Coming Alongside: Chaplains of Change
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, writer Tavia Gilbert. And along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.

In our last episodes before the holidays, we met two researchers, Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Dr. Timothy Lomas, who shared their research on human flourishing. Each touched on the importance of human connection and relationship as an antidote to loneliness.

In our first episode of This New Year, we continue that conversation, this time by exploring the unique role of chaplains and how their purpose is to keep the people they serve from going through painful times alone. ♪

If you're like me, the first thing you think when you hear the word chaplain is that it's synonymous with pastor or minister. That chaplains are a spiritual guide associated with a particular religious faith. But as we'll learn today, the history of the chaplaincy, the role of modern chaplains, these are more nuanced than you might imagine. In fact, chaplains are found in some pretty surprising places, including seaports.

Chaplains talk about coming alongside, especially the port chaplains. I think it's a metaphor related to water and the sea. But good chaplains come alongside. They approach with care.

The chaplain can always be sent away. There's no one who's ever required to see a chaplain. And most of what they do is listen. They ask some questions. They bear witness. They hear. They see. And they support people where they are in the mess of our lives.

Dr. Wendy Kaj is the Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences at Brandeis University and the founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, which supports, educates, and expands the vision of chaplains everywhere.

When most of us think about chaplains, our understanding is largely informed by the past. She says, The term itself, chaplain, is historical. It's absolutely Christian-infused. Chaplains were historically white Christian men. However, Dr. Kaj adds, not only are more women and more people of color than ever serving as chaplains, They now include people from all racial, religious backgrounds,

In general, in the United States, people think about religion as being institutional and spirituality as being more about how people find meaning and purpose.

Not much of what chaplains do is religious with a traditional kind of flavor, with a capital R. It tends to be more about questions of meaning and purpose. And to me, what chaplains do that's unique, what's their special sauce, is being able to engage with people around those questions of meaning and purpose.

So very rarely are chaplains prescriptive. They're there to listen and support and to partner, to be alongside someone as they make or figure out how to make decisions or move forward in the midst of whatever their current life situations are. So to me, good chaplains are good listeners. They are aware of the places where people get stuck and they have a knack for asking questions

good open-ended questions to help lead people through things. They are aware of the wisdom of the world's spiritual and religious traditions, not because they're giving a sermon about it, but because it is informing how they ask their questions.

and the ways that they can help people not feel alone as they are moving through their lives. This is just an incredible group of people who are doing quiet, supportive work every day. They're not in this to preach or to have big steeple churches or to gain status or prestige or pay. They're in this because they see it making a difference in the day-to-day.

Dr. Kaj became interested in chaplaincy when she was studying Theravada Buddhism in the United States during her dissertation project at Princeton.

A monk at a Thai temple where she was studying fell ill, and spending time with him in the hospital led her to think about how he was moving through his life and about religion and spirituality and healthcare. That, in turn, led her to consider the role of chaplains, particularly because she was interested in exploring religion outside of traditional organizations. You know, most people who want to understand religion look at congregations. That's an important part of the story, but not all of the story.

And chaplains have always done their work outside of congregations, in the military, in prisons, higher education, healthcare. And I was curious what the role is, what does it mean to be a person of faith doing professional work with people from a broad range of backgrounds?

in a broad range of institutions. And I thought that would be a helpful angle into the work. As I learned more about chaplains, and especially as we're watching contemporary American religion change with fewer and fewer people involved with local congregations, I realized that these are some of the only people that many of us meet who have professional religious education.

And I wanted to know more about that as part of understanding the broader landscape of the United States. Her interest in non-congregation-centered spiritual leadership has led Dr. Kaj to connect with thousands of people in a formal study of the role of chaplains in American life. So I had been interviewing the leaders of professional chaplain organizations in airports and ports and the military, and they were all struggling with similar questions, but they didn't know one another.

And I thought, well, what if we see if we can bring people together and see what we can learn from one another. From that simple beginning, we've been able to gather about 15,000 people, both educators and social scientists, chaplains and people looking to engage with chaplains to think about what the work of spiritual care is today, what it looks like going forward, as opposed to what it has been historically.

What is the history of American chaplains? So the brief history is that chaplains in the United States date to the Revolutionary War. They have long been present in the military as people who are responsible for protecting people's right to free exercise. We think they have long histories in hospitals, especially because many hospitals were founded by religious organizations.

But in the 1920s and 30s, that began to change somewhat in terms of the training and preparation of chaplains, as well as shifting from serving just their own people of their own religious background to serving others. And over time, there also is a history certainly in higher education. Many colleges and universities were founded by religious people in groups.

There's an interesting history in ports where a lot of Protestant social service organizations did work in ports that included religious workers, chaplains, religious professionals, etc. Chaplains still serve in ports today. In general, on cargo ships, there are small teams of 8 to 12 to 15 seafarers.

Many of them are not allowed to get off the ships if they don't have the right visas, and they are working nine-month contracts to support their families at home. So in the United States, the only people who care for the people on board the vessels are the chaplains, and they get on board with magazines, with phone cards, with snacks.

sometimes with cookbooks, and to have a friendly conversation. If the crew are able to get off in their short 10, 12 hours in the port, they can help them get to a mall or help them send their money home to their families or things like that. So port chaplaincy plays a huge role for an almost entirely forgotten group of people that otherwise are not served. Dr. Kaj has been surprised by other unexpected places that chaplains serve.

More and more, we're seeing chaplains in places you wouldn't expect. Until the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus closed, there was a chaplain who traveled with the circus. There is a chaplain at the Federal Research Station in Antarctica. You know, other places that I was surprised to find chaplains were airports. I couldn't figure out why airports would need chaplains or chapels. And in fact, Boston's Logan Airport was one of the first in the United States. And there's an interesting history there about making space for airport workers to

to go to mass and do other religious services. But today airport chaplains do a lot of work with people who are flying due to crisis or sudden death.

They do a lot of work when someone is injured or harmed while in flight or a family member is. They do a huge amount of staff care for everyone from baggage handlers to the people who are checking you in that you know you're watching a fellow traveler unload on. Spiritual care providers are now deployed with every Red Cross disaster team. We're seeing them in more and more police departments and fire departments. Sports teams often have chaplains. They tend to be more traditionally religious. More recently, to see...

as many chaplains emerging in working with the unhoused and working around addiction. I mean, this is a place where religiously motivated and other social workers have long played a role. But I think that there's an important set of opportunities there for chaplains. Dr. Kaj can imagine the presence of chaplains expanding even further. What if they were in veterinary clinics?

dealing with people when their animals were quite ill. There's a strong body of research from the UK that shows that embedding chaplains in primary care services

as kind of listening services, people that you can talk to for as many times as you want when you go to see your primary care physician and provide some support, some community resources, this sort of thing, is very beneficial both for the patients and families but also for the staff because it frees their time up to deal with other kinds of issues. But the place most people might think of chaplains playing a role is in hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care settings.

There is a long historic relationship between chaplaincy and health care, says Dr. Kaj. Her study of the chaplaincy underscored the importance of their work in settings where people are ill, injured, or dying. There is a long history of spiritual care in hospitals because of their religious origins.

But even as many hospitals secularized, they maintained chaplain spiritual care providers in part because they saw spiritual well-being as central to health.

You know, in the United States today, most people die in hospitals or in hospices and palliative cares. And most people, when they think chaplain, if they think anything, will think end of life. The relationship between health care, hospitals, end of life, certainly hospice and palliative care is important. We interviewed 50 people who, in our survey, told us that they had contact with chaplains.

And in those interviews, we wanted to hear about it. We know what the experience was like for them. And many of them talked about being with loved ones who were at the end of their lives and appreciating the nonjudgmental presence of chaplains, their comfort, their accompaniment. They're helping to navigate and support them when they or their loved ones were not religious in any traditional sense or didn't fit into any traditional box.

And they were trying to make sense of what was happening and how to move forward both kind of practically and existentially. So that's why I think we saw so much contact with chaplains as related to health care organizations.

Nurses in particular have historically worked closely with chaplains, says Dr. Kaj. And her research not only suggests that this remains true today, but that it can inform the work of other health care providers. I wrote a book called Paging God, Religion in the Halls of Medicine. And I spent time in two intensive care units, one that cared for adults and one that cared for infants.

And I interviewed a whole lot of health care workers. And it is the nurses who most often work closely with the chaplains and spiritual care providers. And I actually went back through nursing and medical textbooks.

because there's been more attention to kind of religion and healthcare should doctors be trained around these issues. And what's really clear in the textbooks is that nurses have always learned about some kind of spiritual care as part of good bedside care. That has a long history in like every kind of nursing textbook.

The idea that physicians should do this is really a new and different idea. They don't have that long history. And so I think nurses are often providing some spiritual care on their own or alongside chaplains, especially at the end of life. That's part of the history of that field and of their doing of that work. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the work of chaplains in health care and end-of-life settings into greater public view, says Dr. Kajj.

And I got a lot of calls from reporters during this period, you know, asking me about whether, how, why chaplains were running toward the dying. And I would repeatedly say a few things. One, chaplains don't run. They walk, maybe urgently, but they don't run. That's not part of being a supportive presence and coming alongside. Second, I would say chaplains have always been there and they've always been doing this work, but the light wasn't turned so that they could be seen.

And that's okay. But as chaplains work across the nation's healthcare organizations, I mean, there are more than two-thirds of American hospitals, hospices, palliative cares. They've long been doing this work quietly and on the edge. And so I think that COVID brought the public's attention and awareness to the work that this group of people were doing. And especially as we were not able to be with our loved ones in hospitals, we

The chaplains did much more staff care. They also did a lot more kind of mediating between people who are hospitalized and those who are not with iPads and phones and other ways to try to help connections. So I think that COVID raised the awareness of chaplaincy and spiritual care in the public understanding.

