- Claiming 'affiliation' is a weak stat. (e.g. can be family history vs. actual practice)
- Most claiming affiliation are not active
- Gen-X to millennials low affiliation numbers indicate continued decline (so, even less in future of what's currently low)
- Religion ranks last place in influencing personal identity (71% claim not important)
- Even for birth-death-marriage rituals, 80% prefer civil to religious celebrants
- Religious metaphysics (God, heaven, hell, etc.), even among the committed, are no longer seen to offer validity to moral/ethical debates
- Most reject religious authority as the ultimate interpretation of law.
- Religious households most likely to have low incomes (i.e. not my wealthy school's target demographic anyway)
- However, there is a disconnect between this new reality and Australian government policy, which favors minority religious policy at the expense of the emerging non-religious majority
- Schools are at the frontline of this struggle between public policy and the social change in actual religious behavior (e.g., most Australians oppose religious schools' legal right to expel students or sack staff on the basis of sexual orientation)
Our chaplaincy model (and its attendant chapel facilities, etc.) is still quite traditional. But given this emerging reality, is it really sustainable?
Any serious quest for the meaning and purpose of what I do demands that question at least be asked.
The traditional role expectations of chaplaincy are almost fully secularized or outsourced at my school already. Even school leaders muddle the terms "Assembly" and "Chapel" as though they fulfill the same timetable function. Assemblies trot out a list of desirable character values--decontextualized, random, perfunctory, and numerous, though they are.
Though I've taken pains to clarify that I am NOT a counsellor (even distributing a report that distinguishes Spiritual Direction from clinical counselling) I am still regarded as one by both students and staff, and I am woefully under-skilled to be that for them. I listen and care, but lack the tools to strategize a fix or a management of their issues.
Student and Old Scholar rites of passage do not default to my keeping--in three years I have performed one staff wedding, but as a private gig, off-campus. That's it. There have been births and deaths, and I've not been called to officiate, nor do I expect or even want to be.
What seems to remain is an occasional, highly specialized performance art--a live mass speech event that shares frontiers with sage-on-the-stage teaching, but without the teacherly validation of evaluations to see what they're getting from it. All you get are sort of google reviews that say more about the person than the event. Those that are susceptible to this form of rhetoric approve, those that aren't, don't. What a surprise.
As my boss reminded me, the decline in religiosity doesn't mean a decline in the need and desire to search for meaning and purpose. But do you need a chaplain for that? Someone in religious orders with all the cultural baggage that comes with that--the tradition of epistemic authority, the psychological pressure of that perceived authority, the emotional manipulation people are still susceptible to by anyone 'of the cloth'.
It seems more like a case of the right person for the job, ordained or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment