The staying power of college chaplains

Are students really less religious, or simply seeking a different religion?

Excerpt: Today, at a moment when young people are much less likely to say they’re religious, you might think that the demand for college chaplains would be on the decline. But recent evidence suggests that the opposite is true.

Although a 2022 report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that nearly 40 percent of young adults do not identify with any established religion, college students are actually attending religious-life programs in larger numbers than they have in decades, and many colleges and universities have more chaplains, some volunteer and some paid, than they did in the early 2000s, James W. Fraser, a professor emeritus of history and education at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book Religion and the American University, told me.

Many of these chaplains are taking inspiration from Coffin: They’re reimagining what a spiritual leader can be in order to better meet the needs and beliefs of their students—many of whom, religious or not, still crave a sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose.

For centuries, religion was central to American university life. Many colleges were established as divinity schools and led by presidents who doubled as ordained ministers, John Schmalzbauer, a religious-studies professor at Missouri State University who studies chaplaincy and campus ministry, told me. But in the early 20th century, a great number of those institutions began shifting their focus from ministry to research, and college presidents started to devote less of their time to spiritual life. In their place, universities hired chaplains to preside over daily chapel services and offer moral guidance to students.

Read: Religious education and the meaning of life

The shape of the college chaplaincy transformed multiple times over the next several decades—first during the Coffin era, when it became a platform from which to advocate for social justice; and again in the late 1970s and ’80s, when the social movements of the ’60s lost steam, academic communities became significantly less religious, and the college chaplaincy shed some of its previous status.

Modern college chaplains, deans, and directors of religious life have taken on a new grab bag of duties. In addition to leading forms of worship and talking with students about their faith, as they always have, many chaplains also help students navigate housing insecurity, safety threats, and campus protests. Although the position was once thought of as a “defined pot,” Kirstin Boswell, Elon University’s chaplain and dean of multifaith engagement, told me, it is now more an interdisciplinary “web.”

The chaplains themselves are also much more diverse. Whereas the chaplaincy was once dominated by white Christian men, many today are women or people of color, and they come from a range of religious traditions. Of the 471 chaplains recently surveyed by the Association for Chaplaincy and Spiritual Life in Higher Education (ACSLHE)—the nation’s largest membership organization for university chaplains, directors, and deans of religious and spiritual life—6 percent said they don’t identify with a major religion, and 2 percent said they don’t believe in God at all.