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

Several years ago the late organizer and Catholic sister Christine Stephens, then national codirector of the Industrial Areas Foundation, opened a packed session at AAR with the line “You know, if seminaries did their jobs, we wouldn’t have to be training community organizers.” Her point was intended to be polemical, but it revealed something far more provocative about the potential of those who gained their professional competence within seminaries and divinity schools. Expressly put, chaplains and spiritual care providers may in fact be far more well-equipped to intervene in spaces and climates of unfreedom than earlier indications might have suggested. In order to properly assess and articulate such an unfulfilled capacity, this essay critically engages the expressions of spiritual care that take place in two disparate spaces, specifically the workplace and the movement. Ultimately, I hope to show the self-imposed limits of spiritual care and propose it take on a militant disposition by weaponizing basic chaplain competencies for the purpose of building solidarity in collective struggle for justice. In this way, we might begin to see the outlines of a militant chaplaincy that is preferential, agential, and intent on agitating.

To that end, the first modality of spiritual care to be examined is a growing field of professionals referring to themselves by a number of different names, e.g. “spiritual consultants,” ancient technologists,” “sacred entrepreneurs,” directors of possibility.” For these new experts they offer spiritual care in order to imbue the work space with “some of the meaning that [people] used to derive from churches, temples, and mosques, and the like.” With the explosive growth of firms like Sacred Design Lab, Ritualist, and Ritual Design Lab, along with a host of independent spiritual consultants, questions have begun to arise around the potential corporate exploitation of spirituality and religious sentiment. More to the point, while operating in contested spaces like the workplace these spiritual care providers may indeed “care for the problems of the people, but do not take a stand for employees, if, for example, working laws are violated.” (my emphasis, Wolf and Feldbauer-Durstmüller, 2018). This unwillingness to “take a stand” offers critical guidance for the direction spiritual care must take in order to address climates of unfreedom. If unfreedom is defined by neutrality (particularly the calm neutrality of a spiritual care provider), then “freedom means taking sides in a crisis situation, when a society is divided into oppressed and oppressors” (Cone, 1970). Following liberation theology, spiritual care must become preferential for the oppressed.

While workplace chaplains may be critiqued for not taking a stand in the face of unfreedom, those serving as chaplains to social movements cannot be criticized along similar lines. In recent years an increasing number of chaplains are beginning to make spiritual care more accessible to social justice movements, often rendering care in the midst of protests, sit-ins, and direct actions. The practical competency that often best defines these movement or protest chaplains is “accompaniment.” Chaplaincy Innovation Lab and Faith Matters Network are two of the major voices in movement chaplaincy. Their accompanying work is metaphorically described by Janelle Adams as “midwives” and “doulas” making spiritual care “accessible throughout the entire process of birthing societal change” (2023). Though this work is critical in providing spiritual care where it is lacking in protest spaces, movement chaplaincy fails to take full advantage of the radical depth of accompaniment. Much like the need to “take a stand,” chaplains in zones of unfreedom must accept greater responsibility in the movement. That is, chaplains must shoulder a role that is not merely accompanying those “birthing societal change” (as if others are the active agents in that process) but rather claim a militant disposition that accepts a similar responsibility as those they are working alongside. In perhaps dramatic language, chaplains cannot merely be the ones offering words of encouragement as others push, they too must be willing to push. This radical accompaniment accepts greater responsibility for the spiritual care provider as a direct agent for change. 

This increased responsibility is simultaneously an opportunity to make use of chaplaincy’s fundamental competencies in more radical ways. To be sure, many of the same skills that define an effective chaplain are the very same skills— perhaps in a more inchoate form—that are employed by value-based community organizers. Value-based organizers emphasize the relational meeting and listening campaigns to uncover and act upon the sacred values that drive people’s commitments to social change (Stauffer, 2024). Rather than a mobilizer who activates people who already agree with a specific goal, the Interaction Institute for Social Change describes an organizer as someone who focuses on “listening, building community, building trust and building respect” (2012). Even a tertiary glance reveals that these descriptions of organizers, and specifically value-based organizing, exemplifies the foundational elements of chaplaincy. Chaplains, therefore, should seek out opportunities to weaponize spiritual care and their capacities for the purposes of concrete organizing and power-building..

Furthermore, spiritual care and the deep connections it engenders is the thread weaved throughout value-based organizing. To illustrate this point, the work of German liberation theologian Dorthee Sölle on the three phases of suffering is instructive here. In her short book Suffering, Sölle both criticizes the Christian conventions that glorify suffering and shows how it can act as a conduit from one person to another, occasioning the deepest of solidarities. For Sölle, movement from a silent sufferer (phase one) to one of lament (phase two) to the final stage when one begins to join with others and organize to end suffering. The ability to speak of one’s suffering, to lament, is the beginning of liberation. Mourning and lament, emotions that chaplains are well acquainted, are the pathways to solidarity and organized resistance. Aiding that transition through agitation and listening is the most critical work of the value-based organizer. Yet, the chaplain, perhaps more so than the classically trained organizer, is capable of allowing “suffering to speak” (Adorno, 1966). For this reason, a militant chaplain may be more effective than a typical organizer.