Interview with Dr. Marty Shoemaker

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist (Unpublished)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): Unknown

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Humanism comprises a broad term for a number of ethical propositions, those which can become split into different areas of focus, one of which is humanist chaplaincy. Let’s discuss this from an educational perspective. What is the relevance of Humanism to Canadian socio-cultural life?

Dr. Marty Shoemaker: That question is one that experientially we really can’t answer until really the last, oh, about 12 years because that’s how we got our first humanist chaplain in a university, but we could have discussed it more as a career, as a theoretical application of Humanism, which I think that we now have a fair number of experiences out, but they’re all in universities as humanist chaplain here in Canada. But there is other literature about spiritual care and caretaking in Europe and in the United States that, in ways, were more advanced than what we had in Canada. We’re kind of the last kids on the block not getting our first chaplain in place, except in 2009 and 2010, University of Toronto Gail McCabe. So I think that chaplaincy, I don’t think of it as a specific and ethical focus; I think of it as a way to interact with people in times of need, which I have done my whole life as a psychologist and also in educational context to share kind of our life stance and live that out in every kind of flexible environment, particularly university where people are starting to form some of their opinions about how to live so different being a chaplain to 75-year-old who’s dying of cancer and a 20-year-old student in university, who is not really sure they want to follow their parents’ faith. So I don’t necessarily think of it as a big ethical issue other than there are ethics around care that we all share that are pretty common, and whether you’re a psychologist or a social worker, a chaplain, a priest, or whatever, which is to really honour people in a time of need.

And I would say our difference is that we don’t have much dogma to rely on for guidance. We don’t have a book that we turn to and says, in chapter 3 of John, it says, and or in Quran on this hadiths application, we don’t have that. We really are getting at it by our own internal kind of inculcation of humanist values and humanist principles that we may have lived out before we ever knew we were humanists. So the ethics of it are really a combination, probably what we would call care ethics, which is probably a primate extrapolation from having children and being in groups to cooperate where you take care of each other, even like primates do. There is also a more scientific way to look at ethics, which is John Mill’s pragmatic, utilitarian approach, which particular approach helps the most people and what hurts the most people. And that’s not particularly a care ethic. It is care to be very individualized, whereas utilitarian ethics are numbers, and you have to have data, right? So, for example, the whole idea of whether you should get vaccinated in Canada? Do we allow churches to avoid vaccination, saying, “It’s our religious right”? And yet they could be carriers. So I would say that the utilitarian principle there is, yeah, it may violate some of your personal freedom, but in the long run, it’s going to help your congregation and your children and your neighbours. So why don’t you think about it that way? And that’s more data.

Jacobsen: How is chaplaincy something integral to acting out the humanist life stance?

Shoemaker: Okay, let’s see. I would say that as a life stance, which is a concept that has become popular among a number of writers, and I can’t remember the name of the guy who actually wrote about Humanism as a lifestance. But what it does is it allows you to be a personal model for some of the things that are pretty essential to our core principles, and that is that’s the way you decide around what’s right and wrong and what’s the correct action, which is an epistemic principle, which is that we do that by human experience, need in science and evidence. We don’t do it with a 3000-year-old cultural morality book of laws. That’s part of our life stance. We don’t turn to those books to tell us what to do.

We have other kinds of evidential ways of doing that and often “skepticism” to say what the conditions would be or what would fail. And I’m trying to understand those. So you have a more sophisticated look at it rather than a blank, dogmatic rule. I also think the life stance for us, which is very relevant today with climate change and potential crisis, is that we are naturalistic beings and are part of evolutionary life on this planet, but we don’t know if it exists anywhere else. But we don’t consider ourselves so unique that we can screw up the Earth, and God will take care of us. So I think that’s a very important part of our life stance now, particularly given how our human skill sets and technologies have faced much of the world.

So I think that’s a large part of our life stance now that didn’t used to be that way. Maybe back in the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Industrial Age. I also think that there are some social lifestyle considerations because we do believe in individual free will. But I also think that we have an interdependence on each other. And the power of groups to get stuff done and be aware of our biases and the noise that groups can make by just giving adherents to the strongest speakers in the group and forming patterns of bias. That’s all part of becoming living a life stance is knowing how you can screw up in these groups, but yet use them and the power of the group to move forward with progressive initiatives. And then finally, the last couple, I would say, certainly there’s an ethical way to live out, which for me has to do with the dignity of every human being and learning how to show care, which has a lot of meaning. And if you do that over time, then you have a character that is very altruistic, and you can very naturally not have problems helping other people out. So that’s a life stance for me. And that’s why I am a chaplain, as opposed to just a private practice psychologist where I charge $200 an hour and only the wealthy can come and see me. I think there’s self-actualization, which is a big component of human life, which is that I’m responsible now for my own happiness.

And if I screw up, I’m accountable. Nobody else is. And I don’t have anybody else to blame. Joseph Campbell called following your bliss, which is an interesting hybrid work because it has to do with a kind of psychological blessing. And yet he was a good Catholic, and I think following your bliss really means an intuitive thing that really brings you joy and meaning. And so I think part of the humanist lifestyle is you got to figure that out. Nobody’s going to tell me that you got to figure it out. The final one probably is a more social concept of justice rather than just one-on-one, which has to do with our primate application of fairness, which you can see monkeys sharing with each other when somebody has something to eat without the hierarchy of the alpha male ramming it down your throat and giving you a licking. It’s a form of justice that has more to do with civil discourse and human rights and the procedures of using a civil litigation system to make sure that people are protected from the laws of your country. So those all, for me, are part of the life stance, and it’s living out those things every day through good habits and being willing to question yourself and notice when you screw up and admit that.

Jacobsen: What were some of the earliest moves for humanist chaplaincy in Canada?

Shoemaker: As I alluded to earlier, we are the new kids on the block, and there are a few other denominations and certain cults that don’t have chaplains, like pagans and some of the ancient Celtic Druid religions. But most of the major religious groups have had chaplains, and the chaplaincy in Christianity goes all the way back to the first chaplains at Cambridge in the 13th century. Christianity has an 800-year history in this, whereas we have about 12 years; there is just a slight difference there.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Shoemaker: And we, as I said when our first chaplain volunteered, Gail McCabe, at the University of Toronto, she was followed shortly by Mary Beattie, who is a professional librarian and very aware of a lot of the policy issues. Great reference individual. She brought a lot of wisdom that she has as a humanist chaplain to her website. Then, I became the third chaplain in Canadian history when I joined KPU in 2014, and I was the only secular chaplain west of Toronto. But now we have a fourth chaplain at the University of Ottawa, who was finishing the double doctorate at The University of Ottawa and has gone through an accreditation process, is actually helping us with our committee and our training, and she is the fourth one we have.

So I think that we are just getting started. We have some significant barriers that we have faced in the past and will continue to face. But the good news is that this year, 2022, we will approve the first humanist chaplain at the end of any military in North America. The U.S. doesn’t have it. They’ve been blocked. It’s a very political issue with the religious right and the traditional religions. And although there’s an atheist military group run by Jason Torpy, we are going to be the first group of humanists nationally to get approval. And that’s because we took an already approved chaplain in the military, who is moving over to our worldview from a traditional religion. I can’t go into any more detail about it because it’s somewhat private at this point in time, but it is going to happen next year, and it’s going to be headlined. Canadian Humanism accredits and has authorized the first humanist chaplain in military history in North America. That’s exciting. So we’re the new kid on the block, but we were moving fast, man, we’re jumping over buildings here.

Jacobsen: Also, as you alluded a bit, what is your record and history as a humanist chaplain in Canada?

Shoemaker: My personal record is I have been a psychologist for 50 years. So the idea of moving into some kind of an advisor role as a chaplain was pretty automatic for me, particularly since before I [reconverted], I actually was thinking about the ministry, and I went to a conservative but old seminary in Southern California called Fuller Theological Seminary, where I got both my Ph.D. in clinical psych and a master’s in Christian thought and theology. So, I actually could qualify to be a chaplain in the institution because I do have a master’s degree. So, it wasn’t problematic for me to be accepted in an institution like a university. In fact, they actually invited me to apply after hearing some of the lectures I gave in SMU and our senior administrator and student services, who I happen to think is probably a secular or agnostic or something, actually reached out to us and asked us to send somebody. That’s very unusual, Scott, that doesn’t usually happen. But if it’s going to be happening more particularly in Canada, because of such high numbers of secularity, particularly out west here in B.C., less so in the Maritimes and less so in the Prairies. But I think the Canadian government and I think the military understand that there is a tremendous number of nonbelievers, irreligious atheists, agnostics, secular free thinkers, whatever you want to call them in the military, and they have some uncomfortableness going to traditional religious chaplains. So my record, I think, is going to a school like a college where I am in the space center was a very natural encore career for me from being a psychologist and sort of semi-retiring, but still want to stay inside of a caring and the guiding and advising role, even if I’m doing this volunteer.

