COMMENTARY: ‘Johnson v. Fleming’ asserts that the state demands that National Guard chaplain candidates have a master’s degree in theology, and in this case refuses to fund the only path to it.
For more than 250 years, from the Continental Army’s campfires to the frozen hills of North Korea, American chaplains have carried out a task no one else in uniform can perform: standing beside a service member when death feels close and offering access to God.
That task is now under assault, not from hostile fire but from budget officers, contracting decisions, and legislative lines drawn around degrees deemed too “religious” to fund.
Consider the Virginia National Guard, which requires its chaplains to hold master’s degrees in theology. When a Guardsman pursued that degree at Liberty University to qualify, Virginia denied him the tuition assistance it extends to soldiers studying anything else, on the theory that the degree is too “sectarian” for state support.
As retired Army chiefs of chaplains Douglas Carver and Thomas Solhjem argue in The Washington Post, the state has manufactured an unconstitutional catch-22 by demanding the credential and refusing to fund the only path to it. The case, Johnson v. Fleming, now sits before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and its outcome will decide whether every future Virginia Guard chaplain faces the same dilemma.
Virginia leans on Locke v. Davey, the 2004 Supreme Court case allowing a state scholarship to exclude devotional theology degrees, but the analogy fails. Locke involved a student’s free choice to pursue ministry, not a credential the state demanded as a job prerequisite. Virginia requires the degree, then refuses to fund the only path to it, unlike a state simply declining to underwrite a private religious calling.
The Supreme Court’s recent public benefit and school choice cases — Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza and Carson — have already read Locke narrowly, confining it to a historical anxiety about publicly funded clergy training, not a general license to exclude religious study from public benefits. That anxiety runs backwards here, since the chaplaincy is older than the republic — built by George Washington on the premise that government should support the religious formation its chaplains need.
This is not an isolated hiccup. In 2023, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center let its two-decade contract with the Franciscan friars who staffed its pastoral care office lapse, just before Holy Week, in favor of a secular contractor unable to supply a priest. Archbishop Timothy Broglio called it an “incomprehensible” decision inflicting grave harm on hospitalized Catholics, a captive population whose religious liberty rights the government has a duty to protect. The contract with the friars was eventually restored, but the episode shows how easily pastoral care gets treated as a line item for the lowest bidder, not a historic tradition.
Catholics make up roughly a quarter of active-duty troops, the largest faith group in the military, yet Catholic priests are less than a tenth of the chaplain corps, fewer than 200 serving more than 300,000 Catholics in uniform worldwide. That means one priest for 1,300 who share the faith. Deployed troops routinely go months without the sacraments, a scarcity that makes every seminarian who enters the corps disproportionately consequential.
That scarcity makes Father Emil Kapaun and Father Vincent Capodanno worth remembering now.
Father Kapaun, a Kansas farm boy turned Army chaplain, followed his men into Korean POW camps, gave away his own rations, and led secret Easter services before dying in captivity in 1951. Pope Francis declared him Venerable in February 2025, and his cause now awaits a verified miracle for beatification. Father Capodanno, the Navy chaplain Marines called “the Grunt Padre,” died in 1967 shielding a wounded corpsman with his body in Vietnam after a ministry spent living alongside the men he served. Posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, his cause for canonization, opened in 2006, continues to press forward.
Two of the small handful of chaplains awarded the Medal of Honor since the Civil War are now on the path to sainthood, both Catholic priests. They are the clearest answer to what a chaplain does for a soldier with nothing else left.
It’s fair to ask why officials keep making these unforced errors, treating chaplaincy as a perk rather than a guarantee. Part of the answer may simply be unfamiliarity. Fewer Americans in civilian authority sit in a pew on a given Sunday than a generation ago, and it is not unreasonable to suspect some officials weighing these contracts and tuition policies have never depended on a priest, pastor or rabbi the way a wounded soldier or a homesick Guardsman does. Faith, to someone who does not practice it, can look like a hobby rather than a lifeline. Religious liberty does not ask policymakers or civil servants to share a service member’s beliefs. It asks them to protect his ability to exercise them.
Congress and the courts have the tools to fix this. The Fourth Circuit can reject Virginia’s misplaced invocation of a precedent that does not validate government refusal to support the path to a military chaplaincy that the government itself requires. The Pentagon can write contracting rules that satisfy the spiritual needs of service members instead of preferring the lowest bid. And the country can remember, through Kapaun and Capodanno, the significance of an available chaplain at the moment a soldier needs one most. George Washington understood that an army without a chaplain was missing something no money could replace. His home state must embrace that lesson.
