(RNS) — Religiously unaffiliated Americans represent about 28% of the country’s population, according to 2024 Pew Research Center data. As this demographic has grown, so, too, have the number of religiously unaffiliated chaplains.
Chaplains often sit with patients and families in hospitals as they face some of the most difficult moments of their lives. They work on university campuses providing a listening ear and guidance to students as they maneuver young adulthood. And for the last 250 years, they have offered spiritual support to their fellow service members in the U.S. military. Regardless of the setting, chaplains provide spiritual or pastoral care. As religious demographics overall shift, so too do the religious identities represented amongst chaplains.
“I think one of our primary (roles) is accepting and acknowledging things the way they are,” said Mariela Gonzalez, a hospital chaplain at Advocate Aurora Health in Downers Grove, Illinois. “Then, inviting a patient to reflect on what might connect them to goodness, or love or hope in those difficult moments. But not moving them toward that if it’s not where they are.”
Gonzalez identifies as a humanist, a belief system that drives her chaplaincy work in combatting dehumanization in the health care system — “the idea that a person is a commodity in the hospital, or you know, a cog in the machine of the health care industrial complex,” she said. She described her work as being “able to have a sense of (a patient’s) personhood and their wholeness.”
Mariela Gonzalez. (Courtesy photo)
Many employers expect chaplains to either be board certified or at least working toward it. There are a number of requirements …