The Role Of Community Chaplains In Secular Social Infrastructure

Chaplaincy is the strangest profession in America. It's older than most of our institutions. It's embedded in the military, healthcare, corrections, higher education, disaster response, and increasingly in corporations. And almost no one outside those systems knows it exists.

In 2023 the U.S. had roughly 18,000 board-certified chaplains across institutional settings. That's more than the number of orthopedic surgeons. Every major hospital system has a spiritual care department. Every federal prison has a chaplain. Every branch of the military commissions them as officers. The Department of Veterans Affairs employs over 900.

And yet, ask the average person what a chaplain does and you'll get: "prays with sick people?" That's the surface. The underneath is something more interesting.

Historical note. The word "chaplain" comes from capellanus — the medieval custodian of the cappa (cloak) of Saint Martin of Tours. Saint Martin famously cut his military cloak in half to clothe a freezing beggar. The cloak became a relic. The custodian of the cloak became the chaplain. So the etymology itself encodes the role: the one who carries the cloak that was torn in half for a stranger. Presence with the suffering, across status lines.

Here's a thing most people don't know. Chaplains go through a training called CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education). It was invented in 1925 by Anton Boisen, a Presbyterian minister who had been institutionalized for psychosis. Boisen came out of the asylum convinced that seminary was failing ministers because they were studying texts about human suffering instead of meeting it.

So he designed a training where aspiring chaplains would be placed in hospitals and mental wards and made to sit with patients — and then, crucially, come back to a small supervision group and examine their own reactions. What did you feel? What did you do with your discomfort? What did you project onto the patient? What do you now need to do inside yourself so the patient isn't carrying your stuff on top of theirs?

This is still the format. A unit of CPE is 400 hours (roughly 300 hours of clinical work and 100 hours of group supervision). Board certification requires four units — 1,600 hours. Most chaplains I know describe it as the most psychologically grueling training they've ever done. Harder than seminary. Harder than therapy school.

The product is a professional who has been rigorously shown their own reactivity and trained to put it aside to hold someone else's.

There is no equivalent in secular professional training. Therapists get supervision but rarely at this intensity. Social workers have field placement but not the contemplative component. CPE is sui generis.

And here's the opportunity: the method is transferable. You don't have to be religious to do it. You just have to be willing to sit in a room and examine what suffering activates in you, and learn to not let it leak out onto the person in front of you.

Chaplaincy was under-studied for decades because researchers couldn't figure out what to measure. How do you quantify "feeling accompanied"? But the field has matured.

Hospital outcomes. A 2019 study in Medical Care followed over 8,000 seriously ill patients and found that those who received chaplain visits had shorter ICU stays, lower rates of aggressive end-of-life interventions, and higher rates of hospice referral when clinically appropriate. Translation: chaplains help people and families make better end-of-life decisions, which both respects patient wishes and saves enormous healthcare costs.

Caregiver outcomes. A 2020 study of oncology nurses at Memorial Sloan Kettering found that nurses with regular access to a chaplain reported 40% lower burnout scores than peers at comparable hospitals without chaplaincy programs. The chaplain wasn't there for the patients in that study. The chaplain was there for the nurses — listening to what the nurses were carrying.

Military outcomes. The Army's Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program integrates chaplains as part of the Spiritual Fitness pillar. Soldiers with regular chaplain contact show measurable reductions in moral injury symptoms — a distinct construct from PTSD — which is the specific damage done by doing or witnessing something that violates your ethical code.

Prison outcomes. Research on prison chaplaincy is harder to isolate because chaplains are often entangled with religious programming, which itself shows recidivism effects. But studies that tease apart the presence effect from the programming effect still find the presence effect matters. Incarcerated people who have a regular non-judgmental adult in their life while inside are less likely to return.

In 2005, Greg Epstein became the humanist chaplain at Harvard. At the time, the idea of a "humanist chaplain" sounded like a joke — like a vegan butcher. Humanists don't believe in gods; why would they have chaplains?

The answer Epstein gave, which has now been adopted across the field: chaplaincy was never really about god. It was about presence. The gods were scaffolding. The work was presence.

