The Draft, Conscience, and Christian Nationalism

A blank registration card with an empty gold signature line, its edge breaking apart into a grid of blue data points on a deep blue background.

A See–Judge–Act reflection through Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

On 5 June 1917, a twenty-eight-year-old railroad clerk in Denver wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. He worked in an office of the Colorado and Southern Railroad. He was a Catholic, and he had read the fifth commandment as meaning exactly what it said. Thou shalt not kill, he told the president, admitted no exceptions. Then he put his own future in writing: “prison, death, or both, are infinitely preferable to joining any branch of the Army.“

In January 1918 federal agents arrested him for refusing to fill out his Selective Service questionnaire. Released on bail, he was arrested again for refusing to report for induction. On 24 July 1918, a court-martial at Camp Dodge, Iowa, convicted him of desertion and of spreading propaganda. He had never been inducted, so he had never served in the army he was convicted of deserting. The court sentenced him to twenty-five years at hard labor.

His church offered him little shelter. The American bishops had publicly backed the war, and Catholic teaching then gave no settled place to a conscientious objector. Some priests refused him the sacraments, even in prison and even when he was ill.

On 13 July 1920, at Fort Leavenworth, he began a hunger strike. The government responded by force-feeding him, and on 31 July it sent him to the ward for the criminally insane at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington. There, with nothing but a Bible and the Catholic Encyclopedia, he wrote a manuscript of about two hundred pages answering the just war tradition.

The government released Ben Salmon on Thanksgiving Day, 26 November 1920, with a dishonorable discharge from an army he had never joined. His health never recovered. He died of pneumonia in Chicago in 1932, at forty-three.

His quarrel with the state began with a blank form.

On 18 December 2026, the form goes away. Under the new law, the government will place eligible young men in the draft registry on its own initiative, using records it already holds. A young Catholic who shares Salmon’s conviction will never be asked to sign anything. His name will simply appear.

That change raises a question larger than military paperwork. When the state’s demands meet a formed conscience, what does a Christian community owe the young person caught between them? And when national loyalty and religious identity fuse, is there still room for a conscience that says no?

Three thinkers help. Thomas Merton names the spiritual distortions that fear and nationalism produce. Marshall McLuhan shows how media shape our sense of service, patriotism, and dissent long before anyone is called up. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asks whether humanity is growing toward solidarity or fracturing along national lines. Joseph Cardijn’s See–Judge–Act method gives the conversation its order, without assuming that Christians, patriots, peace activists, and objectors all think alike.

See: The Form That Fills Itself

Automatic registration is not a return of the draft. The first task is to separate what the law does from what people fear it means.

President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act on 18 December 2025. Section 535 of that law, Public Law 119-60, repeals the old registration statute and enacts a new one titled “Automatic Registration.” It covers male citizens and male residents between the ages of 18 and 26, and it takes effect one year after enactment, on 18 December 2026. On that date, the duty of young men to register themselves ends. The Selective Service System registers them instead.

The implementation is unsettled. The Selective Service System sent draft regulations for review on 30 March 2026 and withdrew them on 23 July 2026 without explanation. As of late August, it had not resubmitted them.

For thirty-five years I helped build systems like this one, and I spent the last stretch of that career defending what organizations know about people. A registry that fills itself from other government records is a familiar machine. What it does not contain is anyone’s conscience.

Three terms need to stay distinct:

  • Registration. The government places eligible men in the Selective Service registry.
  • Induction. The government calls men into military service under an authorized draft. That would require further action by Congress and the president.
  • Conscientious objection. A person claims that taking part in war violates deeply held moral, ethical, or religious convictions.

For an objector, the practical consequences are specific.

  1. Registration happens without consent. A man who believes that registering is itself a step toward war will now be registered anyway. The law removes the act he might have refused. It does not remove his moral concern.
  2. Objector status is not granted in advance. The Selective Service System has no process for classifying anyone as a conscientious objector before a draft. A claim is heard only if a draft begins and the man is called for induction.
  3. Objection is not blanket exemption. A recognized objector may be assigned noncombatant military service or, if he opposes all military service, alternative civilian service. Each claim turns on the person’s beliefs and circumstances.

That last point matters for religious communities. A person may object to carrying a weapon, to all military service, to one particular war, or to conscription itself. These are different convictions, and the law treats them differently. A Catholic who judges one specific war unjust may not qualify, while someone opposed to war in any form may. Parishes, schools, and peace groups should explain these differences now, not in the week a young man receives an induction notice.

Three Frames, Not One Movement

Christian nationalism is not a single organization with an official position on the draft. It is a loose set of movements and people who disagree about foreign policy, military intervention, and the place of religion in public life. Expecting one answer from it would be a mistake. It is more honest to look at three frames that appear within it.

Military service as a sacred duty. Some describe service as defending a nation with a special relationship to God. Sacrifice, loyalty, and faith become one thing. The question to put to this frame: does it leave a Christian any way to conclude, in good faith, that a particular war is unjust?

