Innovations in Spiritual Care
A conversation with Dr. Wendy Cadge and Dr. Michael Skaggs
We usually think of innovation as technological, having to do with new tools, new platforms, new efficiencies. But some of the most consequential innovations today are happening far from Silicon Valley, in places where the work cannot be automated, optimized, or scaled.
One such area that we typically don’t associate with innovation is spiritual care. As traditional religious institutions in the West wane and congregations close, people have not stopped grappling with questions of meaning, purpose, grief, and belonging. What has changed is where they may encounter someone willing and able to accompany them through those questions. Increasingly, that person is not a local clergy member but a chaplain—a spiritual care provider they might meet in a hospital, a university, the military, a workplace, a port, or a community organization.
Chaplains aren’t new, but the social infrastructure that once supported this kind of care is being reorganized, and we need to understand how. This is why in the latest episode of Beauty at Work, I spoke with Dr. Wendy Cadge and Dr. Michael Skaggs to learn from their research.
Wendy Cadge is President of Bryn Mawr College. She’s a nationally renowned sociologist of religion and spirituality and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, which brings together chaplains, educators and social scientists into conversation around the work of spiritual care. She has published widely on religion and public institutions, religious diversity and spiritual care.
Michael Skaggs is Director of Programs and the Co-Founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, where he oversees education, professional development and networking initiatives and hosts the lab’s public-facing work. Trained as a historian of American religion at the University of Notre Dame, Michael has written on interfaith dialog, maritime ministry and American Catholicism.
Their work starts from a simple but often overlooked insight: chaplains are frequently the only people who pause, listen, and recognize the dignity of those most of us pass by, such as people who are alone, unhoused, grieving, or living at the margins of institutions.
The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab treats the field of spiritual care as a big tent and examines both legacy models (e.g., in healthcare and the military) and emerging ones (in community organizations, first responder programs, and workplaces). Innovation here is not disruption for its own sake, but learning: Where is spiritual care already happening? Where could it happen? And what kinds of organizational and financial models might sustain it?
One of the most striking findings from their research is how poorly public perceptions of chaplains align with what chaplains actually do. Many people still imagine chaplains as “religious with a capital R,” when in practice chaplains describe their work much more broadly—as accompaniment around meaning, no matter where that meaning comes from. Survey data bears this out: chaplains serve across demographic lines, in ways that don’t map neatly onto conventional religious categories.
My guests argue that instead of asking whether there is “demand for chaplains,” we should ask whether there is opportunity for the work they do. People may not know to ask for a chaplain, but they know they are lonely, disoriented, or facing life transitions they didn’t expect. Chaplains already have the skills to address the loneliness epidemic; the challenge is building frameworks that connect those skills to public need.
Innovation here may require talking about the same work in multiple idioms, depending on whether people come from religious backgrounds or not. It may require embedding chaplains where people already are, rather than expecting them to seek spiritual care out. And it requires taking seriously the burden of innovation: the difficulty of making this work intelligible and sustainable without reducing it to something it is not. Such work is vital for understanding the spiritual infrastructure of the future.
Chaplains work with people who believe beauty is no longer possible in their lives. By witnessing vulnerability and staying present through loss, they can sometimes help people rediscover meaning where it seemed unimaginable.
You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), or watch the video of our full conversation or read an unedited transcript below.
Brandon: All right. Wendy and Michael, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Great to have you here.
Wendy: Good to be here.
Michael: Thank you for having us, Brandon.
Brandon: Sure. Well, I’m excited to learn more about your work and share it with our listeners and viewers. But before that, could you share a story of beauty, of an encounter with beauty, that you’ve had, maybe from your childhoods or your teenage years—something that comes to mind, something that lingers for you? Maybe, Wendy, we’ll start with you.
Wendy: When I think about beauty, I think about being outside. I think about looking at the sky as a child, following stars and being curious about thunderstorms and clouds coming in down the street. I feel like that has continued now, where if you asked me about a moment of beauty yesterday, I would go to the same kind of motifs that’s been really important to me.
Brandon: Wow, fantastic. Michael, do you have something that strikes you?
Michael: Well, it’s hard to compete with nature.
Brandon: Yeah.
Michael: But, you know, I find myself really touched by those small moments of human interaction that don’t take very much time, maybe even didn’t take very much thought, but they get at the heart of what it means to connect with someone. I was reaching over just now because I have this little stone that says “peace.” I had a colleague who was going through kind of a hard time, and I had sent a message of support. He mailed me this stone that says ‘peace’ in the mail and said, “That was the right thing at the right time, and I really appreciated that.” And so just to have this, you know, it’s a rock, but it means a lot. I have it in view all day. I think those kinds of moments of interaction are quite beautiful.
Brandon: Wow. Thank you. I wonder if in some way, that encounter with the stars, and even the recognition of the beauty of our human relationships, has shaped your social scientific vocations. Would you see a connection there between this sort of what has moved you, what you found beautiful, and then the research you do?
