Can we heal the moral injury of our nation?

Since the pandemic began, the murder rate has risen to an unprecedented level, healthcare workers are leaving their professions in record numbers, doctors have suicide rates double the general population, and hate crimes have escalated. Additionally, the record rates of mental and emotional distress and still-soaring opioid overdoses reflect the despair that characterizes moral injury. Is it no wonder, then, that violence and threats of violence have erupted at school board meetings, against election officers and elected officials, and in classrooms, hospitals, stores, workplaces, and airplanes — even in the halls of Congress.

Our country faces a time of moral reckoning.

The anniversary of Jan. 6 only highlighted that: Intense moral injury is tearing us asunder.

Being moral is the basis of being human, the primary way we maintain all our relationships to ourselves, one another, and our world. Moral injury occurs when people in authority and leadership in high stakes situations betray the people who must trust them to do the right thing; when people violate their own core moral foundations by failing to stop harm, inflicting it, or witnessing it; and when social, political, or religious systems are unjust, deceptive, violent, or inhumane. As a nation, we have experienced all of these moral failures.

Moral injury is felt in a loss of trust, grief, demoralization, fury, shame, and despair, and it results in a loss of faith or meaning and a negative change in character. Unaddressed, it can lead to emotional isolation, addiction to drugs or alcohol, violence, vengefulness, fierce polarization, and allegiance to closed ideological or religious identity systems resistant to ambiguity, compromise, compassion, or reason.

The devastations and pervasive anxieties of COVID-19 arrived nearly two years ago in the midst of ongoing racial and economic injustice and created the perfect storm for massive moral injury.

The undeniable legacy of white supremacy has meant disproportionately high death rates for Native American, Black, and Latinx communities, in addition to violent and often lethal attacks upon unarmed people of color. Moreover, that healthcare workers, school officials, and others in public-facing jobs have been attacked for their efforts to address COVID-19 also evinces the profound realities of moral injury.

We are reeling from loss, outrage, utter exhaustion, fear of violence, shame and feelings of failure, and from the betrayal of the vision of our democracy as a place where there is “liberty and justice for all.” Where are hope and healing to be found under the weight of realities that require so much of our energy just to survive?

It is well past time for our nation to recognize the ways in which the immoral inequities of employment, education, and healthcare and the disasters of climate change interact with white supremacy to endanger all of us.

To turn away from the precipice of devastating moral failure requires us to create spaces for people to recognize moral injury and share their emotionally painful experiences of it in a context of compassionate deep listening without judgment and debate. In such spaces healing is made possible as people recognize shared emotional pain across their differences, and their injurious, destructive experiences open possibilities for connection through mutual insight and wisdom. Moreover, these conversations can guide us to more resilient meaning systems and practices that can integrate challenging truths, renew trust in ourselves and others, support life-giving relationships, and sustain lives of purpose for making a better world.

If we as a people fail to address the profound moral injury that afflicts this nation in this present moment— with so much at stake for ourselves and future generations — we will continue to dissolve in the acids of hatred, shame, cynicism, distrust, fury, and violence that are currently burning through all that might hold us together.

We need a critical mass of people weary of hatred and division who possess the courage to be with others who seek to heal moral injury and to grapple with and recognize how we have arrived at a country so divided and violent, and who seek to build a more just and humane society where all persons are valued and respected as the sacred human beings that we are.

Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock is Senior Vice President at Volunteers of America.

Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas is Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral.

They will co-moderate a virtual conference, Jan. 11, 2022, “For the Healing of the Nation: Understanding Moral Injury in the Wake of the Pandemic,” with keynoter Margaret Grun Kibben, Chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives.