Bentley is a private university in Waltham, just outside Boston, Massachusetts. It started life as a business school but a cursory look at its webpage suggests it has graduated to woke. It’s “more than business” because it creates “leaders for positive change” by “redefining success” (check with your employer whether he subscribes to the redefinition) through “life-long knowledge seekers” that are “a force for positive change.” The reader is asked, “Are you ready to be a Force?”

“The Force be with you.”

After seeing their homepage, I shouldn’t have been surprised by their ad this week, looking for a chaplain (see here). Bentley wants a “chaplain for inclusion, belonging, and dialogue.”

I guess that’s an improvement over Harvard which, three years ago, recruited a “chaplain for atheists.” When challenged about that oxymoron for a “chief of chaplains,” it punted to his duties: he leads nondenominational prayer to somebody or something at Commencement, does time and attendance for other chaplains, and schedules. (I wrote about him here.)

Bentley wants a syncretist. He’ll run “interfaith” programs, whip together the programming of the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Catholic groups, advance “bridgebuilding amongst religious and spiritual communities,” promote interfaith “literacy,” plan and staff events like “Art and Soul” and “We’re Better Together,” and engage in “benchmarking with peer institutions.”

It’s paradoxical that the same woke people who are intent on keeping identity group lines clean and clear, who will undoubtedly conduct a three-hour remediation workshop on “cultural appropriation,” and who would certainly lecture you on the “systemically racist, patriarchal, homophobic, xenophobic, all-phobic” evils of the “melting pot” have one place they love melting pots. They can never resist making a goulash stew out of religious identity.

I’d keep my child far away from Bentley’s chaplaincy. I’d do that because given the typical religious illiteracy found among contemporary college-age students, the lack of any grounding in one’s own tradition means one cannot critically engage with others. One is, instead, a sponge or a buffet line consumer, trying some chow mein, roast beef, kimchi, falafels, gefilte fish, and fried fish on Fridays. This is not designed to create religiously identifying individuals. It’s designed to create the mush we call “spirituality,” where people babble about “values” and “practices” of which they are the author and to which no one but, reductively, themselves is accountable. Real spirituality made “disciples,” and disciples are subject to discipline, i.e., to measures and authorities outside themselves. There are no Lone Rangers in genuine spirituality.

Except, maybe, at Bentley.

Then I began to wonder: Could Francis’s Vatican also riff the Bentley ad? After all, aren’t they looking for formation of clergy who, rather than being “rigid” and “backwardist,” are “inclusive”? “Belonging,” accompaniment, and welcome are the leitmotifs of this vision. I’d argue it’s also sometimes equally vacuous: As long as you “belong” and “feel welcome,” let’s not sweat the doctrinal details too much. Bentley wants a chaplain for “dialogue.” Maybe for “conversations in the Spirit” that masquerade as a new Pentecost after two minutes of silent prayer?

I hope Bentley gets its hire quickly. If they get this guy/gal on board in September, maybe he/she can get a gig at the Synod on Synodality. His/her required theological depth seems to be compatible with some of the Synod’s standards. This kind of chaplaincy keeps with a certain kind of, essentially, Protestantism (of a Kierkegaardian persuasion) that wants some kind of warm and fuzzy glow it calls “spiritual” but little of the content of orthodox Christianity as hitherto received. It’s the model chaplaincy in a dictatorship of relativism that doesn’t consider anything religiously normative.

Last month we celebrated the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe. He went to his death as a chaplain, his final entourage nine other men starved to death with him. He shrived them, accompanied them through the valley of the shadow of death, and was the last to leave that bunker dead. He supported them with prayer and song, not a “Kumbaya” but one which reckoned with the existential crossroads at which they stood between heaven and hell. That is a chaplain.

What Bentley wants is what Roman Brandstaetter ironized in a comment on an interview by the late dramatist Eugene Ionescu. Back in the 1980s, Ionescu said he was thinking of writing a play about Kolbe but was perplexed about how to ensure it did not “become propaganda for the idea of Christianity.” In other words, he understood nothing about Maximilian Kolbe. Just like Bentley understands nothing about chaplains.