Wendy: I don’t want to speak for Michael, but I think for me, an awareness of that which is ineffable and that which is most meaningful to me, to us, to people in general, has certainly shaped the kinds of questions I’ve asked as a scholar and the ways that I have worked, thankfully, with Michael, to try to apply that in the world, both in the classroom—but I think we’re going to talk today mostly about the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab—so in the work that others do to support those very questions in a day to day.
Michael: You know, I’m a historian by training. I’m used to digging around in dusty archives, and I always love those little moments of awe when you come across something very vulnerable in correspondence, or a difficult decision that had to be taken, or some tragedy that somebody made note of, or whatever. These are things that most people will never see. And I feel sort of honored that I am able to come across these things in a lot of ways that has shaped my outlook and work as a historian, in that it’s those kinds of very human things that interest me. I’m not quite so concerned with large movements, impersonal institutions. But the day-to-day lives of real people, I like to think of it, is what has really shaped my academic outlook.
Brandon: Wonderful. Thank you. Well, let’s talk about the research you all have been doing with the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab. That’s really such a remarkable entity. I’d love to hear a little bit about the origins, what generated this project. Perhaps, Wendy, could you say a little bit about why chaplains? Who are chaplains? For our listeners and viewers who are not familiar, who are chaplains? What does innovation mean in this domain?
Wendy: So we think about chaplains and spiritual care providers as religious professionals that work outside of institutions to support people in questions around meaning and purpose. I came to learn about chaplaincy through a research project about spirituality and religion in hospitals, and I learned about the work of hospital chaplains. And I knew, while I was doing that, that there were chaplains in many other settings—in universities, in airports, in ports and businesses. It was those questions, that actually is how I met Michael. I think a lot of the birth of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab emerges very much from the questions that you were asking—about seeing the unseen and seeing in that ways to support. Because Michael and I actually met through unrelated work about port chaplaincy, that most people have never heard of. The work that poor chaplains do—Michael can say better than I—is with those that many of us never see.
Michael: There’s such an element here of chaplains being some of the only, and in some cases, the only people that are able to witness and see the basic human dignity of many people who are experiencing really difficult circumstances. That can be someone who is alone in a healthcare institution. It can be people that are working in shipping, like Wendy mentioned, which almost none of us ever think about. It can be people, like, you will see those who are unhoused on your drive to work. You might physically see them and think, “Well, that’s a shame.” But in many cases, chaplains are the only ones that are going to talk to these people and say, “How are things going? What can I do for you?” Very basic things, basic interactions, that most of us get to enjoy on a regular basis, on a daily basis. Chaplains go out to the margins, and they find the people that don’t have those moments, and in that way, really recognize the humanity of those that most of us ignore.
Wendy: The innovation piece, I think, came because the research that I had done, the work that Michael was doing, with port chaplaincy, there’s a traditional, perhaps, legacy model of chaplains in the military, in healthcare. There are also a lot of people doing this work today in creative and unusual places.
In launching the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab in 2018, what we aimed to do was gather chaplains, as well as social scientists and theological educators, to think about all of the ways—the more traditional or legacy ways, and the newer, more creative or innovative ways—that this work is happening. We picked the Chaplains Innovation Lab title with our colleague Trace Haythorne because we wanted to signal the breadth of our scope and the creativity or a part of what we wanted to ask which was about: where is spiritual care today? Where could it be? Where is it emerging? What’s happening that’s creative, new, different? What are the models, including the business models, that could or will support this work, which is really about religious leadership going forward?
Brandon: Great. Thank you. Well, tell us, what have you learned in your work and maybe what surprised you about either the nature of the work that chaplains are doing or about the kinds of innovations that are happening? What’s new and emerging that you found?
Wendy: I think when we started, we didn’t know all the places that chaplains were or are. Some weeks, every week, you learn about something new. So the breadth of the work, I think, continues to surprise—both the similarities and the differences across all of those who do the work. This is not a clean, cut and dry field. It has very blurry boundaries. That’s a strength and a weakness, and some days, a surprise. Michael, what would you say?
Michael: It is a strength and a weakness. In some sense, I think when we launched the lab, I had this thought process of, how are we going to make sense of all of this? Because it is so messy and tangled, how are we going to make sense of this? A few months in, I thought, well, that’s the wrong question, because we can’t make sense. There are people who are calling themselves chaplains, doing this kind of work in many, many, many different ways. Some of them are highly credentialed in classroom education and clinical education. Other people, this is their second or third career. Other people, they are doing this in their free time. There are many paths to this kind of work. There are many people who are able to do this kind of work, and a lot of folks who need this kind of work.
And so what I really love about the lab is our ability to welcome all of those people and say, “We don’t have a lot of expectation of what you must be to be a chaplain. You need to be basically a decent human being and treat others with the same dignity. And if that’s what spiritual care means to you, then that’s great.” So not so much trying to define the field as I think we have sort of a spotlight and a megaphone to say, look where interesting work is being done. And in many cases, when other people see that, they’ll say, “That’s interesting to me, too,” and then you start to build a critical mass and all these really interesting.
