Religion: A Missing Component of Professional Military Education PKSOI Paper | Page 32

Conclusion
The absence of religion as a core subject within a
contemporary war-fighting curriculum leaves our
military personnel ill-equipped for a complex world.
A quick scan of any newspaper, on any day, clearly
communicates the escalating presence of religion
in the public square. The circumstances of modern
conflict demand that military leaders become knowledgeable of not only the divisive, but also the many
positive, roles religion and religious actors can play in
conflict prevention and resolution. Leaders will need
a literacy that allows them to understand how religion
can interact with conflict, to engage religious leaders
as counterparts in PSO, and they will need to develop
an ability to work with and through religious institutions. Mission success, and human lives, depend on
leader religious literacy.
ENDNOTES
1. Thomas Matyok and Maureen Flaherty, “Can People of
Faith, and People in Peace and Conflict Studies, Work Together?”
in Critical Issues in Peace and Conflict Studies eds. Thomas Matyok,
Maureen Flaherty, Hamdesa Tuso, Jessica Senehi, and Sean Byrne
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 2.
2. Eric Patterson, Politics in a Religious World: Building a Religiously Informed U.S. Foreign Policy (London: Continuum, 2011).
3. Thomas Matyok, Cathryne Schmitz, and Hannah Rose
Mendoza, “Deep Analysis: Designing Complexity Into Our Understanding of Conflict” InterAgency Journal (2014), In Press.
4. Ibid, 1-12.

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