When the Caregiver Collapses: Moral Injury, Diagnostic Ambitions, and Systemic Failure in the Nanking Safety Zone (1937–1938)

This paper examines the moral injuries experienced by American Protestant missionaries during the Nanjing Massacre and the Nanking Safety Zone (1937–1938), arguing that their suffering reveals moral injury less as an individual pathology than as a sign of systemic failure. Drawing on diaries, letters, and reports by Minnie Vautrin, Miner Searle Bates, George Fitch, and Robert Wilson, the paper analyzes how humanitarian and spiritual labor under conditions of occupation, scarcity, and violence produced distinct forms of moral injury, including guilt over exclusion, indirect collusion, remorse over misjudgment, and anguish under impossible triage. In conversation with current debates over defining “moral injury disorder,” the paper argues that pathologizing moral injury risks shifting attention away from institutional betrayal and structural violence. The Nanjing case shows that spiritual caregivers themselves may be uniquely vulnerable, and that moral injury can function as an embodied political and theological critique.