individual human beings and making them more motivated and hardier soldiers better able to contribute to the Army’s overall mission in an age of long-term combat.

What the article glosses over is the conflict that can develop between the soldier’s individual psychological needs and the collective military needs of the Army. Military psychologists who work for the Army learn through their practice that what is good for the Army is not always good for the soldier as an individual, a dilemma for them that surfaces often enough that it has an official name in military psychology parlance—“mixed agency conflict” ( Howe 2003 ; Kennedy and Johnson 2009 ), where the psychologist’s obligations to the patient conflict with an obligation to the military and its needs. Sometimes the two cannot be reconciled, and in such cases, psychologists must choose between their obligations to the military and their ethical duties as psychologists—or else attempt to maneuver around the conflict by, for example, pursuing stealth treatments not recorded in documentation ( Kennedy and Johnson 2009 , 24).

There is no acknowledgement in Pargament and Sweeney’s article that there is any tension between the therapeutic aim of supporting the mental health of the individual soldier and the Army’s organizational need for a more resilient fighting force, but there is reason to believe that the two goals can come into conflict. Fostering resilience in soldiers may prepare them for battle but prove counter-productive after they return to civilian life because the skills needed to prevail in battle may not be the same as required to do well in a civilian context. This at least is the conclusion of a study by Ross McGarry, Sandra Walkate, and Gabe Mythen, published after the Pargament and Sweeney article, showing that combat soldiers trained to be resilient on the battlefield often had a hard time readjusting to civilian life ( McGarry, Walklate, and Mythen 2015 ; see also Kline et al. 2010 ). Pargament and Sweeney do not recognize any potential for tension, suggesting instead that the same regime of spiritual fitness training enhances the soldier’s well-being in both military and civilian contexts and in ways that advance the private psychological interests of the individual soldier and the organizational objectives of the Army at the same time.

Part of what makes this conflation possible, I would contend, is the ambiguity of spirituality and its capacity to pivot between the individual and the corporate, the therapeutic and the military. “Spirit,” as Pargament and Sweeney define the term, refers to the part of the self that needs care, functioning as a synonym for the psyche and its needs. This, of course, is a well-established meaning of the term, and Sweeney and Pargament were simply using the term in the way that was already well established within the health-care and psychological communities by that point. But in military contexts, “spirit” can also refer to something else—the animating impulse that motivates a person to fight. The convergence of the two meanings within a single word is something of an accident of translation. The Latin spiritus corresponds in meaning to the Greek terms pneuma or psyche , the “soul” or the “mind”—that is, the invisible entity within the body associated with its animacy, vitality, and well-being—and a long history of philosophical, religious, and psychological discourse has come to associate “spirit” in this sense with medicine and therapy and with psychologically oriented self-care. But the English word “spirit” can also be used to translate a distinct psychological concept, the emotionally charged mental state that emboldens soldiers and propels them into battle, and it is in part the convergence of these distinct meanings within the term “spirit” that allows the authors of spiritual fitness training to pivot between the individual and the corporate, and between the therapeutic and the military, without the appearance of any contradiction or conflict of interest.

In the background of spirit in its military sense is the insight that soldiers’ perceptions and emotions can play a decisive role in battle, potentially outweighing other advantages like superior numbers and better field position. Since at least Greco-Roman antiquity, military thinkers have observed that soldiers animated by certain emotions—in Greek, tharsos (“confidence”) or euthumia and prothumia (“good cheer,” “enthusiasm”)—will be all the more ready to charge into battle whereas those who feel low-spiritedness and fear are all the more easy to defeat, and a good commander will know how to arouse the emotions he needs on the battlefield. This is why Julius Caesar was so preoccupied with the psychological disposition of his troops, for example, what he would have referred to in Latin as their animus ( Lendon 1999 ). As we learn from his accounts of his various military campaigns, he had a fine-tuned sense of how emotions functioned in battle, of how to make them work to his advantage and how to stir them up when needed, and recognized that he had to tend to them before, during, and after battle. The part of the self where these emotions reside, the animus that generates the confidence to charge into battle, can be rendered in English as “mind,” “heart,” or “morale,” but it is also translatable as “spirit.”

