Non-religious pastoral care

Non-religious pastoral care, often called humanist or secular pastoral support, is the provision of emotional, existential and "spiritual" support to people in need, in settings such as hospitals, prisons, universities and the armed forces, from a non-religious rather than a faith-based standpoint. It has developed as a counterpart to traditional religious chaplaincy, responding to the reality that many of those facing illness, crisis, grief or death are not religious and may not wish for religious ministry, yet still need someone to talk to, to be present with them, and to help them find meaning, comfort and resolution in their circumstances. The non-religious pastoral carer offers attentive presence, listening and support grounded in shared humanity and a humanist understanding of life, without prayer, scripture or the framework of an afterlife, meeting the person on their own terms and according to their own beliefs and values.

The practice has grown as the number of the non-religious has risen and as institutions have sought to provide equitable care to people of all beliefs and none. Humanist pastoral carers now serve alongside religious chaplains in the health services, prisons and other institutions of a number of countries, and their inclusion in what were once exclusively religious chaplaincy structures has itself been the subject of advocacy and, at times, of dispute. Non-religious pastoral care reflects the recognition that the needs traditionally met by religious ministry, for presence in suffering, for help in facing mortality, for the search for meaning, are human needs not confined to the religious, and that they can be met in a wholly secular form for those who neither hold nor wish for a faith.

Institutional chaplaincy in hospitals, prisons and the armed forces was built entirely around religious provision, and humanist pastoral care has had to argue its way into structures that assumed a chaplain would necessarily be a person of faith. The United States military's recognition of humanist chaplaincy was contested for years: Jason Heap, endorsed by the Humanist Society, was rejected for a Navy chaplaincy position in 2014 despite meeting the stated qualifications, a case humanist organisations cited as evidence of institutional resistance rather than a genuine credentialing gap, and it was not until 2021 that the United States Army commissioned its first humanist chaplain, a gap of years between the request for recognition and its grant that traces the same pattern seen in hospital and prison chaplaincy programmes elsewhere.

British universities and the National Health Service moved somewhat earlier, adding humanist pastoral carers alongside religious chaplains at a number of institutions from the 2000s onward, generally following advocacy by Humanists UK making the case that non-religious patients, students and prisoners were being left without equivalent support purely because the provision was organised entirely along denominational lines. The underlying argument in every one of these cases is the same: that grief, fear and crisis are not religious experiences requiring a religious response, and that a listening presence trained in exactly the skills chaplaincy already values, without the theological content, meets a need the older system had simply never been designed to notice.