Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century

An Introduction

Wendy Cadge, Shelly Rambo, Wendy Cadge, Shelly Rambo

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781469667614
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo demonstrate the urgent need, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to position the long history and practice of chaplaincy within the rapidly changing landscape of American religion and spirituality. This book provides a much-needed road map for training and renewing chaplains across a professional continuum that spans major sectors of American society, including hospitals, prisons, universities, the military, and nursing homes. Written by a team of multidisciplinary experts and drawing on ongoing research at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century identifies three central competencies—individual, organizational, and meaning-making—that all chaplains must have, and it provides the resources for building those skills. Featuring profiles of working chaplains, the book positions intersectional issues of religious diversity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity as central to the future of chaplaincy as a profession.

PART ONE

Background and Context

CHAPTER ONE

Chaplaincy in the United States: A Short History

RONIT Y. STAHL

ABSTRACT This chapter offers a concise overview of the history of chaplaincy and spiritual care in the United States. I consider this history in light of the American separation of religion and state and of the settings—the military, federal prisons, and the Veterans Administration—where chaplains are required. I also explore places like higher education, healthcare, ports and airports, and community contexts where chaplaincy has been present but optional. I show growing diversity in who serves as chaplains and the settings where they work as well as how the profession remains young and in transition.

INTRODUCTION

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in earnest in March 2020, AdventistHealth chaplain Ney Ramirez—like other hospital chaplains across the country—redefined the scope of his work. Rather than stepping into hospital rooms with patients and meeting families face-to-face, he supported patients and hospital staff at a distance.¹ Months later, and only three days into her new job as the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, Retired Rear Admiral Margaret G. Kibben comforted legislators when supporters of then president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol. Drawing on her combat experience, she engaged in a “ministry of walking,” circulating among lawmakers to comfort, pray, and reduce stress. Days later, she described how that situation “confirms why there is a chaplain here in the House and why that’s so important. It’s not related to a particular faith tradition, it’s that there is somebody here who comes alongside in this moment.”²

While the specifics vary, chaplains have long played these roles in settings across the United States. One hundred years ago in Newport News, Virginia, a chaplain was engaged in “waging a noble warfare”—according to a sailors’ magazine—against “the vampires of the waterfront,” or the crimps who took advantage of sailors by ensnaring them, through liquor, gambling debt, ladies, violence, and even kidnapping.³ Port chaplains established inns where seafarers could stay in port and fostered community apart from alcohol and gambling. On college campuses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, university chaplains tried to instill morals in students, often assuaging the concerns of parents that institutions of higher education lacked religion and, without that religion, were devoid of morality.⁴

This chapter offers a short synthetic history of chaplaincy and spiritual care in the United States. Serving in hospitals and prisons, ports and universities, chaplains have long histories—often at the margins of institutions, where they are frequently overlooked. I briefly summarize that history in the context of the American separation of religion and state and in the settings—the military, federal prisons, and the Veterans Administration—where chaplains are required today. I also consider the Christian origin of the concept and ways it has—and has not—been adapted by and for people from other religious backgrounds, including none. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan calls chaplains “ministers without portfolios” who are “strangely necessary … religiously and legally speaking, in negotiating the public life of religion today.”⁵ I explore how clergy came to these roles and offer important historical context for those working and considering working in chaplaincy and spiritual care today.

EARLY YEARS, WELL-ESTABLISHED SETTINGS

“There can be no doubt that the practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer has become part of the fabric of our society,” wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1983. “To invoke divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws is not, in these circumstances, a violation of the Establishment Clause; it is simply a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.”⁶ As Burger indicated in this Supreme Court decision about legislative prayer, congressional chaplains had existed since the founding of the American republic.

VOICES FROM THE FIELD

The Chaplain Keeps Prayer in the House

Rear Admiral Margaret Grun Kibben is the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives as of January 3, 2021. Photo credit: Laura Hatcher Photography.

Early in our country’s establishment, on September 7, 1774, the Continental Congress began with a prayer offered by a local Episcopal rector from Philadelphia. On May 1, 1789, in one of its first acts, the House elected the Reverend William Linn as the official chaplain of the House. Since Reverend Linn’s appointment, for over two hundred years the House chaplain has continued the tradition of opening each day’s proceedings with a prayer.

This honor is one of several official duties, which can be identified as prayer, presence, and service. In addition to participating at the legislative sessions, the chaplain offers prayers at official congressional functions and many events occurring on and off Capitol Hill. The chaplain is intentionally present and accessible to members and staff for pastoral care and for support in meeting religiously based congressional staff needs and in times of crisis, sickness, or celebration. The chaplain can often be found on the House floor, in committee hearings, and in the hallways, coming alongside members and staff to provide encouragement and counsel, without discrimination based on party, policy, or religious affiliation. The chaplain’s office serves members and staff by providing prayer opportunities; assisting in the observation of religious holidays; facilitating memorial services, wedding planning, baptisms, and other significant milestones; offering talks on religious topics; and sharing information on local religious services.

