A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law. By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Abstract

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's A Ministry of Presence is a dazzling, meticulous study of the interdependence of law and religion. Sullivan contends that shifts in legal interpretation of the religion clauses of the constitution and in religious life are yielding a new form of religious establishment in the United States. In contrast to the previous de facto Protestant establishment, when jurists urged broad separation of church and state, the courts now expect government institutions to promote religion as a nondivisive, universal aspect of human being. With less judicial intervention, religion is regulated more by administrative decisions—through politics and public–private partnerships. “Religion is being neutralized and naturalized—de-constitutionalized, formally” (201). Sullivan brilliantly illustrates this re-configured interdependence of law and religion by analyzing the regulation of chaplains in secular institutions. What sets this book apart from others about chaplaincy is Sullivan's method. She constructs an inductive “legal anthropology of religion” from court documents, statements from institutions and advocacy groups, and allied literature about chaplaincies (15). This is a distinctive, well focused, and integrative choice that enables Sullivan to explore religion in the chaplaincies from several directions, without weakening the book's coherence. The conceptual center of her analyses is a regulatory scheme that she calls, “spiritual governance” (17) (akin to “Foucauldian pastoral care,” but lacking Europe's “church-and-statism”). What American “governance through spiritual care” entails for Sullivan grows clearer at each turn of her argument, which uncoils in five, long, and intellectually sinuous chapters. These chapters treat, respectively, a fundamental concept, actor, credentialing process, nexus of litigation, and central practice in Sullivan's story about chaplains and the new establishment.