Wendy: And when we were setting this up, Michael and I were really thoughtful about what our kind of statement of principles would be, what the boxes are that we’re asking people to check, to be engaged. They were very much about what Michael just said, kind of a commitment to others and some basic human dignity.
Then we were launching a big tent, and we were trying to bring into conversation a lot of people who were not in conversation. We’ve done—gosh, I don’t know, Michael—20, 30 research projects on a whole range of different topics. Our whole reason for being is to understand, do communicate, some of the best research about what’s happening in spiritual and religious life, moral life, around questions of meaning and purpose broadly—but then to translate it as best we can into practical applications. And it’s not because we have the answer to the question about life’s meaning. It’s because I think we both believe in the real applied value of good social scientific and historical research, and that we do that research to learn, but we do it always with an eye towards the application.
One of the things that I think is unique about the lab is that I was working on a book about these topics when I met Michael, but the book didn’t come out for several years later, because I tend not to be very patient. And so while some people like to write the book and then do the application, I think we both saw the need right away that there were a lot of people doing this work. They weren’t talking to each other. They, in fact, didn’t even know each other. And so we launched the lab as an experiment to see if people wanted to come together and be in conversation and learn from one another.
Then we have done any number of research projects where we’re looking at various groups of chaplains, training. We’re just finishing up a big project that looks at what we call the demand or a need for chaplaincy. A lot of this conversation focuses on the chaplains. We have tried to churn the lens to ask about those that chaplains serve, because that’s actually the goal. And so we learned in that the fraction of Americans that have contact with chaplains, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel like, in every research project, we learn something new. And we try to translate. So on our website, now we have case studies that could be used for teaching about how people think about chaplains. We have all different kinds of tools, most of which are freely available to anyone who wants them, that we hope will help to inform the work and inform all of our ways that we wrestle through this life.
Brandon: Okay. Well, thank you. Just turning to the sort of beauty angle, what is drawing somebody to be a chaplain? What do they find attractive about it? What moves them to commit their time, their energy and their lives in this direction? Do you find any patterns or any types? What stands out to you there?
Wendy: Do you want to try, Michael?
Michael: There are as many answers to that question as there are chaplains, you know. I think one of the most laudable goals of many chaplains is having grown up in some sort of environment where they either did not receive the care that they are now giving, or it wasn’t being given to other people—whether it’s from a religious tradition or an institution or whatever—a real recognition that, hey, people have needs here and they’re going unmet. Or they’re being sidelined, they’re being marginalized, and being a chaplain is a way of addressing a lot of those needs.
I think chaplaincy is sort of — it’s the perfect occupation or vocation, however you want to think of it, for empaths. And so when you talk with chaplains, for very many of them, it doesn’t take very long until you realize they’re sort of chaplaining you in your conversation, even though you’re talking about a conference or something like that. That’s just the natural mode that they slip into and have a real talent for.
Brandon: In terms of the need or demand for chaplaincy, how do you see that shifting? I mean, there are a lot of people who have talked about just outgrowing loneliness crisis and so on. Do you see an increased demand? Do you see challenges coming from the realm of AI in terms of replacing this form of ‘connective labor,’ as Alison Pugh puts it? What are you seeing there?
Wendy: Those are great questions. Part of the way we have thought about chaplaincy is about religious leadership in the future. And so as the religious landscape is shifting, and in some regions, congregations are closing, we have asked questions about: if an individual is going to meet a religious professional, who is that person going to be? And in many cases, it’s more likely to be a chaplain than a local clergy person, because they don’t have a local clergy person. But they might meet a chaplain in the hospital, in the military, when they drop children off in college, et cetera, et cetera. And so part of the question about demand is a question about where one might encounter these people.
Our more recent research suggests some pretty big gaps in how chaplains think about their work and how members of the public think about their work, where members of the public tend to think about chaplains as being Religious with a capital R, whereas chaplains tend to describe their work in a much broader kind of conversation about meaning—no matter where that meaning comes from, whether it’s in nature or from a religious tradition. So we’re seeing some gaps in perception and thinking about the work of spiritual care. We’re doing some work now thinking about business models and where and how to encounter. So we’ve shifted the question from demand, because it’s not clear to me that there’s a lot of demand for chaplains per se. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the work they do.
We have thought a lot also about the loneliness epidemic, about the fact that there are chaplains spread across this country in urban and rural areas who have the exact skills to help address that epidemic. But those connections have not necessarily been made. And so we’re trying to think about the kinds of frameworks, business models, et cetera, that might facilitate and support making those connections in the future. That’s the innovation part. Not that we have the answer, but we see, in community chaplaincy, we see in some first responder chaplaincy, some in some workplaces, possibilities.