Dissent as disloyalty. Some voices cast objectors and war resisters as weak, unpatriotic, or indifferent to the troops. That is a rhetorical pattern, not a documented consensus. The question: can a citizen oppose a military policy precisely because of religious conviction?

Conscience as religious liberty. Other Christians with strong national loyalties and conservative theology defend conscientious objection as an exercise of religious freedom. The question: does religious liberty protect only beliefs that serve the state, or also beliefs that resist it?

The wider numbers counsel the same caution. In April 2026, Pew Research Center found that 17 percent of American adults wanted the federal government to declare Christianity the official religion, up from 13 percent in early 2024. Another 43 percent opposed an official religion but wanted the government to promote Christian moral values, and 38 percent wanted neither. Those figures measure views on religion and government, not on the draft. They show that Christians, including those drawn to Christian nationalism, do not think as a bloc.

The Best Case for the Registry

The opposing case deserves its full strength. Registration is not combat, its defenders say, and a list of names harms no one’s conscience. A registry that fills itself is simply more accurate and more equal than one that depends on paperwork. Under the old system, men who failed to register, often through ignorance rather than conviction, could lose access to federal jobs and other benefits for life. Automatic registration ends that trap. And if a great emergency ever did require a draft, a complete and fair list spreads the burden across every class, instead of leaving it to the volunteers who already carry most of it. The objector loses nothing, because his claim will be heard at the only moment it matters.

Much of that is true. Automatic registration is more accurate, and it does end a real injustice for men who never knew they had to register.

But the argument assumes that conscience can wait for the moment of induction. Salmon’s story shows why it cannot. By the time the state asks its question, a young person needs a conscience already formed and a community already prepared to stand with him. Formation takes years. A system that never asks gives the Church no natural moment to begin, so the Church has to make one.

Judge: The Idol Behind the Flag

None of these three thinkers wrote about Selective Service. Their ideas still help us judge what we see.

Thomas Merton: what fear does to the soul. Merton asks what happens to a person when fear begins to justify violence. His critique of the false self applies to peoples as well as persons. A group can build its identity on superiority, fear, or the need to protect its own, and when national identity becomes sacred, the nation can quietly take the place of God.

In Peace in the Post-Christian Era, written in 1962 and withheld for decades after his order forbade its publication (Orbis Books, 2004), Merton urges Christians to resist the moral shortcuts that turn whole populations into enemies and make violence look inevitable. He does not claim that all military service is wrong or that every antiwar position is right. He asks for honest examination of motives, consequences, and spiritual roots. A Merton-shaped examination asks four things:

  • Do we still see the humanity of the people our nation calls enemies?
  • Have we confused defending our country with defending every policy our government adopts?
  • Are religious leaders helping people discern, or blessing decisions political authorities have already made?
  • Can a young person refuse a war without being treated as a moral failure?

For Merton, saying no can be an act of responsibility rather than an escape from it. He asks the same honesty of the peace movement, which must examine its own anger, its own certainty, and its own capacity to see the suffering of others.

Marshall McLuhan: how the environment decides in advance. McLuhan’s central claim in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) is that a medium reshapes human relationships and perception, whatever content it carries. In the draft debate, that means looking past individual speeches to the whole environment in which ideas of service, sacrifice, patriotism, and dissent take shape. Three patterns deserve attention:

  • The heroic soldier. Images of courage and unity can honor real service. Without other voices beside them, they make any question about a war feel like a betrayal of those who fight it.
  • The traitor. Social platforms reduce hard moral questions to labels: patriot or traitor, strong or weak, faithful or faithless. The labels generate feeling and crowd out thought.
  • The echo chamber. Recommendation systems feed people what they already believe. Where national and religious identity have fused, one viewpoint can come to look like the only Christian one.

These are mechanisms worth watching, not claims that every outlet or congregation behaves the same way. The Medium Is the Massage (Bantam, 1967), McLuhan’s collaboration with the designer Quentin Fiore, suggests a practical exercise: ask not only what a message says, but what habits of attention its medium invites. A thirty-second video calling an objector a coward produces outrage before the viewer knows anything about the person. A long interview or a structured discussion creates very different conditions for judgment. McLuhan’s lesson is that a society settles its view of conscientious objection long before any draft, through the stories, images, and platforms that define patriotism.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: the wider horizon. Teilhard asks whether humanity’s growing powers are making us more capable of solidarity or making our divisions more dangerous. In The Phenomenon of Man (Harper & Brothers, 1959), he describes the noosphere, the expanding layer of human thought and connection that binds the species together. We are increasingly connected through communication, knowledge, and technology, yet our loyalties often stop at the border of nation, ethnicity, or creed.