But honestly, when my family was growing up, and I had to make almost six years here in Canada, I couldn’t have been a chaplain unless I just volunteered for a very short time because of this. And until we get approval for some alternative kinds of degrees other than these M.Div. degrees and masters of theology and spiritual care degrees, it is not going to pay because the institutions that pay hospitals, a few prisons and the military pay well actually. We haven’t really been approved because we don’t fit the slots of education that are traditionally set aside by the great churches of history. They’ve dominated what it takes to be a chaplain. And as I say, as a new kid on the block, we’re getting lots of support now because there are people who are chaplains who would like to identify as a humanist because they’ve already read deep into their history and into the theology and into the textual criticism of their holy books. And they realize there’s a lot of shams there, and they don’t believe anymore. But to keep going, they have to stay in their particular belief system as we offer this, and they can stay a chaplain but change the label on their lapel or get a lot of movement.

Jacobsen: What are the current projects important for the advancement of humanist chaplaincy in Canadian society, as well as becoming more accepted as a non-supernatural alternative to celebrations of life?

Shoemaker: Yeah, I think humanist chaplains are going to be embraced very easily, particularly if we are well trained in world religions and multi-faith and multicultural interfaith environments, which I like to call pluralism pubs and their hubs of lots of different views. So I think that we will be welcomed except by the most extreme and most threatening religious people. And that could be just an individual issue, not really within the major making demand of that particular organization. So I think that our advancement, the biggest barrier we have at this point in time, is two things: education, which now requires some kind of master’s degree in theology or divinity or spiritual care that’s not relevant to humanists. Those are not the things that we are particularly motivated by. We’re motivated by other things. You might be interested more in how to counsel and a more [psychotherapy] approach or an educational approach or a client-centred kind of exchange to help release the potential of whatever client we’re working with. So, I think the education barrier is the biggest one in front of us.

And the second one is funding, and that is we don’t have deep pockets. , we’re fortunate that we have an association that’s growing here in Canada and even here in BCHA, where I work and live. I basically give enough money to the organization to pay the fee I have to pay to be a chaplain. Otherwise, it would have to come out of their budget. So I think that that’s a major problem because if you have a family or if you need to start a career and buy a house, et cetera, et cetera, chaplaincy is a very tenuous path. Unless you go through the traditional education, are certified, and can work in a hospital or for the government in some institution. So far, we only have institutions of learning, and they don’t pay, and those in the military will get paid, and they’ll get paid well. They get paid about $60000 a year. So, shielding funding, but that’s the minority. So I would say funds in education are the two biggest ones, not that we won’t be accepted by our peers.

Jacobsen: What would you like to be your legacy as a humanist and as a humanist chaplain?

Shoemaker: Legacy is probably something that enters my mind a little bit more at my age. , the closer I get, the 80s and the years of some kind of cerebral efficiency are still in my grasp. I would say at this point in time, I’m just starting to accumulate that, and it’s going to come out, I think, predominantly as an educator and promoter of this chaplaincy initiative is just getting started. I’m on the accreditation committee. I have the honour of being the first accredited humanist chaplain in Canadian history, which I am very humbled by, and I’m not sure I should have got it because I certainly wasn’t the first in the country. But be that as it may, I would like to say we’re writing a book, Trixie and I, and that book is the proceeds of that book. I want to fund chaplaincy education and chaplaincy promotion and to expand the rules that we can find where chaplains can be paid. I’m a psychologist who did a lot of career counselling and did a lot of coaching. So, I want to leverage my psychological skill set and my experience of consulting and organizations to help chaplains not only work in prisons and hospitals but also in the military and schools.

I would like to see us get into the community particularly; I’d like to see our work in organizations as kind of humanist ethics collaborators and advisors and actually coach executives and the kind of things that will put their employees in a position of being dignified and will be a voice for balancing out the profit motive and capitalism with the way we treat our people in these organizations and our clients. So that’s one of the legacies I like to live, leaving [this] kind of a hybrid between my consulting industrial organization, teaching background, and chaplaincy as a career. It can pay and be honoured and have some status within the consulting community because that’s the training that I have, and I’ve made this switch over relatively easily. But when we start with a 25-year-old, he doesn’t have any psychological training but wants to be an ambassador for Humanism and needs to get paid. We’ve got to find other ways than just governmental institutions. So, probably, the legacy that I would like to leave is education and finding ways to make reasonably wage-earning careers as chaplains.

Jacobsen: Dr. Shoemaker, thank you very much for the opportunity and your time.

Shoemaker: Did you get enough stuff?

Jacobsen: I think so.

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