Military Voices Only Count if They Confirm Civilian Bias

In April 2022, Chris Smith, editor of The Englewood Review of Books, declined to review my book God is a Grunt (Hachette). His reasoning was explicit: "the primary audience for this book (active military/veterans) is narrower than the previous books, and doesn't intersect well with our readership."

This week, I saw that ERB Press is publishing Shane Claiborne's Of Grace and Bombs, his journal from Iraq in 2003. The contradiction was impossible to ignore.

If military families don't "intersect well" with ERB's Christian readership, who is Claiborne's Iraq journal for? If they do intersect, what changed since 2022?

I emailed Chris and Shane to ask. The answer reveals more than editorial discretion—it exposes bias.

Chris's response tried to minimize the issue: it's just a "new edition" from 2005, military readers are "a small percentage" of ERB's audience, and my book was aimed at too "narrow" an audience. He compared military families to "accountants or chefs or long-distance runners"—interest groups, not a protected class.

But here's what matters: under 18 USC 1389 (The Soldiers Amendment, 2009), military service members and their families are a federally protected class on "equal footing with other protected classes." That's the explicit congressional intent from the Senate floor. Until proven otherwise in court, military families have the same protected status as race, religion, and national origin.

Imagine ERB telling Esau McCaulley (a military spouse, btw): "the primary audience for this book (Black readers) doesn't intersect well with our readership." The bias would be obvious. Yet when the protected class is military families, it gets dressed up as editorial discretion.

Chris also contradicted himself without acknowledging it. In 2022: military families "doesn't intersect well" with the readership. In 2024: they're "a small percentage" of the readership. If they're readers at all, they intersect. He just doesn't think there are enough of them to matter.

ERB reviewed two of my previous books on military and war topics. So what made God is a Grunt—published by a major Christian publisher, about veteran theological experience—suddenly too narrow?

The only explanation Chris avoided: it's not the topic, it's the perspective. Claiborne's anti-war journal serves "large swaths" of ERB's readers. A veteran's trained theological reflection does not. ERB is "very interested" in military topics—as long as they confirm progressive Christian assumptions about war.

Churches, families, neighborhoods, and workplaces without military families do not exist in America. Engineering a Christian readership to match that fantasy isn't just editorial curation—it's exclusion dressed up as taste. The only logical conclusion is that ERB’s “attentiveness to the communities in which we are embedded” is selective, discriminating. It’s not complicated, even if military families issues are.

I followed Matthew 18 and brought this to them privately first. Chris's response was defensive evasion. Now it's public record.

This is how Christian accountability works.