So the other thing that COVID showed us is that there are different ways we can support one another when we're not physically together. And that really opens a lot of possibilities for the work of spiritual care and chaplaincy in places where that kind of being together isn't possible because of geography or distance or age or any number of things.

So I think it made a difference in public awareness, in the opportunities for different ways of providing spiritual care, and also in chaplains looking to one another for support. Despite the importance of chaplains' work, especially at the end of life, there are existential questions about the chaplaincy.

Even though chaplains are not necessarily Christian, they may still primarily be thought of as aligning with the Christian church, and the number of Christians has been steadily falling since the 1990s. If recent trends persist, less than 50% of the American population will identify as Christian by the year 2070, according to the Pew Research Center. Will this impact how people view chaplains? Dr. Kaj isn't sure.

So it could be that as more traditional forms of religion fade, people are less interested in religious leaders in general and so don't have any interest or kind of cultural familiarity with reaching out or being in contact with the chaplain.

It could alternately be that as fewer people have local religious leaders and they're in a hospital emergency room or in a disaster setting and they're looking for support with life's kind of big questions of meaning and purpose, the only sort of religiously trained person they may have access to is a chaplain. And part of what we're trying to understand is what's actually happening.

And whether the opportunities, the need for chaplains, the places and ways they do their work expands in the future because of a gap left by the declines in traditional religious life, or whether it declines along with traditional religious life is an open question. In the United States, says Dr. Kaj, anyone can become a chaplain, which obviously broadens the professional opportunity to do this work.

In reality, in the United States, we have a free market, an open market for religious identity and practice, and anyone can decide that they're a chaplain. However, some American industries still limit who can be a professional chaplain. And that can be problematic, says Dr. Kaj. You are not currently allowed to work in a federal chaplaincy position. That's in the military, the Veterans Administration, or prisons.

without the endorsement of a religious organization, which is complicated. And so if you don't fit into one of the militaries, 23 or 25, I can't remember, religious groups that they recognize and allow to endorse, it's not possible to become a military chaplain. And that concerns me. It concerns me because...

With 30% of our young people not affiliated, and many of those young people enlisting and going into the military, I worry about them not having a spiritual or existential guide that has experiences similar to theirs. That is not to say that Christian chaplains can't serve the unaffiliated. I'm not saying that at all.

But I think to me, the separation of church and state and protecting free exercise is recognizing that what counts as spiritual or religious or free exercise is broader than perhaps how the founders initially imagined it. And I think that there's a reason to create space for a broader range of chaplains to do that work.

That hasn't been an option, and there's been a lot of political heated debate about that. So that's a place to grow. So what does she see as the future of chaplaincy? Increasingly, chaplains are called spiritual care providers. That term is a bit more open and a bit more accessible.

But we've recently put forward a strategic vision for spiritual care, and it includes really thinking through how to repackage and redescribe and rename the people who do this work.

because the term chaplain opens doors for some, usually those who are Christian or religious in a fairly traditional sense, and it closes doors for others, the growing number of people who are not religiously affiliated, who are not Christian, etc. And I think that the term spiritual is both more broadly understood and more accessible, and I think it speaks to a broader range of questions.

and possibilities than the term religion does as it is traditionally understood or currently understood across the country. No matter what the future holds, chaplains can play a vital role for people going through hardships, says Dr. Kaj. Spiritual wellness is part of human flourishing. And I think part of what those who do the work of chaplaincy and spiritual care are aiming to do is support and promote spiritual wellness.

Chaplains, spiritual care providers are almost always on the edges. Their work by its nature is private and confidential, often out of view. So it's easy to overlook them. And I think they play really important roles in this promotion of spiritual wellness and human flourishing. I think we need to figure out how to think about spiritual wellness and

And how to allow, enable, support a broad range of people, not just those with the category or label or title chaplain, to provide it. Because I think our world is broken and troubled and beautiful. And if there are ways that we can all provide some very basic, gentle, spiritual care to one another, we can start moving in the right direction.

So I'm encouraging chaplains to collaborate widely, to think about how to help their colleagues who are not chaplains do some very basic listening and spiritual care. And I think, you know, as we think about responding to loneliness and visioning forward with hope, we need to think about what the role is of spiritual care and spiritual wellness in that and how to bring that.

those skills and people and attention and questions to some of the most difficult social problems today. What I like to say is that none of this work matters if at the end of the day it's not reducing suffering. And there are places where it's not doing that. And, you know, we can pack up and go home. But we're invested in places where we see potential to reduce suffering. And that's what gets us up in the morning and keeps us doing this work with so many, I mean, thousands and thousands of chaplains across the country and around the world.

We'll be back the first Tuesday of February with a special episode on young adults, polarization, and truth in Northern Ireland. In the meantime, if you enjoy the stories we share with you on the podcast, please follow us, give us a five-star rating, and share this podcast with a friend. And be sure to sign up for the TWCF newsletter at templetonworldcharity.org.

You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org. This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergay and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. Senior producer, Katie Flood. Assistant producer, Oscar Falk. Music by Alexander Felipiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod.

Executive Producer, Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.