When the Continental Congress opened its sessions in 1774, Rev. Jacob Duché, rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, provided opening prayers. Not all delegates to the First Continental Congress (or all religious leaders in the early United States) supported these prayers. Indeed, a number of deists, Quakers, and evangelicals debated whether legislative prayer represented what Burger characterized as a “tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held.”⁷ John Jay objected to choosing a minister on the grounds that it would demonstrate preferential treatment for one (Protestant) denomination over others.⁸ After the Constitutional Convention and the adoption of the First Amendment, with its provisions to prohibit the establishment of religion but enable free exercise, John Leland, a Baptist minister and strong advocate of religious liberty, fretted about the “unconstitutional … and unnecessary … paying of the chaplains of the civil and military departments out of the public treasury.”⁹

Nevertheless, two kinds of government chaplaincies emerged in the early republic: legislative and military. While congressional chaplains ministered to lawmakers, the chaplains who served in the American Revolution tended to a broader flock—the wide variety of men who took up arms against the British on behalf of the new nation. What united both was the new federal government that hired and employed clergy. Since then, legislative chaplains have almost always been Protestant Christians, though “guest chaplains” have offered invocations and prayers based on other religious traditions.¹⁰ In contrast, the military chaplaincy expanded to include Catholics by the mid-nineteenth century and formally opened to Jewish, Latter-day Saint, Christian Science, and Eastern Orthodox clergy in World War I.

During this period, prior to the U.S. entrance into the Great War, the military chaplaincy professionalized, creating new educational and ordination requirements for chaplains and altering their roles to exclude auxiliary tasks like managing post libraries, operating commissaries, and delivering mail. Instead, chaplains were religious officers who led worship or coordinated services for personnel of other religious traditions, buried the dead, and provided pastoral care, which ranged from counseling and “sexual morality” lectures to leading Bible studies and communicating with families. As the title of one internal military history suggests, military chaplains moved “up from handymen.” As educated professionals with graduate degrees, chaplains were, the military perceived, capable of ministering to everyone, from non-English-speaking enlisted men to four-star generals. The efforts of a multi-faith World War I chaplaincy cemented the tri-faith nomenclature of “Protestant, Catholic, Jew” within the military and portended greater religious cooperation—and, also, competition. By World War II, the military chaplaincy encompassed both mainline and evangelical Protestants as well as Catholics and Jews, while Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist chaplains entered the Chaplain Corps in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹¹

Other kinds of chaplaincies, or proto-chaplaincies, arose in the early republic as well. Two other spaces—the prison and the seaport—drew the attention of religious leaders who were intent on moral and spiritual reform. In developing penitentiaries in the early United States, an array of Protestants, from “strict Calvinists [to] liberal Quakers … earnestly debated the meaning of a true Christian and republican penal practice.”¹² Whether focused on city jails or state prisons, and whether assessing these new institutions from the vantage point of a government official or a member of clergy, “reformative incarceration” seemed to require religious leadership. Quakers supported and managed some early prisons like Newgate in Greenwich Village, New York. While their pacifist commitments led to clashes with “state officials concerned with prison order and profit,” their departure from the premises led to the “hir[ing of] the nation’s first prison chaplain in an effort to secure the right sort of religion within prison walls.” The new Baptist chaplain articulated a “prison religion of suffering and redemption,” which not only justified the reintroduction of corporal punishment but also created a model of prison ministry centered on redemption through conversion.¹³

By the late nineteenth century, religion continued to suffuse carceral institutions, with prison chaplains collaborating with prison wardens in prison operations. In 1870, Reverend E. C. Wines drafted the “Declaration of Principles” for the American Prison Association, declaring “religion is of first importance.” About fifteen years later, he helped form the American Correctional Chaplains Association to further cement the role of chaplains within the prison infrastructure.¹⁴ In this period, prison chaplains not only led services, preached sermons, and visited prisoners but also maintained libraries, taught in schools, and wrote reports for state authorities.¹⁵ At the same time and perhaps because of these varied duties, prison chaplains appeared—much like military chaplains operating in the liminal space between service personnel and their commanding officers—to “ostensibly occup[y] a position between offenders and their custodians.” Yet by the twentieth century, prison chaplains became “religious representative[s] in a secularized institution of professionals” and, as a result, needed to legitimize their presence by asserting their value to the institution, rather than to the prisoner congregant.¹⁶

During the same period of antebellum moral reform, numerous Protestants along the Eastern Seaboard attempted to “improve the social and moral condition of Seamen” as part of a broader effort to shield seafarers from alcohol, gambling, sex workers, and other vices prevalent along the docks.¹⁷ These voluntary efforts by religious organizations often relied on preachers and other ministers who, formally or informally, viewed themselves as port chaplains who served a transient population and, perhaps, kept them out of prisons. Organizations like the Young Men’s Church and Missionary Society fashioned churches out of barges from which chaplains could regularly preach and provide outreach—often by offering a conglomeration of services that addressed seamen’s needs for post offices, banks, storage facilities, lodging, and funeral homes.¹⁸

In higher education, chaplaincy emerged from the religious origins of some institutions and as an outgrowth of campus religious organizations at others. The first colleges and universities in the United States were religious institutions, with mandatory chapel attendance and religious study often embedded in the daily life and curriculum. As early as 1750, Yale College held an annual day of prayer.¹⁹ Chaplaincy as a distinct mode of campus ministry emerged in the nineteenth century, alongside the growth of public universities. In 1890, University of Michigan president James B. Angell penned a statement to “allay concerns of nervous parents who conceived of public universities and agricultural colleges as ‘godless institutions.’”²⁰

By the early twentieth century, a variety of Protestant programs, ranging from the nondenominational YMCA to denominational groups like the Baptist Student Union, as well as the Catholic Newman Center and the Jewish Hillel program, began establishing their presence on college campuses. These groups arose in ta...