Objection to Military Service as a Commitment to Sacred Values Stories Retold in light of the Devoted Actor Model

This article draws on the ‘devoted actor’ model to characterize the conscientious objection movement as a commitment to sacred values. The devoted actor model assumes that “people will become willing to protect morally important or sacred values through costly sacrifice and extreme actions, even being willing to kill and die.” Recognizing that religious as well as secular values can be venerated as sacred, I call the action of objecting to military service ‘the convictional objection’ rather than ‘the conscientious objection’ and attempt to unearth and retell the stories of those who refuse military service based on their convictions. Sacred values motivate actors to act beyond the cost-benefit calculations in defense of those values that they are commited to. What makes the belief-based conscientious objection movement unique is that it has sought to pursue values despite the certainty of punishment. To illustrate this, this article focuses on the post-2001 convictional objection movement, which has not only included religious objectors, but also non-religious objectors who have declared their objection based on anti-war pacifist beliefs or feminist values. In the sense that they are non-religious, or in other words, based on secular values, their refusal to military service is the political act and thus a form of ‘value politics.’ At the level of social theory, this article attempts to bring together Max Weber’s notion of charisma and Emile Durkheim’s notion of the sacred by describing the act of convictional objection as a devoted action to sacred values.