Do you need to have certain religious beliefs to provide spiritual support?
Yesterday I listened to a fascinating interview between Sean Illing and Devin Moss. Illing is one of Vox’s patent brand of earnest journalists and took over the main interview show from Ezra Klein when the latter left for the New York Times (which Balaji Srinivasan tells me is like leaving Hamas to join the Khmer Rouge but worse). The show is no longer called The Ezra Klein Show for fairly obvious reasons but is instead called The Gray Area. This name makes me think of aliens (Area 51, Grays) but the Vox/Gray Area coverage of this important field has been erratic.
Rather the show: “takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time.”
I quite like Illing’s work. It is reasonable and thoughtful and nuanced. Although sometimes I don’t want reason and thought and nuance. Then I just fire up Twitter* for a few minutes or maybe read just read YouTube comments to restore my lack of faith in humanity.
Anyway, to get back to the topic at hand, Devin Moss is an atheist humanist chaplain. Moss doesn’t believe in a supernatural god but he did feel called to provide spiritual and emotional support to those in need. He was a chaplain in a hospital and then he worked with an inmate on death row. Listen to the interview - it’s very good.
As their conversation elucidates, a lot of what chaplains do is not really about theology. It’s about being there for people who need someone there for them. It’s about providing rituals that make sense of these powerful parts of our lives (sickness, death) that seem beyond our puny senses of reason. The role of psychopomp is necessary - not just between life and death but across all the thresholds we face.
The humanist chaplain presents challenges to two commonly-held viewpoints.
Firstly, as Illing says: “I’ve really come to be annoyed with a certain kind of atheist that can only approach religion as a set of epistemological claims, as though scanning the Bible for bogus claims about biology or history will amount to some death blow for religion… It’s also important to recognize that religion, at its best, is a near-universal expression of this human need for connection and ritual and meaning and it’s a mistake to not grapple seriously with the implications of that, especially if you’re a non-believer.”
This echoes my own lack of interest in the theological debates that obsess Apologists and Anti-Apologists. The reason most people believe things is not because they have rigorously reviewed the evidence for and against. Most of us simply aren’t equipped to. It’s because those beliefs give us something useful and meaningful. To talk about religion means to talk about behaving and belonging as much as believing. As any nerd will tell you, religio in Latin means “that which binds”. What are the things that bind us together? If nothing else, we share birth and death (as much as some people might be trying to opt out of the latter). We will likely need to create new rituals or adapt existing ones and Public Atheists and Agnostics need to acknowledge that.
The second viewpoint to be challenged is that of the advocate of established religion. Such a person will often say that those who are not religious lack these key rituals and guides. They may even go further and say that all non-believers are immoral. Which I think gets things exactly ass-backwards. Human beings seem hard-wired to create moralities and make rituals. It’s kinda what we do. We make this stuff up all the time.
Religion is not theology just as a cake is not the icing.
There is a phrase that gets bandied about: “Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR). I think the idea here is that such a person is interested in the world beyond the quotidian but does not adhere to an established theology.
I suspect that I am the opposite: “Religious But Not Spiritual”. I’m not particularly interested in the supernatural or the ineffable (I can’t be effed). And I’m not convinced by the theological claims of organized religions. But I still respect the religio - the ties that bind us together, whatever form or fabric they may take.
Returning to the world of those who seek a pastoral vocation outside the framework of organized religion, I came across the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University and their Advisory Group on Spiritual Care Networks for Unaffiliated Chaplains (note the last four letters of the URL) - which has a couple of interesting articles - one formal and one less so.
“Chaplaincy is so not about us as chaplains, right? It’s about being able to be present with people, and what they need, and what their own worldview is… I had a patient who grabbed my hand and said, ‘Oh, Jesus is so good. He’s so good. Jesus saves all of us.’ And I just said, ‘Jesus is so good to you. You just really put all of your faith in Jesus.’ You know what I mean? I don’t have a place in that conversation. My own worldview, my own beliefs, doesn’t have a place.”
What comes through in the research is that there is role for “unaffiliated” people to play in settings that require pastoral care - but there is a general lack of systems in place to develop and support these people. The route into chaplaincy is typically through some kind of the religious education (e.g. Divinity** School) which is a poor fit for those who do not profess that religion. Although organized religion is a much less powerful force here than in the US, this is also true in Australia. “[The Humanist Society of Victoria] discovered that most local hospitals are unwilling to take on secular spiritual carers. This is the case even where secular spiritual carers restricted their care to non-religious patients. These hospitals required that, paradoxically, secular spiritual carers complete a unit of theologically-informed Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).”
N.B. I do suspect that different flavours of non-religion may present different chaplaincy approaches. Humanists tend to have a fundamentally optimistic and universal view of human nature which makes them well-suited to this kind of work. I’m not sure if a Nihilist chaplain would be a great idea: “Nothing matters. Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory. Have you had your medication today?” An Objectivist probably wouldn’t become a chaplain in the first place as the selflessness required would go against their beliefs. Although an Absurdist chaplain might work. Moss’s own use of dad jokes indicates a path forward for such a position.
Overall, I think we should be allowing people who want to to help others and provide them with the care that they need. Even we heretics and unbelievers need guides for the crossing of thresholds and the living through of hard times. And I commend the likes of Devin Moss in seeking that vocation.
But where can I get training to be a Primaris Chaplain?
*Still not calling it X.
**Which, to my profound disappointment, has nothing to do with Divine - although that would deffo make for a challenging curriculum.
I think I have a very similar mindset. I like to say that Religion is less of a theology and more of a psychology. Atheists are often the most religious people I've met, they just don't know which faith they follow. I wrote about some of that here:
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/religion-as-a-psychology