We wrote a kind of vision statement for the future of chaplaincy and spiritual care, in which we think about the audiences or the clients—pick your words—in two ways. It seems like, in the United States right now, there are a set of people for whom the word ‘chaplain’ is familiar. They tend to be people who have experience in more traditional or legacy religious organizations. There’s interest and demand or need or opportunity there. But there’s another growing set of people for whom the word chaplain sounds Christian or unfamiliar because they didn’t grow up in religious contexts, and for whom that frame is never going to be attractive. And so we’ve been thinking—Trace Haythorne and others who are working on a project—about what it looks like to think about this work perhaps in a couple of different languages. Because the people perhaps who could benefit from it will only hear it if it’s in a language that’s familiar to them. Michael, do I have it right? You’ve been closer to this of life than me.
Michael: Well, I think that is absolutely correct. There’s also a line of reasoning that one can follow. It’s very superficial. But the line of reasoning goes like, well, if rates of formal religious affiliation are cratering, what need is there for chaplaincy? Because people have determined they don’t need religion, therefore, why would they need a religious person anywhere in their lives? This comes back to what Wendy was saying about pigeonholing chaplains in this ‘capital R’ Religious leadership framework.
One of the few things that the lab says without hesitation and very strongly is that religion is not spirituality automatically. One does not stop having spiritual needs because they aren’t religious, whatever that might mean or claim some sort of formal religious affiliation. And so, in that sense, as rates of formal affiliation decline, this is exactly where the chaplains are positioned to step in. Because people are not stopping having all the situations Wendy mentioned—changes in family, there’s death and there’s dying, major life changes they didn’t expect, all that kind of thing. These are things that speak to much deeper needs than something like just—I shouldn’t say just—a therapist would speak to or something like that. There are real issues of the human spirit that everyone has, and this is where chaplains are positioned to do the hard work.
Wendy: Interestingly, the data show that. Our colleague Amy Lawton, Michael, and I worked with Gallup to do a national survey of the American public to see who had had contact with a chaplain. And when we put our social science hats on and run the regression models, the findings are actually surprising. Because while we would expect perhaps women, perhaps people of color, who tend to be perhaps more religious, to have more contact with chaplains, the analyses actually show that there are very few predictors of who has contact with chaplains. So the traditional demographic variables you would expect don’t hold up, which supports very much empirically that chaplains do serve everyone. That was an interesting, perhaps not surprising because we had heard the story, but empirically, for those of us who study American religion, a surprising finding about what’s happening on the ground.
Brandon: Are there any sort of innovative models of chaplaincy, whether it’s delivery models that you’re finding or models that maybe you think ought to be diffusing more widely and are facing some challenges?
Wendy: There’s a lot out there. It’s a pretty unsettled field. So a number of groups have attempted a version of 1-800 dial a chaplain. That’s an interesting model. I’m not aware of a lot of successes in part because you have to figure out who’s willing to pay for 1-800 dial a chaplain. There have been some successes in community chaplaincy for particular groups in particular regions. We ran a grant innovation program, actually—Michael, do you want to talk about that—where the whole point was to introduce chaplains in new possible settings.
Michael: Yeah, we had support from (the Henry Luce Foundation. No, it was the Revson Family Foundation. Sorry I misspoke) the Revson Family Foundation to invite organizations to apply for funding, to support a chaplain that they didn’t already have in the organization. And so this included things like Jewish community foundations, Jewish community organizations. We had one for an addiction services organization in Wisconsin. We had one that was dedicated to visiting older adults who are living alone, that kind of thing.
On the surface, that seems very old school, right? You have these institutions that have existed for a long time that are already connecting with people. But to simply embed a chaplain in that work and have chaplains available to come alongside the people that those organizations were already serving, it really brought to light the fact that there is a spiritual component to all of these things that people are experiencing. And so having someone there who is able to address some of those issues, it’s good on its own on the surface. It cuts out a couple of steps that people are going to have to make to go find that kind of assistance somewhere else. And so doing something as simple as making sure an institution can put a chaplain where the people already are is enormously effective.
Brandon: Where are you seeing areas of resistance, perhaps? For instance, are hospitals generally cognizant of the value of chaplains for the therapeutic mission of the health institution, or even with companies? Are there other domains where you’re seeing maybe that there is a need, but there are some sort of obstacle where it’s not seen as legitimate, perhaps?
Michael: You know, I think the answer to that turns a lot on how much people identify chaplains with historically Christian religious leaders. Here’s why I say that. That can go either way. So there are plenty of companies in the country that either contract out for chaplains or hire chaplains specifically to come in and be Christian religious leaders—to do Bible study, to primarily offer prayer for employees who are struggling, or whatever the case may be. They have chosen to do that.
On the flip side, there are many companies—and this gets back to where is this happening. So we’re talking about the corporate sphere—many companies who believe that chaplains are primarily Christian religious leaders and say, “There’s no way you’re ever going to cross our threshold, because that’s not appropriate. That’s not what our employees need.” And of course, the counter to that is, well, that’s not what every chaplain does. And your employees don’t leave their spiritual needs at the door when they clock in, right? They’re going to keep thinking about the parent who’s dying, or the child who’s in trouble, or whatever. So really, the matter of perception of the chaplain is kind of the overriding part, and then how that plays out in institutions varies from place to place.
