Militant Chaplaincy: A Söllean Weaponization of Chaplaincy’s Fundamental Competencies in Value-Based Community Organizing

In recent years, chaplains have wrestled with the perceived limits of their own profession in addressing systemic injustice and suffering. While spiritual care and accompaniment have been martialed by pastoral theologians and chaplains to confront personal suffering, these practices have begun to wander into zones of political contestation. In critically reviewing two models of chaplaincy operating in such zones, workplace and movement chaplaincy, I argue that the former illustrates the potential pacifying dimensions of spiritual care per se and the former exemplifies the limits of pastoral accompaniment. To effectively meet spaces of unfreedom, chaplaincy must deepen its identity within the intersections of other fields and discourses, specifically value-based community organizing. By deploying Dorthee Sölle’s work on suffering, this essay hopes to weaponize chaplaincy’s capacity to “allow suffering to speak” for the purposes of organizing for real power, turning private grief into an effective public witness.