The draft makes that tension concrete. A young American may feel a real duty to protect fellow citizens. That same sense of responsibility can extend to people in other countries, to those called enemies, and to the generations who will live with a war’s consequences. Teilhard offers no simple pacifism. He asks whether our political and technical progress is matched by a deeper sense of responsibility for one another, and he insists that genuine human unity is not uniformity. A true community makes room for disagreement and for conscience.

The Words Salmon Never Had

Catholic teaching now says what Salmon’s priests would not. In 1965 the Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et Spes 79, asked that laws make humane provision for those who refuse to bear arms for reasons of conscience, provided they serve the human community in some other way. The Catechism of the Catholic Church carries that teaching forward. Section 1782 affirms the right to act in conscience and in freedom. Section 2306 commends those who renounce violence and seek peaceful means of defending human rights. Sections 2307–2317 set out the Church’s teaching on avoiding war and the strict conditions for legitimate defense, and section 2311 repeats the Council’s call for equitable provision for conscientious objectors.

The three thinkers can stand beside that teaching, though their views are not Church doctrine. The teaching itself holds conscience to a high standard. Conscience must be formed through truth, reason, prayer, and honest engagement with others. It is neither personal preference nor automatic agreement with authority. Three distinctions follow:

  • Conscience is not infallibility. A person must test convictions honestly against the moral facts.
  • Patriotism is not absolute obedience. Citizens keep their moral responsibility when they judge their government’s actions.
  • Peace is not passivity. Pursuing peace can demand courage, resistance to injustice, protection of the vulnerable, and costly service.

An objector is not automatically a hero, and a soldier has not automatically surrendered his conscience. The real question is how each person answers the call of conscience, justice, and respect for others.

Act: Before the Notice Arrives

Parishes, schools, and social justice organizations can turn this moment into adult formation. A three-session program follows the method.

Session one, See: the draft, conscience, and the American story.

  • Explain the difference between registration, conscription, and conscientious objector classification.
  • Trace the history of conscientious objection among Quakers, Mennonites, Catholics, and other religious and nonreligious traditions, beginning with Ben Salmon.
  • Study cases in which war resisters were portrayed as disloyal or morally deficient.
  • Compare public rhetoric about military duty with the positions churches, movements, and peace organizations actually hold.

Session two, Judge: when Caesar asks for what conscience cannot give.

  • Read Merton on war and peace alongside Catholic teaching on conscience, human dignity, and the common good.
  • Use McLuhan to examine how digital media build the categories of patriot, traitor, hero, and enemy.
  • Use Teilhard to ask whether national security can be pursued without losing sight of humanity’s shared future.
  • Debate a case: a young Christian concludes that a proposed war is unjust. How should family, parish, government, and community respond?

Session three, Act: from contemplation to responsibility.

  • Prepare a resource guide on conscientious objection and where to find qualified legal counsel.
  • Hold discussion sessions in parishes and universities now, before any military emergency.
  • Train facilitators to tell moral disagreement from personal attack.
  • Invite veterans, conscientious objectors, military chaplains, peace advocates, and young adults to speak from experience.
  • Publish a reflection on faith, national identity, and the rights of conscience.

Four questions can anchor a public forum, an adult formation class, a newsletter, or a parish bulletin:

  1. Can a Christian be patriotic and refuse to fight? What separates responsible dissent from indifference to one’s neighbors?
  2. When does religious language become a tool of political mobilization, and how can we tell a genuine moral appeal from a loyalty test?
  3. What happens when algorithms reward outrage over discernment, and how might that make conscientious objection harder to understand?
  4. What does solidarity require among interconnected peoples? Can we defend our own communities while honoring the dignity of those our governments call enemies?

The questions do not supply answers. They make honest moral conversation possible.

Three Questions for an Index Card

  1. Merton: examine the heart. Has fear turned our national identity into an idol? Can we see the humanity of those we were taught to fear?
  2. McLuhan: examine the environment. How do our media draw the boundaries of acceptable thought, and which moral positions do they make look unpatriotic?
  3. Teilhard: examine the horizon. Is our growing power producing greater solidarity, or sharper divisions that make violence easier?

Together they move the conversation past the old contest of patriotism against protest, toward a harder question: what kind of people, and what kind of humanity, are we becoming?

Christian nationalism matters here because, where religious identity and national power fuse, conscientious objection can look like a rejection of both country and faith. That reaction deserves scrutiny rather than assumption. It also should not be pinned on every Christian who values patriotism, national defense, or traditional belief.

The Manuscript at St. Elizabeths

Ben Salmon formed his conscience alone. He worked it out in a hospital ward with a Bible and an encyclopedia, two hundred handwritten pages, while the men who should have helped him refused him the sacraments. The Church caught up with him forty-five years later.

On 18 December, the government will stop asking young men anything. Their names will enter the registry without a signature, a conversation, or a choice.

Someone should still ask them.

Ask them now.

Sources

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Published by Richard Pütz

Connecting history, philosophy, and; culture to today’s challenges, drawing on the work of Thomas Merton, focusing on the Anthropology of Technology ~ Killer storyteller!

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