(outro)
Brandon: All right, everyone, that is a great place to stop the first half of our conversation. Join us next time as Wendy and Michael help us think about the future—what they call the spiritual infrastructure that we will need for the next generation—as well as the burdens that chaplains face as they try to innovate and what role technology, including AI, may play in supporting or hindering spiritual care.
PART TWO
(intro)
Brandon: I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.
Hey, everyone. This is the second half of my interview with Wendy Cadge and Michael Skaggs. Please check out the first half if you haven’t already.
In this part of our conversation, we talk about their new project on the spiritual infrastructure of the future. We look at how shifting demographics and congregational closures are reshaping where people find meaning and care, and what it will take to build innovative systems that are inclusive, accessible and sustainable. We also discussed the burdens of innovation and spiritual care—from financial constraints to institutional inertia—and why, even with new technologies like AI, nothing can quite replace the beauty of human connection.
Let’s get started.
(interview)
Brandon: Would you be able to also comment on perhaps where you might see the greatest need for innovation in this field? What is the sort of biggest burning problem where innovation is needed?
Wendy: I think there are two big burning problems. The first is that the public doesn’t have a clear sense of what chaplaincy or spiritual care is, and even in the survey data—where people who have had contact are quite satisfied with their engagement with chaplains in spiritual care—the field, the people who do the work, don’t have a collective sense of who they are and what they do that is well understood by the American public. That’s problem one.
And problem two, what’s called an opportunity, is the business models. So legacy chaplaincy is offered through organizations. So if you’re in the military, you can find a chaplain. It’s actually a federal requirement. Certain healthcare organizations are required by The Joint Commission, the regulatory bodies, to ensure that spiritual care is available, often provided by a chaplain. If you are not in a hospital or in the military, and you think this might be helpful, there is no obvious place to go and find said person.
And so the work that Trace has been doing, with a number of of colleagues, including Amy, has been to think about or to try to figure out: Is there a single understanding that could be used to help this field grow and have a common core that could be communicated, and then what are the business models to enable this? And if they’re only through organizations, that’s limiting. If they were only individual, that would be limiting too. But right now, there’s not a dollars and cents model that makes that work. You can think about subscription models.
So I think those are the two biggest challenges/opportunities. And I think one of the important questions is whether the people who help to answer those questions are called chaplains, or if they’re just doing the work. I, personally, from what we have learned, especially in recent years, think we need to prioritize the work over the label. But then, do you need a new label or a new framework? Yes, probably. But then now we’re many steps down the road. So I think business model and sense of what the work is and how to share, communicate, market it are the two most important questions for this field.
Brandon: Michael, would you agree, or would you have other priorities that you think are important?
Michael: The one thing that I see on a on a daily basis in the lab is a question of religious demographics. And here’s what I mean by that. On the one hand, very well-trained and educated chaplains will and do serve anyone and everyone. They are prepared to do that across a wide range of religious literacy, non-spiritual identification, or whatever the case may be. On the other hand, you very well may want a chaplain from your religious tradition. This becomes an issue if you are from a statistically minority faith tradition in the United States. And it’s a problem, especially for those traditions that may not have sort of a clear-cut concept of chaplaincy like some of the other traditions.
This becomes an issue because you will have people out of those traditions that feel called to this work. Even if they don’t want to call themselves chaplains, they might want to use another term. But it can be extraordinarily difficult for them to find educational opportunities to actually learn how to be a chaplain, because so many of our institutions of education and clinical training remain very historically Christian. And so that can be a real problem for the people who are trying to get into the field.
And so why do I hear about this every day in the lab? It’s because we’re trying to identify those opportunities and help funnel people towards the places that are going to nourish those parts of themselves, which are very important, so that they can now do the work of spiritual care even if their tradition doesn’t have a clear conception.
Brandon: I wonder. I mean, are issues of legal concerns around training and credentialing and liabilities an issue in these cases? Where if there is a body that can accredit chaplains, then perhaps certain institutions are more comfortable with that. But if it is like a minority tradition where there is no institution that can credential a chaplain and provide a kind of standardized training, they might be suspicious. Is that sort of thing a concern? Does that come up?
Michael: It’s definitely a concern. I have two examples of that. One, we will hear fairly often, “Well, why doesn’t the lab just push there to be a legal definition of a chaplain so that the state will license chaplains, just like they license medical providers or whatever else?” I’m not speaking for the lab, but myself. I think that’s a terrible idea, because that definition is going to be open to interpretation and revision until the end of time.