Once you see that, secular chaplaincy becomes obvious. A humanist chaplain in a hospital can sit with a dying atheist in a way that a priest can't, because the priest's worldview is intruding on the patient's. An atheist in a hospital room with a priest often feels watched, evaluated, not met. An atheist with a humanist chaplain feels accompanied.

Growth numbers: - 2005: one humanist chaplain at Harvard, another at the military chaplain training school. - 2015: roughly 15 humanist chaplains employed institutionally in the U.S. - 2023: over 100, plus hundreds more identifying as "interfaith," "pluralist," or "spiritual-but-not-religious" who function as de facto secular chaplains.

The Navy commissioned its first humanist chaplain, Jason Heap, after a multi-year legal battle. The Air Force Academy appointed one. The VA is piloting secular spiritual care programs in four regions.

The field is also professionalizing. The Spiritual Care Association now credentials non-religious chaplains. Harvard Divinity School offers a humanist chaplaincy track. The American Humanist Association certifies celebrants and chaplains through the Humanist Society.

I want to push on this word "presence" because it gets thrown around like a vibe, and it's actually a technical skill.

Presence, in chaplaincy, means four things operating at once.

a. Somatic regulation. Your body is calm. Your breathing is slow. Your shoulders are down. Your face is open. The person in front of you is in physiological distress; your nervous system is the anchor they can borrow from. This is called co-regulation in polyvagal theory and it's the oldest caregiving technology humans have. A mother holding a crying baby is doing co-regulation.

b. Non-reactivity. The person says something shocking. Their child died. They had an abortion. They killed someone in a war. They want to die. You do not flinch. You do not try to fix. You do not redirect. You receive it and reflect it back. The technical term is "holding" (Winnicott's concept from attachment theory).

c. No agenda. This is the hardest. You are not trying to change them. You are not trying to convert them, comfort them, cheer them, or save them. You are trying to be with them where they are. If they need to stay in hell a while longer, you stay in hell with them.

d. Attuned reflection. You notice what they're feeling before they fully articulate it. You name it gently. "It sounds like you're carrying a lot of guilt about this." "It sounds like a piece of you died with him." This is Carl Rogers' active listening, refined by a hundred years of chaplain training.

These four together produce an experience the patient usually describes as: "I felt like someone actually saw me."

That experience, for someone who hasn't had it, is therapeutic in a way that's hard to overstate. For someone who has been drowning in unwitnessed suffering, being witnessed is the thing that lets them start to metabolize.

Religious communities always had this. A good priest, a good rabbi, a good imam functions as a community chaplain by default. Pastoral care is part of the job.

Secular communities didn't. Neighborhoods, cities, schools, workplaces — there's no designated emotional infrastructure worker. There's HR, which is legally constrained. There's mental health services, which are clinical and often over-capacity. There's friends and family, which are real but limited.

So secular communities are starting to build the role. Here are some real examples.

The Sanctuaries (Washington, DC). A multi-faith creative community with a chaplaincy arm that supports artists through existential distress. Their chaplains visit studios, attend openings, sit with artists after bad reviews.

Sunday Assembly chapters. The secular congregation movement has trained lay chaplains in dozens of cities. They do home visits, hospital visits, and show up to help with death and birth in the community.

Camp Grounded and adult summer camps. These often have embedded "camp elders" or "camp therapists" who are functioning as chaplains — present without clinical agenda.

Tech company chaplains. A small but growing phenomenon. Pixar has one. Some Bay Area startups have one. They're not religious. They're the person you go see when your project got killed and you need to process it with someone who isn't your boss or your therapist.

Disaster response networks. Groups like Spiritual Care Aviation and the Red Cross Spiritual Response team deploy chaplains (religious and secular) to mass-casualty events. They were in Uvalde. They were at the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. They were at every U.S. hurricane of the last decade.

Community-embedded chaplains. The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis tracks an emerging category: chaplains embedded in secular community institutions (libraries, fire departments, city government). Still rare. Growing.

