NEED FOR NON-RELIGIOUS CHAPLAINS IN MILITARY AND SCHOOLS
Chaplaincy is a profession that has existed for centuries. Chaplains provide emotional/spiritual care, support, comfort, and guidance to individuals facing challenges in various situations and areas of life and duty. They include patients, prison inmates, police/military officers, and students in schools, colleges and universities. Unfortunately, chaplaincy has been understood or better, been misunderstood as strictly a religious profession, as an exclusive preserve of persons who profess a religion, or who belong to a religious tradition. Many people think that chaplains must be believers and persons of faith. Well, this is a grave mistake. Indeed, chaplains used to be exclusively religious leaders who provided support and rendered services to religious believers in the military, in prisons, schools, colleges, and universities. But the situation has been changing because the nonreligious constituency has been growing, the non religious are becoming increasingly visible and assertive. Nonreligious chaplains are emerging to serve the needs of nonreligious communities, especially in the Western world, where the profession of chaplaincy started. And if one understood what chaplaincy was about, it should not be strictly religious. There should be chaplaincy beyond religion, chaplaincy beyond belief, and chaplaincy for all, believers and nonbelievers. Religious and nonreligious chaplaincies should be available and accessible to all in a religiously pluralistic society like Nigeria. At the moment, the chaplaincy institution in Nigeria is organized to favour and only serve people of faith. It excludes and discriminates against nonreligious Nigerians.
Why do I think so? And what should be done to resolve this problem? First, let us explore the duties of a chaplain. Associated with the military, chaplains offer prayers. They provide comfort to officers on and off the battlefield. Chaplains attend to the spiritual and psychological needs of officers. But as we know it today, not every military officer is religious or, professes a belief in a deity. Not all members of the Nigerian military pray or believe in the efficacy of prayers. Some military officers are atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers. Many officers are nonreligious, and do not take religion seriously. So the Nigerian military needs nonreligious, secular/humanist, chaplains for nonreligious members of the military. They need humanist chaplains to provide nontheistic officers care, hope and meaning, comfort, and support based on reason, and science, not religion and superstition. The Nigerian military should meet the emotional and spiritual needs of nonreligious officers. Here, spiritual needs means needs related to the search for meaning, solace, and purpose in life, not a reverence for a spirit or some supernatural being. And failure by the military to attend to the needs of nonreligious officers is a disservice to the nation.
In the prisons, chaplains support inmates as they serve their sentences or await trial. Many people in prisons feel hated, hopeless, alienated, and sometimes betrayed. Inmates feel isolated and abandoned by the society. Chaplains work to bring comfort to inmates. They pray and fellowship with them. Chaplains encourage inmates to trust in God for their eventual release or acquittal. Chaplains organize fellowships, and Bible study programs; they provide inmates with faith-based counseling sessions and nonjudgmental support, and help them find meaning and hope. Again, not all prison inmates are persons of faith. Not all inmates believe in God or take religion seriously. Many do not find meaning and comfort in religious injunctions and faithbased programs.