Entering the Temple of Mars: Why There Is Not Substitute for the Spiritual in War

Recent scholarship validates the importance of spirituality and spiritual fitness. This article operationalizes the 2023 article “Holistic Health as a Twenty-First-Century Military Strategy: Stoic Philosophy and Spiritual Fitness for Optimizing Warfighter Readiness,” which argues that the U.S. Department of Navy should actively advocate spiritual fitness at the unit level as a means of improving military personnel’s overall health and readiness. Accordingly, this article aims to provide a scholarly response to the concept of spiritual fitness that has been discussed in various official U.S. Marine Corps documents, including Spiritual Fitness, All Marine Corps Activities (ALMAR) 033/16 (2016); Resiliency and Spiritual Fitness, ALMAR 027/20 (2020); Spiritual Fitness, ALMAR 020/24 (2024); Spiritual Fitness Leader’s Guide, Marine Corps Reference Publication 6-10.1 (2023); and Religious Ministry in the United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Tactical Publication 3-30D (2023). This article offers a comprehensive understanding of the subject and its relevance to the Marine Corps. It does so by tracing the significance of spirituality in these documents back through Marine Corps history to Lieutenant General John A. Lejeune’s famous statement, “There is no substitute for the spiritual in war.” As such, the article systematically reviews the importance of spirituality through the statements of famed Marine Corps commandants, other revered Marine Corps leaders, as well as celebrated military leaders, noted military strategists, and philosophers. In so doing, it emphasizes the necessity of operationalizing spiritual fitness at the unit level to improve military personnel’s overall health and readiness. To this end, recent scholarship validates the importance of spirituality and spiritual fitness, supporting what many military commanders have always believed about the need for spiritual fitness. As such, the article highlights how command leadership can effectively build character and achieve this result by operationalizing spiritual fitness at the unit level in order to “enter the temple of Mars,” if called on to do so. The article concludes by acknowledging that clinical evidence and practical military wisdom validate the crucial importance of spiritual fitness in character development, military readiness, and battlefield victory.