Justice, Not Comfort

by Lisa Watts

Kristen Leslie ’83

For more than twenty years, Kristen Leslie’s career kept her fairly comfortable in the familiar worlds of church and academia. The daughter of an Ohio Wesleyan University chaplain, Leslie herself served as chaplain at Adrian College in Michigan before earning a Ph.D. in theology and taking a teaching position at Yale University.

That’s when things got interesting. Leslie’s 2003 book, When Violence is No Stranger: Pastoral Counseling with Survivors of Acquaintance Rape (Augsburg Fortress), led officials at the United States Air Force Academy to her as they grappled that year with widespread sexual harassment and assaults of female cadets. The officials invited Leslie, an ordained Methodist minister and therapist who teaches pastoral care, to train their chaplains in counseling the assault victims. She was invited back two more times, in 2004 and 2005, with a group of graduate students to generally assess and enhance the work of the chaplains.

What Leslie found on the Colorado Springs campus, plopped down in the middle of basic training for a week, astounded her. Air Force chaplains did many good things but also “some really bad things,” she says. Though a public, non-sectarian institution, the academy’s environment was stridently evangelistic. One chaplain declared during a Protestant service, for instance, that those who weren’t yet born again “will burn in the fires of hell.” Chaplains and faculty members urged cadets to convert their fellow students. And the academy’s second-in-command sent an e-mail to all cadets saying, “the Lord is in control. He has a plan for every one of us.”

Leslie’s 2004 report to the commanding officer of the chaplain corps became known as “the Yale report” and offered a record of growing religious intolerance. When her report was made public this past spring, Air Force officials commissioned their own review, which confirmed much of what Leslie saw.

She testified at a Congressional hearing in June on the climate of religious intolerance at the academy. Two months later, the Air Force issued guidelines to all of its commanders cautioning against supporting one religion over another and calling on chaplains to respect and minister to those of all faiths, and of no faith. The guidelines are a good beginning, Leslie says, but she hopes the Air Force leadership will refine them so that religious intolerance isn’t left to individual interpretation.

As a Wooster undergraduate, Leslie never knew her work would eventually focus on survivors of sexual assault. She only knew that she wanted to pursue matters of peace and justice, and the ministry — she’s the tenth ordained person in her family over six generations — seemed a good way to do so.

Leslie’s time as a college chaplain quickly taught her how prevalent acquaintance rape is on campuses. She sought training in how to counsel victims and wrote her dissertation on the topic. She isn’t sorry that her work has led her to argue issues of First Amendment rights before Congress.

“I feel I’m called to be just, not comfortable. Sometimes that means we’re damned uncomfortable.”