Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Glad to hear your ideas, and thanks for commenting!

I think you're probably right about Riley being portrayed as far more of a representative of the institutional military rather than the institutional church (if you go by screen-time, at least: he shows up late for church once in "Who Are You?" in season 4, but otherwise his expressions of "faith" -- and therefore his crises of faith -- seem to be focused upon his commitment to the military and his self-image as being therefore "on the right side").

However, with a dearth of other candidates to represent actual church-going Christians in Sunnydale (in spite of Willow's comment about the Hellmouth vibes making people pray harder), it's also easy to see how Riley's faith can become a matter for much speculation.

btw, One of the first books I found really useful in my research might be of interest to you, also: Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, by Jonathan Shea, M.D. (1995). Shea writes about the intertwining of losses of "faith" in various institutions (military, religious, and, of course, family) in bringing about the "berserker" and PTSD phenomena. He makes a big thing of the fact that armies, churches, and families all have a similar power to "create our reality" and therefore have incredible power to mess us up, when they prove to be dysfunctional or destructive.