In Europe, a typical chaplaincy model (in higher education, but also healthcare, penal and other institutions) is an interconnected multi-religion/belief team, serving the organisation’s members, while allowing some autonomy for individual chaplains.
An emerging European agenda in sociology of religion has fundamentally changed the research landscape on the roles and aims of chaplaincy across all sectors. To some extent, this research agenda has created a new conversation about chaplaincy—less about spiritual care per se—asking what difference it makes to members of religious groups to have a chaplain.
Four contextual axes affect this agenda, and the models of chaplaincy that inform and are informed by it. In combination, these contexts have the unfortunate and profoundly challenging effect of perpetuating minoritization of religious identities on campus. In short, those who are most excluded are unlikely to benefit from (European) chaplaincies in their current form.
First, in Europe, higher education chaplaincy (and often healthcare, penal and other chaplaincies) is in itself minoritized. This marginalization arises because the framing of higher education and other (public) services is secular. In that context, all adherents of a religion/belief are minorities. Yet some identities—especially ‘mainstream’ Christians—are less marginalized than others. For example, the European academic year follows Western Christian holidays (with breaks for Christmas and Easter), whereas significant dates for other religions are not so embedded. Major university assessments often coincide with Ramadan, when many Muslim students are fasting; Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah coincide with compulsory orientation activities, when many Jewish students wish to be with their families.
Second, the funding resources available drive a research agenda largely focused on ‘student (client) experience’ and individual ‘satisfaction’, including ‘well-being’. Rather than being about spiritual care more broadly understood, this research thus tends to embed a transactional vision of chaplaincy, focused on individual encounters. This leads to a tendency to create and frame chaplaincies as isolated spaces (‘repositories of religion’) where ‘adherents’ are ‘sent’ to resolve anything affecting their experience or well-being that pertains to their religious identities.
Third, in a context of significant challenge in terms of financial and human resourcing of higher education institutions (associated with austerity and a rise of right-wing ‘small government’ politics in Europe), these isolated spaces operate with diminishing resources. At the same time, a strong ‘equality’ agenda pushes higher education institutions (and also healthcare and penal institutions) to demonstrate (or ‘perform’) compliance with equality obligations—whether from constitutional norms or European human rights instruments. The need to demonstrate (legal or quasi-legal) compliance, coupled with diminishing (human) resource leads to an audit-culture where spiritual care is reduced to ‘tick-boxes’ or institutional policy documents.
A fourth contextual axis concerns interactions between freedom to speak and/or religious practice and an institutional desire to ‘combat’ islamophobia and anti-semitism, especially within broader contemporary geopolitical contexts, such as widespread human migration flowing from wars on Europe’s edges. Combined with diminishing resources, universities retreat into demonstrably serving mainstream religious identities and ‘being seen to’ serve ‘religious needs’ that are most easily understood (Christian practices; the individual ability to wear a hijab) than ones which would require widespread institutional learning and change (ritual washing facilities; changing educational practice to ameliorate colonialized curricula; campus food provision). These processes leave other religious identities even more marginalized, and squeeze to almost nothing the space(s) that would be needed to embed equal respect for a wide range of religious identities across whole organisations.
These brief paragraphs set out some of the context of our work, and our paper. We would like to open a conversation about what could be learned on both sides of the Atlantic from our respective contexts. What do we share—in terms of innovations in liberatory edges, professional frontiers and, above all, perspectives? Our approach is a practical model that involves a fundamental reconceptualisation of what it is to be and embody a chaplaincy.
We take the philosophical structure of rhizomatic theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, A Thousand Plateaus) both theoretically and as a metaphor, for how a chaplaincy may appear as a solitary wizened tree in a desolate landscape, but is rather a productive and replicating rhizome, to explain our approach. Knowing there is a rhizome beneath prompted our involvement and repositioning as ‘consultants’, engaging with University discourses on their own terms, and seeking alliships with those working on exclusions in the University in other contexts than chaplaincy. Locating the rhizome involved an iterative approach of listen, research, and respond. We sought to hear the stories of those across the university with religion and belief identities. A narrative research method—supported by quantitative data —became our way of effectively representing, to those in power in the university, exclusionary experience—and how it could begin to be healed (respond). As we mapped the rhizome, we came to understand our role in the university not as isolated chaplaincy, but as embedded and valued consultant for change processes and learning. The efficacy of our method is akin to symbiosis: a new perspective of chaplaincy showed our work as bringing mutual advantage to us and the wider institution.
A holistic institutional ethos of religion/belief inclusion and spiritual care would eschew othering and put provision for diverse persons at the centre of its design, operation, form and function. We show that chaplaincies are well-placed to do this work, by modelling practices of listen, research, respond; and showing their value to learning. As ‘insider/outsider’ consultants, we can be light-footed yet highly challenging. ‘In the university’ but not ‘of the university’, we move freely among those who have power and the disempowered. Contrary to a measurability-of-results approach to chaplaincy services of spiritual care, our mode of practice sits with the discomfort of the work never being ‘complete’, as an ongoing conversational learning process. The institution is increasingly enabled to grow its understanding of religion and belief identities within its staff and student bodies, and thus to offer a profoundly different model of spiritual care. We are able to remain liberatory because we are always asking ‘who is excluded?’ To whom do we need to listen next/more?
In Europe, a University chaplaincy is typically perceived as a solitary wizened tree in a desolate landscape providing meagre shelter for a few ‘adherents’. Such centres risk becoming ‘repositories of religion’ (Dinham, 2016), for a minority group at an otherwise secular institution, whether providing higher education, healthcare, penal or other services. Isolated chaplaincy professionals, themselves minoritised, serve people also institutionally minoritised.
This paper analyses the opposite perspective.
Our work moved a multifaith chaplaincy from a religious repository, into an embedded whole-organisation change-agent. Our experience shows how a chaplaincy can be re-interpreted as a much-needed rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari: 1980) that produces and replicates caring resources on religion/belief to the organisation.
What could be learned from these insights, in terms of innovations in liberatory edges, professional frontiers and, above all, perspectives? What is gained—and what challenges arise—when chaplaincies offer a fresh understanding of their role and practise listening, researching and responding?