On the other hand, even among organizations that are willing to host or employ chaplains or whatever, if leadership in those organizations doesn’t quite understand the nuances of who becomes a chaplain, you’ll end up with a situation where maybe there’s a leadership job opening in a healthcare system, and they’ll say this person must be board certified. They must have X number of units of Clinical Pastoral Education, and they must be an ordained religious leader. Well, that cuts out everybody whose tradition doesn’t ordain, or maybe they are from a tradition who doesn’t ordain them in particular. And so there are some misconceptions about that that are still about. It’s a very long-term process to go about addressing them. And it is an opportunity for education with some of those institutions to say, “Hey, you’re missing some of the picture here. Maybe let’s think about this in a larger frame.”
Wendy: My worry is that so much airspace and ink has been spilled thinking about those questions, Brandon. They’re all what we call demand-side questions. They’re all about who are the right people to do the job. But if the people who are being served don’t even know what the job is, I don’t think they’re the right strategic questions. Because we can move letters around all we want, but if nobody knows why they would call the person with the letters after their names, who cares?
So as we have learned more about what we call the demand side, or just the experiences of the American public, I think the questions you ask are very important. But I think that they are secondary questions to asking if anybody knows who a chaplain is and how to find one, and who’s going to pay for that person to do the work. That said, I mean, I’m exaggerating, but it has felt, historically, like 90% of the things that chaplains can talk about are in response to your question. And so I try to be provocative with them, to get them to spend less time thinking about those questions and more time focused on those they serve, how they serve them—but if those people even know who they are.
Brandon: I want to pivot to asking you about the more recent work you’ve been doing on this concept called the Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future, which I think really builds on what we’ve been talking about. Could you say a little bit about that initiative, and what do you mean by spiritual infrastructure?
Wendy: Yeah, so that’s a three- or four-year project that’s just getting started. Amy and I, Michael, some colleagues, had been doing unrelated projects, trying to map both those who call themselves spiritual innovators, to understand what they’re doing and who they are, and also trying to understand some church and congregational closures. And my sense, with my sociologist hat on, is that we are seeing a shift in delivery mechanisms for spiritual and religious content, while the congregation in the United States has long been the primary delivery mechanism. And for many people, it absolutely still is. There are others for whom it is not the primary delivery mechanism, and we were trying to understand that. We were thinking about that, both from perspective of individuals, but also being aware of the history of religious organizations in social infrastructures.
And so this is a project designed to ask questions about how the spiritual or religious infrastructures—the institutions, not just the congregations, but the ways that different hospitals, social service organizations, community centers, et cetera—interact in particular cities, and to ask if there’s a way for us to see some of those transitions in real time. So the project has a few arms. The research component is going to focus in four cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and, very likely, Oklahoma City. We’re going to focus in city centers to see if we can understand what’s opening, what’s closing, how are these delivery mechanisms shifting?
The other two pieces of the project: one focuses on public understandings and trying to support journalists in telling a range of stories about contemporary American religious life, not just the stories about decline. And the third part of the project is really designed to ensure that experts in this field continue to be nurtured through graduate school and into positions inside and outside of the academy to provide the thought leadership that is essential going forward. That is an internship program that will enable PhD students in related fields to do paid internships outside of the academy that develop relationships with foundations and different kinds of organizations, where that thought leadership happens, to ensure that we are continuing to build a robust pipeline to think and understand and provide thought leadership about these important questions.
Brandon: That’s wonderful. Yeah, that’s exciting. Really, really ambitious, exciting initiative. Could you say a little bit about what impact you hope it would have? If it’s immensely successful, what would that look like for you?
Wendy: So my sense, we need to think about audience, right? So my sense is that, in the scholarly world, there have been a couple of really important books about the state of American religion. Bob Wuthnow’s 1998 Restructuring of American Religion book is one. Bob Putnam’s book is one. There’s a handful. But as scholars, it always takes us time to catch up to what’s happening and to try to tell this broad sort of stories. So Bob Wuthnow and Penny Edgell are actually editing a book as part of this project, in which we tried to step back and tell that broad story.
So to me, if this project is wildly successful, we know a little bit more in closer to real time about how institutions are shifting on the ground in response to the changes that are taking place in many areas of contemporary religious life. That additional understanding spurs all of us in the public, through articles in the newspaper—where people are thinking about their training and where they’re looking to kind of engage around questions of meaning and purpose—to understand and see more options and to make the choices that are right for us. So we’re trying to advance understanding in a scholarly way, but also in a public way, and also, I think, as people think about vocations in a range of settings.
Brandon: That’s great. Could you all just, sort of zooming out a little bit, say something about perhaps the purchase of the concept of innovation as being valuable for the study of religion, both from a scholarly perspective, a sociological perspective, but also for practitioners. Is it helping shine a light on something that we’re not seeing otherwise? And also, conversely, are there any pitfalls of focusing on innovation as a concept?
Wendy: So we’ve been thinking about that very question because innovation is a new-ish concept. We’ve done the Google Ngram searches, and you can see it gaining in popularity. In my view, innovation is a way to talk about change. And so we’ve been talking about a working paper in which we might look at genealogies of religious change, where innovation is one amongst others. Because it’s impossible to define innovation because it’s so context-dependent.