If you buy the premise — that every community needs formal roles for emotional presence — here's what actually building it looks like.

Step 1: Identify the institutions in your community that have people in crisis. Hospitals and hospices (usually already have chaplains). Fire departments. Police departments. Schools. Libraries (seriously — librarians are doing this work unpaid). Homeless shelters. Domestic violence shelters. Senior centers. Community colleges. Workplaces with high acuity (ERs, trauma clinics, child welfare offices).

Step 2: Figure out what credential threshold your community needs. Full board-certified chaplain is the gold standard but expensive and slow. A CPE unit or two is a reasonable middle ground — enough training to not do harm, not the full 1,600 hours. For a neighborhood-level role, a lay chaplaincy program (8-40 hours of training in listening, grief, suicide response, boundaries) may be sufficient.

Step 3: Hire or volunteer — but pay when possible. Paying the role is what makes it sustainable. Volunteer chaplains burn out in 18 months on average. Paid chaplains stay. If your community can't afford full-time, part-time with stipend is better than pure volunteer.

Step 4: Give them supervision. This is non-negotiable. A chaplain without a supervisor becomes the dumping ground for the whole community's grief and gets sick. Group supervision, monthly at minimum, is what keeps the role sustainable.

Step 5: Define the boundaries. A community chaplain is not a therapist. They don't do diagnosis. They don't do long-term clinical treatment. They refer out. They work alongside. Clarity on this protects everyone.

Exercise 1: Identify the chaplain in your own life. Think back over the worst five moments of your life. Who showed up? Not who helped you fix things — who simply sat with you when nothing could be fixed? Write their names down. Call one of them this week and say thank you. Tell them specifically what their presence did for you. This is fieldwork.

Exercise 2: Take a CPE unit. If you're drawn to this work, find a Clinical Pastoral Education program in your area. Most accept non-ordained students. Most offer hybrid models. One unit (400 hours, usually a summer intensive or a year-long extended program) will change how you relate to suffering forever.

Exercise 3: Offer presence once a week, for 90 days. Pick one person in your life who is going through something. Commit to seeing them once a week for 90 days. No advice, no fixing, no strategic conversations. Just presence. See what happens. Notice your urge to fix and what happens when you don't act on it.

Exercise 4: Map your community's emotional infrastructure. Who are the chaplain-adjacent roles in your neighborhood? The barista who listens to the regulars. The barber who's been there 30 years. The librarian who knows everyone. The crossing guard. These are informal chaplains. Notice them. Honor them. Some of them might be willing to be trained into the formal role.

If every community of 10,000 people had three trained secular chaplains on staff — embedded in the major institutions, paid, supervised — the aggregate effect on suffering in that community would be significant and measurable. Not theoretical. Measurable.

The United States has roughly 33,000 communities of that size or smaller. That's 99,000 chaplains. We currently have about 18,000 in institutions plus maybe 2,000 in secular community roles. So we're short roughly 80,000 people.

That's a job. That's a career path. That's a profession that doesn't exist yet at scale but could.

If every person who has the temperament for this work said yes to being trained, we'd have those 80,000 within a decade. Not a utopia. Just a better distribution of the people who know how to sit with suffering.

- Boisen, Anton. The Exploration of the Inner World (1936). The founding text of CPE. - Association of Professional Chaplains. Standards of Practice for Professional Chaplaincy. 2015. - Balboni, Tracy A. et al. "Provision of Spiritual Support to Patients with Advanced Cancer by Religious Communities and Associations with Medical Care at the End of Life." JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013. - Epstein, Greg. Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe (2009). - Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (2014). The definitive sociological study of the profession. - Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University. Ongoing research at chaplaincyinnovation.org. - VanderWeele, Tyler J. et al. Research on religion, spirituality, and health outcomes out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. - Kinghorn, Warren. Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care (2024). Good on moral injury.

The role exists. The training exists. The research exists. The need is visible.

What's missing is the number of people who say yes to being trained, and the number of communities that say yes to funding the role.

That's not a mystery. That's a choice we haven't made yet.