The Cultural Challenge of the Chaplaincy

A friend of mine asked me what I thought the military chaplaincy’s greatest challenge might be over the next decade. I answered that the greatest challenge might not be within the chaplaincy itself. We chaplains are a strange mix of “God and country” in a culture that is increasingly uncomfortable with that formulation. Our culture is:
  1. Fragmenting Religiously. The old cultural consensus is dead, and along with it, religion's dominant place in society. The culture is awash with endless permutations and combinations of religious ideas. "Spiritual but not religious" is on the rise. Even among the religious, identification with a particular institution or stream of tradition carries little weight. Religious institutions themselves often seem adrift and uncertain about their identity. The "me" and the "now" are it.
  2. Pushing Religion into the Purely Private Realm and out of the Public Square. There is great distrust of religious institutions, discomfort with public expressions of religion and an intolerance for religious reasoning.
  3. Coalescing Around Media Driven Cultural Values. While the old religious mores are dying in public, nature abhors a vacuum. In their place, the pervasive culture offers a new "non-religious" (or at least "non-threatening-religious") set of values. The new cultural center is not found in the institutions of commerce or the state. Indeed, commerce and the state are all too happy serve the new cultural center, as they are rewarded when they do and punished when they don't. Religious institutions, too, face pressures to conform to the spirit of the age. Most people are not even aware where their values come from or why they look at life the way they do. People just sort of absorb their world views. The culture's values just seem to float in the air. In a way, they literally do. The new cultural center is transmitted by the media: from old media like films, television and music to new media found on the internet. The speed of transmission and assimilation of this cultural outlook appears to be increasing, at least to an old codger like me.
I’m not sure how the chaplaincy will evolve in this kind of environment. I hope that it survives in a form that will be healthy for the church, the chaplaincy and the nation.

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