So I think we’re trying to think about how to contextualize the term. And the fact that it’s currently popular and sounds kind of cool is not a good operational definition when it’s really a way of talking about change. Especially in American religious life, there’s many, many changes. So I’m not answering your question as much as complexifying it and being skeptical. If we put all of our eggs in the innovation bucket, I’m not sure it allows us to tell the whole stories. And what is innovative to one person, family, religious tradition, is not to another. And that level of granularity is important and also impossible to deal with as a scholar. So I don’t know. Michael, I’d be curious about how you think about that. And, Brandon, I’d love to know how you think about it.
Brandon: Yeah, well, as a historian, Michael, I’m very curious about your perspective too.
Michael: Well, we’re touching on very deep parts of people and institutions. I think that there is a risk sometimes that when those institutions hear a word like innovation, it seems combative, or you’re trying to push us in a direction that we don’t want to go, or you’re going to leave behind what is truly a value, or whatever the case may be. I think a very important part of this message is that that’s not the point. The point is not to get rid of American religion as it currently stands, right? That’s not what innovation means.
In one sort of definition, it means drawing on the strengths of our institutions and infrastructure as we have them now to better meet the needs of people where they are. When to use this word many times in her response, she said, shift, right? Not jettison, not bulldoze, and build a new shift, right? So we have, in many ways, the raw material to address these needs all around us. It’s looking at it from a different perspective, and being willing to think about how those resources are put to use in a different way that will allow us to innovate however we choose to define the work.
Brandon: Yeah, I know it is a really, really thorny concept, and that’s why I’m really intrigued by the ways in which both we could use it as scholars, but also pay attention to some of the baggage that comes with the term. There’s, of course, the distinction between the kinds of things we mean by innovation, the kinds of shifts and changes and adaptations. We might mean that there’s something significant about those changes. They’re not just merely incremental modifications, but there’s something, you know. That some community is judging as a significant and useful change for some end that they’re hoping to achieve. But then the word itself can carry a lot of baggage with it.
Are there particular places where as you’re doing this work of mapping, this shifting spiritual infrastructure, that you’re seeing beauty emerge in some of these spiritual innovations perhaps? And any places that you’re particularly drawn to?
Wendy: I mean, my off-the-cuff response is that so much of this work is about enabling people to see beauty that they would otherwise overlook, and—or I don’t want to say creating the conditions, because I don’t believe we create beauty. I think it’s revealed, but to have spaces where it may be revealed where it’s least expected. So I think that’s sort of like asking a question about God, and I would probably give a similar answer.
Michael: I think so much of the work of chaplains is assisting people to see beauty when they think it is impossible to do so. So many chaplains are working with people with a terminal medical diagnosis, or they’ve just suffered a catastrophic death in their family, or whatever the case may be. And when those things happen, quite rightly, you think there is nothing more that is good about my life. Things have changed so drastically that I cannot possibly see beauty anywhere. It’s not something that happens over the course of a 10-minute conversation. But I think chaplains being part of witnessing that difficulty, witnessing the vulnerability, and inviting people to discover what it is that helps them make meaning can really turn those objectively negative experiences into a moment of beauty in a way that certainly would not have happened without someone providing spiritual care to that person.
Brandon: Wow. That’s wonderful. Is there one thing that the public generally tends to get wrong about chaplains? I mean, you’ve mentioned a few things. But is there something that you really want to correct in the public imagination around chaplains, or at least maybe the folks who have the funding resources—whether it’s mayors, or hospital CEOs, or whoever, right? Is there some kind of perception there that you really love to shift and help make a case for the importance of chaplains?
Michael: I can’t remember what year it was Wendy, but there was the actor from MASH who died. We were a little opportunistic and took this opportunity to publish an article somewhere. I can’t remember. But the title was Father Mulcahy Is Dead. The thrust was, a lot of folks think about a chaplain as a white Christian male who’s wearing a collar, and there are plenty of white Christian males wearing collars who are still chaplains. That’s good and fine. But more and more and more chaplains don’t look like that, and most chaplains don’t do the kind of work that Father Mulcahy was doing in the war. Now, how do you shift that perception? I don’t know. Maybe we start paying for multi-million-dollar ads here in football season, so we can get the most people. I don’t know. But that is a major shift in perception that we’ve got to push.
Wendy: I actually prefer the term ‘spiritual care provider,’ because I think it’s more inclusive. And if you look just at that term, spiritual care providers are those who tend to our spirits, to the things that keep us going in all the frames. And so what I would want to say to leaders across the country is that I think it’s undeniable that many of us are struggling with our spirits, and we can see that in polarization and many contemporary social challenges. No chaplain can fix that. But why would you not tend to someone’s spirit if you had the opportunity? That can take many forms. It can include the word religion, if that makes sense, for your demographic, but it needn’t.
