When Following Orders Breaks You: What the Military Knows About Moral Injury (That Wellness Culture Ignores)

Six Democratic lawmakers, all military veterans or former intelligence officers, released a video in mid-November reminding U.S. troops they must refuse illegal orders. Why? Well because since 2025 the Trump administration has ordered military operations that legal experts say cross the line into illegality. There are the boat strikes on unarmed civilians accused of drug smuggling. Then there are the domestic deployments. National Guard troops sent into Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Washington D.C. to enforce immigration law and suppress protests. These actions have alarmed international human rights observers and put troops in the position of enforcing policies many question.

Senator Elissa Slotkin told The New York Times she’d been hearing from active-duty troops worried about their own legal liability. They were being ordered to do things that seemed wrong. But refusing could mean court-martial.

That’s the bind.

A National Guard member deployed to Los Angeles told The New York Times: “The moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring. This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”

Moral injury. Ever heard of it? As an ethicist (my PhD from University of Chicago is in Religious Ethics) I think it is way more common than you might think. In fact in September 2025, the American Psychiatric Association added “moral injury” to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

And this isn’t just a military problem. Right now, thousands of wellness chasers and spiritual seekers are at risk of the same condition, and most have no idea. And this makes moral injury one way to think about forms of ethical harm that are often unanticipated.

What Moral Injury Actually Is

Moral injury isn’t trauma in the traditional sense. It’s what happens when you commit, witness, or experience something that violates your core values, and that violation does lasting damage to your sense of who you are.

Harvard researchers Tyler VanderWeele and Jennifer Wortham developed the definition that made it into the DSM: moral distress arises “because personal experience disrupts or threatens: (a) one’s sense of the goodness of oneself, of others, of institutions...or (b) one’s beliefs or intuitions about right and wrong.”

When that distress persists? That’s moral injury.

Photo by Savannah B. on Unsplash

It’s different from PTSD, which stems from fear-based trauma. Moral injury is about values. Your moral code gets shattered, and you’re left trying to figure out who you are in the wreckage.

The military has known about this for decades. Veterans returning from war with overwhelming guilt and shame, even when they followed orders. But a 2018 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Psychiatry found moral injury also affects healthcare workers, journalists, police officers. It can affect anyone forced to act against their values.

Okay, you might be thinking. I get it. This is an ethical issue. But this Substack is about religion….what the heck does it have to do with that?

One one hand religion comes up in how the harm of moral injury is described. The Department of Veterans Affairs describes moral injury as impacting not just psychological health but spirituality itself. People lose trust in their relationship with a Higher Power, question previously held spiritual beliefs. They experience what the Syracuse Moral Injury Project calls “a deep soul wound.”

But also, spiritual practitioners can experience moral injury too.

The Military Shows Us How This Works

Each boat strike involves hundreds of military personnel. Analysts identifying targets. Drone pilots launching missiles. Command teams watching high-definition footage as people burn alive. The teams running these operations watch for days. They see targets hug their children before casting off. After the strike, they watch people slowly die.

National Guard troops in L.A. aren’t pulling triggers, but they’re enforcing policies many believe violate constitutional rights. They’re separating families.

This is where moral injury happens. Not from one dramatic atrocity, but from the accumulation of acts that violate your sense of right and wrong. Acts you’re required to commit while embedded in a system that demands compliance.

Something I’ve learned form studying religion for over two decades: The practices we engage in shape us. They don’t just reflect our values. They create and reinforce them.

That’s moral injury. You get remade into someone you don’t recognize.

The Spiritual Fitness Trap

Rosemary Kellison, a fellow religious ethics professor, published her analysis of how the U.S. military tries to prevent moral injury through something called “spiritual fitness” in the Journal of American Academy of Religion. And here’s where it gets really interesting for a religion nerd and wellness critic like me.

The military defines spiritual fitness, she writes, as cultivating “beliefs and practices that strengthen your connectedness with sources of hope, meaning, and purpose” and developing “core beliefs, highest principles, and ultimate values.”

Sounds good, right? Help service members develop their spiritual selves so they can make ethical decisions under pressure.

But look closer at what’s actually happening.

The military’s definition of “spiritual fitness” relies heavily on contemporary American understanding of spirituality as essentially individual. Your spirit. Your core values. Your authentic self. The military is careful to distinguish “spirituality” from “religion.” They emphasize, Kellison points out, that spiritual fitness is about personal faith and individual meaning, not institutional doctrine.

Except here’s the thing: while telling troops to develop their own “core values,” the military is simultaneously training them to adopt military values as their own. As Kellison found in military documents, service members are expected to align their personal values with organizational values. “The Marine Corps’ core values of honor, courage, and commitment define how all Marines are to think, act and fight.”

Kellison points out this isn’t new. Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. military promoted what it called “moral monotheism.” Vague spirituality rather than specific religious doctrine, used as a way to unite troops with diverse backgrounds while shaping their ethical commitments to serve military interests.

