Spare Us From Humanist Chaplains

As we see today with our local Occupations, people make their own communities as needed, in the form that best suits them. No formal structure or priest-like leadership required.

But oh how the authoritarians in political parties, law enforcement, journalism and religion hate such disorganized freedom.

And so they must find some way to force the freethinkers to conform.

Tom Flynn at Free Inquiry:

Sometimes the best is the enemy of the good. A new campaign sweep-ing the humanist/atheist/freethought movement exemplifies this dilemma. The campaign is well meant, but I fear it pursues a seductive short-term benefit at the expense of greater long-term goals. At the same time, it actively endangers principles that secular humanists value highly. Along the way, it shows us clearly where today’s dividing line between religious humanists and secular humanists is drawn.

I refer to an issue that only a few years ago was on nobody’s radar scope: humanist chaplains in the military. Servicemen and -women who live without religion compose one of the larger “life stance groups” within America’s armed forces. A movement to broaden military chaplaincy to include them is gaining sudden traction. The cause has its own specialist organization, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (MAAF), a full-fledged member organization of the Secular Coalition of America. This past spring, MAAF was the subject of a front-page story in the New York Times, among much other attention in the mainstream media and in cyberspace.

At first glance, making military chaplaincy more humanist- and atheist-friendly seems like a no-brainer. Why shouldn’t military nonbelievers have the same access as believers to the counseling, mentoring, and the other kinds of support chaplains provide?

At second glance, secular humanists recognize that this stream surges over treacherous rocks.

SNIP

So, what should secular humanists campaign for in this area? First and foremost, I’d suggest that instead of pressing for nonbelievers to be admitted to the chaplain corps, we should campaign for nonreligious servicemembers to be exempted from required interaction with chaplains. It should be understood that chaplains are there to serve servicemembers who happen to be religious; nonreligious ones should have a swift and painless way of wiring around them. This would necessarily require making scientific mental-health practitioners more easily available without chaplain referral. That might mean recruiting more of them, and it would surely mean discarding those elements of the current system that stigmatize servicemembers who seek genuine scientific counseling or therapy. Finally, a confidential path to counseling needs to be available for servicemembers who prefer not to exploit the chaplain’s clergy confidentiality.

And yes, that’s a big order. But I can’t help seeing it as a more worthy goal than campaigning for an oxymoronic humanist/atheist chaplaincy.

People who reject religion as a category have no business becoming chaplains. If we succeed in doing so, we should not be surprised if many in the larger culture find our claims to live without religion ringing hollow.

In fact, if the campaign for humanist chaplaincy succeeds, pardon the expression, heaven help us.

PZ Myers has less patience:

I wasted too much time in the #humanistcommunity debate on twitter, so I’ll briefly summarize: because I detest the church-like model of Epstein’s humanist chaplain concept, I must dislike organization, leadership, and community. It quickly became obvious that many people are incapable of recognizing anything other than chaplains and churches as a reasonable model for community.

This is annoying because we have quite a few models for godless organizations that avoid that pitfall. CFI. American Atheists. SSA. They don’t have “chaplains”! I wonder how they manage without collapsing?

This is particularly galling because what Epstein claims to be doing is gathering empirical data on how best to run a secular movement. As I pointed out, we’re doing this already by having diverse secular groups springing up all over the place, not by having Greg Epstein defining what a secular meeting is supposed to be. He managed to diss one such incredibly successful group in his interview:

That’s not to say there aren’t homes for atheists on campus. Jesse Galef, communications director for the Secular Student Alliance, said his organization now has 306 chapters nationwide, up from 195 two years ago.

But those groups are loose-knit. They have no official format for meetings; some do service projects while others are as likely to hold an “atheist prom.” Most are led by students, not chaplains, and they have no institutional memory, since their membership turns over every four years.

Epstein wants to create something more permanent with a carefully thought out infrastructure.

Here’s one of the fastest growing secular organizations in the country…so what’s wrong with being “loose-knit”? It seems to work. What’s wrong with an “atheist prom”, or whatever idea provokes and entices the group? Maybe a “carefully thought out infrastructure” would be exactly the thing to crush the spirit of the movement.

Anyway, the argument will never end. Some people will follow this strangely pseudo-religious pattern, some of us will be more anarchic and let the organization bubble up from the bottom. But if we’re looking for empirical examples that work, it seems to me that the secular organizations that are succeeding all seem to have a shortage of chaplains.

They call us freethinkers for a reason.