In general, chaplains are relatively inexpensive. And so I would just encourage people to try things out. Do a pilot. There’s a great body of research in the UK that shows that embedding spiritual care providers in primary care clinics makes a difference for everybody in the clinic. They are not Father Mulcahy. They are people who provide a listening service—usually, the research shows—around grief and life transitions that patients really appreciate, and that nurses and doctors really appreciate, because nurses and doctors never have enough time during the day to serve and attend to all of the reasons why people are there. When that feels like religion in a medical clinic, people can be very concerned. But when that’s simply about a listening presence and coming alongside and tending people’s spirit, why not try it and see if it works?
Michael: I had a conversation just maybe last week with a person who has a nonprofit organization to provide spiritual care to a community that is involved in a very dangerous and very expensive hobby. I shouldn’t say more than that, because that person didn’t know I was going to talk about this. But this person said, “Look, the folks that I work with that I provide spiritual care for, they are obscenely wealthy. All of their material needs are met. And in that demographic, they don’t need God, they don’t want God. But we’ll be out in the field doing this hobby and they’ll say, ‘My spouse is leaving me, and I have no idea what to do.” That’s not a question that has an answer, but it is something that having someone who is well-trained and prepared to stand there and talk to you while you’re engaged in something that you love to do about this enormous life change that is looming over you is really important.
Wendy: We have a section on the Chaplaincy Innovation website that’s called “This is What a Chaplain Looks Like.” We encourage people to Google it. We’ve encouraged any chaplain who wants to be included there to send us their photo and a bio. Because it really shows the breadth of possibilities in this work. And part of what Michael does in his leadership now in the lab is help people who want to try things out, figure out what they might look like. One of the lab’s greatest resources is its networks and our ability to introduce people with an idea to someone who’s tried it or might try it. This is where we facilitate innovation, which means experimentation, trying things out that may or may not work, and learning together through that process.
Brandon: Yeah, it’s amazing. So in this particular time we’re in—both in terms of the political uncertainty and upheavals that are going on, but also in terms of the rise of AI and new technologies—are you seeing any, especially critical needs to protect the value or highlight the value of spiritual care? Is that going to take new forms, you think? How do you see that?
Wendy: Michael, this one’s for you. I texted Michael about this the other day, and he said, oh, he’d already been doing all these things.
Michael: This is something that really intelligent thinkers are thinking very hard about. Because I would imagine most of us agree that AI is: it is already pervading our lives. It is going to continue to do so. We can’t push back the time. It’s here to stay.
What does that actually mean for something like spiritual care? There is a really easy answer that says, well, as long as you train the model well enough, why can’t AI be a spiritual care provider? You can ask it questions, and it’ll have conversations with you. It gets to know your personality. That is extraordinarily dangerous and, I think, irresponsible. But that is one thing that we have to contend with.
On the other hand, we have to think about what are all of this sort of administrative tasks and bureaucratic things that chaplains have to do day in and day out? Can AI be a tool to free them up, to be more creative and be more direct and personal with people? If so, that’s great. But I think we are heading towards a point where the conversation over what makes us human is going to be very top of mind for all of us. I would guess that all of us have an answer. But pretty soon, it’s going to be unavoidable, and it’s going to determine the course of where society goes.
Wendy: There’s a great recent article, and I’m going to forget all the details, written by a theological educator who had an accident and was in the emergency room and decided to ask AI all kinds of core questions. It outlines the answers AI could give and the answers AI would not give, and how that’s different when you talk to an AI module through a Catholic, a Mormon, et cetera, lens. And what I left that article, which is what I was sending to Michael, what I left that article thinking about is that AI is a tool. It’s a kind of exoskeleton for the mind. Sure, we can train it up to do some of this work. But for me, what makes us human is that real connection, that real improvisation, that ability to sit and touch and be with other people—not a bot—when things are wonderful and when things are difficult. And so I think AI is another tool that can enable the work of spiritual care to be done perhaps in some different ways. I think we need to embrace it and play with it and try it out. Will it replace it? No, but I don’t believe that AI is going to replace the humanness of us if we continue to use it as ethically as appropriate.
Brandon: Yeah, let’s hope so. It’s a real danger. I think as you would use the word empaths, Michael, to describe spiritual care providers, I think that particular capacity to be moved and to respond because one is moved, and therefore to be present because one has suffered in some way and can therefore resonate with the suffering of another seems so critical to highlight and to value in these times.
I want to thank you for the important work you’re doing and for being so generous with your time. Where can we direct our viewers and listeners too, so they can learn more about the work you’re doing?
Michael: It’s very easy. Chaplaincyinnovation.org. Everything that we have talked about is right there, including a lot of information about the project on the spiritual infrastructure of the future. So I really encourage everyone to check all of that out. And you can always get in touch with us directly. It’s just info@chaplaincyinnovation.org. There are many days where I think I’m mostly a glorified traffic cop, and I direct people to go talk to other people. But that’s fine. I love doing that. So if people have questions or want to continue the conversation, we certainly will.
Brandon: Amazing. Well, thank you both again. This has been a real delight.
Wendy: Thank you.
Michael: Thank you, Brandon.