This is the resonance of “spirit” as it appears in the World War II memorial inscription cited by Pargament and Sweeney as evidence that military leaders have long recognized the importance of the “human spirit” in propelling combatants toward victory: “Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit—a magic blend of skill, faith and valor—that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory” (quoted from the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC in Pargament and Sweeney 2011 , 59).

The passage clearly echoes ancient military thinking and its recognition of spiritedness as a key tactical advantage in battle, as in a similar observation about the battle-turning power of a strong spirit from the Greek general Xenophon in his work, the Anabasis : “Neither numbers nor physical strength make for victory in war, but whichever side—with the gods’ help—advances upon the enemy stouter in spirit” ( Anabasis 3.1.42). Pargament and Sweeney seem to understand the inscription to be referring to the same dimension of the self that generates a person’s need for meaning, purpose, and connection, the part that needs to be strengthened for a person to be psychologically healthy and socially well adapted, but that understanding obscures important distinctions. Military strategists like Caesar recognized, for example, that too much animus could be counter-productive or even destructive in certain battle situations, engendering overconfidence and rashness, which is why Caesar sometimes aimed to dampen down the “spirit” of his troops, not to amplify their confidence and enthusiasm but to calm them down or chasten them ( Lendon 1999 , 299–300). This is a point at which the military conception of spirit as a propulsive force diverges from the therapeutic conception of spirit as the source of a person’s vitality—in the former, a commander seeks to either strengthen or moderate the spirits of his troops depending on what the circumstances of battle require; in the latter, the only relevant goal is to strengthen a person’s spirit with the goal of making them psychologically healthier and better able to function socially—but the fact that the different mental states at issue can all be rendered in English by the word “spirit” helps to mask that there is a difference.

I do not mean to allege that Pargament and Sweeney intentionally conflated different conceptions of the spirit and the spiritual. In a study of the language of spirituality as used within hospital settings, Wendy Cadge found that the meanings it developed there were not the result of conscious decision-making but emerged from a kind of negotiation among differing perspectives, each with its own reasons for using the language of spirituality as it did ( 2012 , 197–99). I suspect something similar is true of how Pargament and Sweeney use the language of spirituality. Operating in a space between the field of psychology and the military, they clearly draw on the meanings that spirituality has developed within health-care settings and psychological research while also responding to how the language of spirituality has been used in American military culture.

But leaving the story there misses how the hybrid military-therapeutic resonance of spirituality serves a strategic function by masking an institutional conflict analogous to the mixed agency conflicts that military psychologists face when the needs of individual soldiers come into conflict with the operational needs of the Army. Such a conflict is inherent in the Army’s operation as an organization responsible for safe-guarding the well-being of personnel that it must also potentially harm in order to accomplish its missions, and, intentionally or not, the language of spirituality functions as a way of mitigating the appearance of such conflict by fostering the impression that the Army can advance the well-being of individual soldiers and its own interest in the same way to the mutual advantage of both. In truth, there sometimes is no solution to a mixed agency conflict, a situation that has sometimes ethically compelled military psychologists to operate outside their obligation to one side or the other by not disclosing to their command the treatment they have prescribed for soldiers or, conversely, by lying to patients about their condition in order to serve the military’s needs. The language of spirituality does not involve that kind of deceit, but it does have the effect of concealing the potential for conflict between the soldier’s interests as an individual and the collective interest of the Army by mingling together the therapeutic and the military in a way that seems to identify psychological health with combat readiness and individual resilience with organizational resilience. Encouraging people to develop a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives and instilling in them the motivation to fight are distinct enough goals to sometimes conflict tragically. The language of spiritual fitness helps fuse them in a way that makes them appear fully aligned, each an effort to fulfill the same existential need.

I do not mean to suggest that the various meanings and resonances of spirituality that we have identified are activated each time a commander, chaplain, or soldier uses the term “spiritual fitness.” From some perspectives, the semantic overlap with religion will be most salient; from others, its antonymic relationship to religion is more relevant. For many, as demonstrated by the research of Hammer, Cragun, and Hwang (2013) , the language of spirituality triggers associations with Christian belief and practice, calling to mind God or the soul, but for others, it suggests beliefs and practices outside of Christianity or Western theism. In some contexts, the language of spirituality conveys an association with therapy, psychology, mental health, connoting the part of the self that needs care; in others, it evokes the courage and daring needed to risk one’s life or kill in battle. The point I am making is not that all of these associations are operative whenever the language of spirituality is used within the Army but that what makes such language useful for the Army as a vehicle of organizational communication is its ability to pivot between connotations, to send different messages to different audiences or in different situations, and to evade ever being pinned down in one way or the other.

None of the conflicts and dilemmas described here seems likely to ever find a permanent solution because they are inherent in the Army’s legal obligations, demographic profile, and operations. What seems more realistic is that the Army will simply continue to manage them—to alleviate the tensions or mitigate their impact—and that is the kind of scenario where communicative ambiguity has strategic value, as we learn from Eisenberg. Whether spiritual fitness has any actual benefits for individual soldiers or for the Army as a whole remains to be seen, but the role of strategic ambiguity in other settings suggests that the language of spirituality is beneficial to the Army to the extent that it helps with such management, not by meaning anything in particular, but by allowing the Army to maneuver among meanings.

Spiritual fitness training has proven so appealing that it is now being emulated in many different corners of American military culture. The Army itself expanded it to include soldiers’ families, Army civilians, and veterans, and beyond the Army’s orbit, the concept has now spread to other military branches as well. By 2013, the Airforce was looking into spiritual fitness training ( Yeung and Martin 2013 ), eventually incorporating it into a program called Comprehensive Airman Fitness. Though it is hard to trace the concept’s impact on the Navy, it has been embraced there to some extent as well, at least in the Marines. In 2016, General Robert Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corps, announced that the Corps would be emphasizing spiritual fitness as part of its conception of fitness ( Neller 2016 ). Chaplains in some National Guards have adopted it (e.g., Texas Military Forces 2015 ); it has been proposed for use in the training of special operations forces ( Worthington and Deuster 2018 ); and certain veteran services organizations have also begun using its methods ( Thomas et al. 2018 ). There is even some evidence that the concept of spiritual fitness training is spreading beyond the United States, having been emulated by the Canadian military to some extent ( Marshall and Pichette 2017 ).

The spread of spiritual fitness training within American military culture is driven, first and foremost, by the needs of a military struggling with heightened mental health challenges in an era of unending warfare, but one implication of the analysis offered in this study is that there may be interests encouraging its widening embrace beyond the goals acknowledged by those who introduced the program. We have learned from the study of strategic ambiguity that the polyvalence and slipperiness that make the meaning of spirituality difficult to pin down turn out to be organizationally felicitous as a way to hold together divergent perspectives, conflicting obligations, and competing interests that might otherwise undercut the military’s cohesiveness.

By zeroing in on positive psychology’s catalytic role in this process, I do not mean to imply that its research has no value for a military struggling to counteract the destructive effects of combat-related stress and trauma. That is an issue I must leave for others to resolve. What I have sought to illumine is positive psychology’s influence on how the language of spirituality is used organizationally, arguing that its role in reintroducing such language into the military has its own dynamic and effects. Whether there is something to learn from this case about the impact of positive psychology in other public contexts such as schools and workplaces goes beyond what we can explore, but it opens up a different way to understand that impact by raising the possibility that its appeal in such settings may also be owing in part to the role of “spirituality” as a strategically ambiguous keyword useful for organizations facing internal contradiction.