But do you see the sleight of hand? Spiritual fitness is presented as individual spiritual development, but the content is institutional.

When those two value systems conflict (when your actual core values clash with military demands), that’s when people break. But it gets worse. By locating morality in the individual, the concept of spiritual fitness shifts responsibility for moral injury from the military as an institution onto individual service members. If you experience moral distress, it’s because you weren’t spiritually fit enough. You didn’t develop strong enough core values. You failed to achieve integration.

Never mind that the military created the conditions. Never mind that commanders gave the orders. Never mind that military policy shaped what was possible.

The problem, according to this framework, is your lack of individual spiritual fitness.

And this exact same pattern shows up in spiritual wellness culture.

The Teacher’s Values Become Yours (Whether You Notice or Not)

The “spiritual but not religious” framework that dominates American wellness culture operates on identical logic.

It positions itself as more authentic, more free, more true to your essential self than “organized religion.” You’re developing your spirituality. Your practice. Your connection to meaning. It’s individual, it’s personal, it’s about your core self. Same is true for the wellness industry, which tells you to trust your own intuition (see my thought about that in last week’s post).

Except, where are those values actually coming from?

When you learn meditation from Deepak Chopra, you’re not just learning a technique in some value-neutral way. His teaching comes packaged with beliefs about power, about who deserves protection, about what matters more than truth. You might think you’re just sitting quietly, watching your breath. But you’re also learning: This is who we protect. This is what we overlook. This is the price of access to wisdom.

The revelation that Chopra had a relationship with Epstein matters because it reveals the values embedded in his system. If nothing else it shows valuing the power that comes from proximity to wealth and celebrity. But there is an email in which Chopra celebrates when a 13 year-old-girl (who accused Epstein sexually abusing her) dropped a civil case against him. These aren’t separate from Chopra’s spiritual teachings. They demonstrate what his system actually values when push comes to shove.

Scholar Craig Martin points out that contemporary spirituality discourse obscures how individuals are actually constituted by their communities and practices. You’re not freely choosing your values in some vacuum of pure authenticity. You’re absorbing them from somewhere.

The question is: do you know from where? And do those values align with yours?

The Risk Is Real

Let’s say you’ve been practicing with a teacher for five years. Your sense of meaning has been shaped by their teachings. Then you discover they’ve been protecting abusers, appropriating sacred practices for profit, or spreading dangerous misinformation.

You’re in the same bind those troops face, just without the threat of court-martial.

Those practices have already remade you. Your identity is entangled with their system. And now you realize the values you absorbed conflict with your actual core values.

That’s when moral injury sets in. The self-alienation. The shame, not I should have known better but deeper: What have I become? The guilt. The disgust. The anger at betrayal.

And here’s what makes this particularly insidious: moral injury often surfaces later, sometimes years after the initial experiences. You practice faithfully, noticing nothing wrong, until something shifts. Your moral codes evolve. You develop clearer political analysis. You learn what appropriation actually means. And you look back at what you’ve been doing, who you’ve been supporting, and you don’t recognize yourself.

A former Air Force intelligence analyst who worked on drone strikes described exactly this to The New York Times. Bennet Miller watched targets for days, saw them with families. Then came the order to strike. A week later, the same name reappeared. They’d killed the wrong person. It happened again. And again. Miller felt trapped, unable to refuse work he believed was wrong. He became suicidal in 2019.

Different context than wellness. Same mechanism of moral injury.

What Can You Do?

Before adopting a spiritual wellness practice, investigate the teacher’s values explicitly. Not their marketing, but their actual behavior. Who do they protect? How do they handle accountability? Ask: What ethical framework accompanies this practice? If the answer is vague platitudes about “loving yourself,” that’s a red flag. Real ethical frameworks have specifics. Obligations, boundaries, accountability structures.

Can you access this practice from someone whose values actually align with yours? You don’t have to abandon meditation because Chopra is compromised. You can learn from someone else.

If you’re already practicing, do regular ethical inventory: Do my teacher’s values align with mine? What values am I reinforcing?

If you’re experiencing moral injury, name it. Now that it’s in the DSM, clinicians should recognize it. Treatment differs from PTSD because your thoughts aren’t distorted. You really did violate your values or were betrayed. Treatment focuses on self-forgiveness, making amends where possible, and rebuilding your moral identity.

Practices don’t just reflect values. They create them. That’s what Kellison documented in the military’s spiritual fitness program. And it’s what happens when you spend years learning from a teacher whose values conflict with yours.

The six Democratic lawmakers who made that video understood what was at stake. They weren’t encouraging sedition. They were trying to prevent moral injury.

Value alignment isn’t optional. It’s protective. The question isn’t whether practices will shape you. They will. The question is whether you’re paying attention to what they’re shaping you into.

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