Walter H. Capps came to UCSB in the early 1960s, shortly after the Department of Religious Studies had been created.  He joined W. Richard Comstock as the second faculty member in the department, and over the next few years he was joined by Robert Michaelsen, Thomas O’Dea and Wilbur Fridell.  Walter initially offered courses in the history of Christian thought.  He understood that the discipline of Religious Studies was what he called “a second-order discipline” by which he meant that it was not the same thing as religion as a lived experience.  It sought to make sense of religious experience and all the dimensions of religious traditions.  While scholars today might think this distinction is overly simplistic, it nevertheless captured the essence of Religious Studies as an academic discipline and what it was all about.  It interpreted religious experience and religious tradition; its second-order nature could deepen faith, but could never replace it.

But this distinction led Capps to have a very broad understanding of the full reach of religion. He offered courses on mysticism and monasticism, and short after the fall of the Republic of South Vietnam in 1975 he was challenged to by a group of Vietnam veterans to take up their plight and their concerns.  The Vietnam War had been more bitter and more divisive than any conflict since the American Civil War.  Americans wanted nothing better than to forget the long years of conflict.  To put the war behind us and move forward. We forgot those who had carried out our national policy under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.  We preferred to look away from the crippling effects of Agent Orange, to turn our backs on the devastating impacts of combat, almost as powerful as an incurable disease.  We took our culture wars to Vietnam and brought them back, and as Capps understood before many others, the war remained unfinished.

In Winter, 1979 Capps offered Religious Studies 155, “The Impact of the Vietnam War on American Religion and Culture” for the first time.  The enrollment sheet in that first course showed 36 students followed Walter into the tragedy of war.  Capps was visionary and his course was the first course on the Vietnam War in the country, and certainly the first which brought Vietnam Veterans into the classroom. The Veterans were the essential element of the course.  Capps did not think of his course as a “history” of the war.  That was not his interest.  He was Religious Studies scholar always and he perceived that in the war and the experiences of the Veterans there was an essential story of religion.  Certainly, there were others who joined Capps and Veterans, some who had opposed the war on religious grounds and others who opposed it for political reasons.  But the course was one of the first places where the sides of the American polity in the 1960s and 1970s came together. Walter’s course grew over the years and filled Campbell Hall and it is estimated that more than 16,000 UCSB students have taken the course over the past 25 years.

Walter described the course in his syllabus as a way to monitor and to evaluate the national response to the war.  At first, Capps understood that course had supplied an individual closure to the experience of the war for many Veterans and others who had been involved in the war. In the first years of the course, Walter ended each presentation by the Veterans by asking the class to join him in welcoming home the Veteran speaker.  Welcoming home was a ritual act which acknowledged the Veteran’s experience as authentic and valid, and most importantly, the ritual acknowledgment that had been denied by an America torn asunder by the divisiveness of the war. It was not until perhaps the mid-1980s, that Capps saw a second level at which the course seemed to be operating – the course was one of the ways that nation healed itself from the wounds of the war.  By this time there were other courses were beginning to appear on the Vietnam war in departments outside of military science where students had been learning of the mistakes of the war in diplomacy, in military tactics, and in military strategy long before the war ended.  Capps understood that for the Veterans who told their stories the telling of the story had a healing power.  He shied away from calling this healing power therapeutic.  That judgment would remain in the purview of other trained experts. He had heard the narratives many times. They were familiar to him, but the teller often chose to de-emphasize some things, and would also present things which were startlingly new and under-narrated in a Veteran’s earlier visits to the class. The telling was what some sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s had described as the “presentation of self.” Each time the narrative was told, the self was revealed and often more and more of the self, building up a complete individual and with each telling the Veteran gained more distance from the experience, was able to universalize the experience, to make it relevant to others. The experience of war through the telling moved from a private horror to a general truth.  By the time of Walter’s retirement in 1995, the course had taken on still a third dimension or level.  Abraham Lincoln had spoken in his second inaugural address of the nation’s need to bind up the wounds of the Civil War, to care for the needs of those left behind by those who had sacrificed themselves in that war, the widows and orphans.  But Capps understood that binding up the wounds meant binding the generations of Americans. Many Veterans and their families were unable to speak of the experience of the war to their own children.  And, to the degree that Veterans and others could speak to “their” children, some literally their own children, but most, the children of the generation after the war, the generations would be bound together.  This would contribute, Capps believed, to the integration of the Vietnam War into the American collective memory.

The study of religion is not just about religious traditions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and others.  Religious Studies is about how religion produces meaning.  Normative values or those values which govern how we might best live our lives is one of the arenas of Religious Studies.  In some cases the experience of the Vietnam war was the “dark night of the soul” for many Veterans.  Amidst the chaos and violence of the war, their religious values were tested. For some, their religious values were strengthened.  For others, the war destroyed their confidence in religious values.  For still others, it was their religious values which propelled them headlong into a conflict with their own country and with their neighbors, friends and families.  Among these there were many who saw the Vietnam War as a screaming testimony against religion which had proven so helpless to end the violence and end the war.  These issues alone would make Religious Studies the most appropriate venue to study this war and others.

But there was something even more important in the class which brought its subject to the very center of the study of religion.  It was the mysterious quality of the telling of the experience of war.  This was not simply an archival act for Capps, a documenting of what had happened through the eyes of the Veterans.  He recognized that in countries that had suffered the long term destructive powers of warfare, that telling had been suppressed or invalidated.  One might argue that the origins in WWII are just as much in the suppression of the “experience of the front” as in the harsh retributive elements of the Versailles Treaty.  It should be remembered that the experience of those German veterans was very similar to the American Veterans of the Vietnam War.  They were the first to experience modern warfare and they came home to a country which did not know how to honor them in their defeat. Defeat is never easy to integrate into a nation’s collective history, but it was the sheer scale of the combat and the enormity of destruction and loss of life that was suffered that made it different and modern.  WWI lasted four years.  Vietnam lasted from the first massive American military build-ups in 1964 to the Fall of Saigon, eleven long, haunting, violent years.  German society became increasingly violent throughout the 1920s and that violence led directly to the Nazi ascendance in 1933.  Some might argue that American society has become increasingly violent after the Vietnam War.  Certainly, our institutions are radically different than the institutions of Weimar Germany, if only in our long-term historical experience with democratic politics.  But the German veterans whose voices were silenced did provide the fertile ground from which Nazism grew.

I recognize that such a parallelism has many weaknesses, but perhaps underscores the central concern of the course – the telling.  The narratives of the Veterans belong to the most important and power dimension of religion – myth.  In every religious tradition there are “tellings,” the narratives which go together with highly symbolic behaviors.  There is the Passover “telling,” the literally meaning of Haggadah at the Passover Seder.  There is the “telling” drawn from the Gospel accounts of the last days of Jesus’ life which forms the very structure of the Easter mystery and the conquering of death. The very center of every religious tradition is a telling.  The telling of the war is thus part of what might be called our national religious character or even our civil religion.  Thus, the most appropriate place to study that religion is in Religious Studies and that is also why this course should be a Religious Studies course.

Richard D. Hecht