This study developed from a conversation organized by Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, which in 2018 initiated a series of dialogues with members of various humanistic fields that included religious studies. Kenneth Pargament, who is at the center of my analysis, was involved in that conversation and was a cordial and engaged interlocutor. I am indebted to James Pawelski, the Director of Education for the Positive Psychology Center, and Justin McDonald, a colleague in Penn’s Department of Religious Studies, for inviting me to participate in that exchange and, in James’ case, for graciously engaging my skepticism. I also thank Sarah Sidoti, the center’s assistant director, who facilitated the meeting; Jeremy Wilson, a former student also involved in the Positive Psychology Center, for excellent conversation about the topic; and Alex Ramos for expert editorial assistance. For their invaluable feedback/pushback, I am indebted to Kathryn Lofton and David Yaden who challenged me from different directions, along with Ronit Stahl, Rachel Werczberger, and Keren Friedman-Peleg for various forms of guidance. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers commissioned by the JAAR ; their critique and suggestions made my argument much stronger.

Personal email correspondence, October 8, 2018.

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• v.3(4); Winter 2014

Spiritual Fitness and Resilience

Short abstract.

This study examines the relationship between spiritual fitness and resilience, using key constructs found in the scientific literature: a spiritual worldview, personal spiritual practices, support from a spiritual community, and spiritual coping.

This study is one of a series designed to support Air Force leaders in promoting resilience among its Airmen, civilian employees, and Air Force families. It examines the relationship between spiritual fitness and resilience, using key constructs found in the scientific literature: a spiritual worldview, personal religious or spiritual practices, support from a spiritual community, and spiritual coping. The literature shows that possessing a sense of meaning and purpose in life is strongly positively related to quality of life and improved health and functioning. The authors find that diverse types of spiritual interventions are linked to improved resilience and well-being. These interventions focus mainly on the individual, but some address the military unit, the family, and the community.

For many people, spiritual beliefs may tremendously influence their outlook on the world, offer solace in turbulent times, or provide support from a like-minded community. These beliefs may thus contribute to resilience and well-being and result in improved force readiness and performance. This study discusses spiritual fitness as defined by the Air Force and as conceptualized by the empirical literature. We first explored how spiritual fitness has been measured. The Army's Global Assessment Tool is one of the few spirituality metrics to focus on service members. Next, we identified key constructs of spiritual fitness, their relationship to well-being and resilience, and interventions that attempted to address these.

First, most spirituality literature includes a conceptualization of a spiritual worldview that includes beliefs in transcendent meaning and purpose, which also include, but are not limited to, organized religious beliefs. Possessing a sense of meaning and purpose in life is strongly positively related to quality of life. Second, personal religious and spiritual practices are linked to improved health and functioning (e.g., protective against substance use). Spiritual meditation may also help improve health (e.g., pain tolerance, buffer physiological stress). Third, there is indirect but converging evidence that support from a spiritual community is generally beneficial to health and well-being. Finally, spiritual coping that is related to purpose in life (i.e., using spiritual beliefs to cope with stressors) drives post-traumatic growth and improved well-being, as opposed to coping that is more narrowly religious. However, spiritual coping is not necessarily effective in coping with such physical stressors as pain. Several constructs of spiritual fitness may be linked to suicidality, such as religious affiliation.

Many of the spiritual interventions and empirical evidence we identified were programs that focused on providing a sense of purpose in life. Although these studies' research designs ranged from observational correlational studies to fully randomized clinical trials, we found diverse types of spiritual interventions that were linked to improved resilience and well-being. Finally, the importance of cultural appropriateness was also very apparent in this literature. Going forward, it will be important to understand how to support not only individuals of, for example, diverse race/ethnicity but also secular individuals as well as Airmen and families within the major religious traditions.

The research described in this article was sponsored by the United States Air Force and conducted by RAND Project AIR FORCE.