Why seminary degrees still matter in an age of TikTok preachers
Anyone with a megaphone can claim spiritual authority, but formal theological training — including humanist divinity programs — matters more than ever.
By Janet Marugg | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
Do we still value Bible colleges or seminaries and theology degrees from divinity schools? Because anyone can make a Bible-verse TikTok, print out some propaganda or hang out a shingle and call themselves a ministry. A gift of gab can turn to grift without the effort of formal study.
Anyone can rap out rhythmic oration, mimic persuasive rhetoric and perform doctrinal passages without any understanding of it whatsoever, and I like to think better of spiritual guidance and pastoral care.
Seminaries are usually sect-specific schools of apologetics focused on doctrinal weaknesses, and if there ever was a faith-builder, it’s a doctrinal weakness. Believing in weak doctrine requires all the faith a person can muster. But a really good theology program encourages students to find what is strong and beautiful in religious belief systems. All of them.
The depth and breadth of a good religious education provide serious students of the divine with a stronger scaffolding for religious professing. In addition to Scripture or doctrinal studies, good religious education will include historical contexts, preterism, philosophy, linguistic limitations, spiritual experience (including neurology), ethics and such. It makes sense that leaders for the Highest should have the highest knowledge, if only to avoid false witnessing.
Spiritual guidance is a serious job. The intellectually honest atheist can acknowledge that religions do a lot of psychological and social work for us. Religious practices can provide humans with attachment theory, community bonding, mortality management, identity formation, ritualized nervous system regulation, intergenerational meaning-transfer from ancestors, grief containment, social belonging, moral scaffolding and narrative coherence.
The best theological programs encourage students to ask, “What is strong and beautiful without religion?” and even the most faithful theological students can learn that there is a place just for humans. It turns out, a person can make meaning all by herself, acquire and maintain a personal morality and settle into a home-liness of unperforming for religious approval. A person can conceive of ways to behave that are done not because someone is watching, but because they are watching themselves.
The case for humanist divinity programs
Unsurprisingly, I am a celebrant of divinity schools with Humanist Studies programs that prepare students with a non-theistic, ethics-based worldview. Today’s divinity students can study humanist philosophy, pastoral care, social justice and community leadership for chaplains, celebrants or organizational leaders.
Humanist programs produce human beings who can, in fact, conduct themselves in ways that reduce human harm and maximize wellbeing without the threat of eternal punishment. We can choose to do good things because we like to. Because it feels good. Because helping others is a source of profound joy.
Author Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard Divinity School, writes in “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe,” “The fact that we live without God is, in a sense, not up to us. It’s not really a choice … But goodness is a choice. It is the most important choice we can ever make. And we have to make it again and again, throughout our lives and in every aspect of our lives.”
Atheists may consider doctrinal maps useless in a shifty world, but I no longer think that religious credentials are meaningless when everyone has a megaphone and a lot of nonsense. When the invisible and the non-existent look very much alike, there is the finest line between pastoring and punditry.
Many Christian denominations, Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques prefer pastoral carers with formal certifications and degrees as evidence of training in doctrinal studies, theology, counseling and leadership, but it’s not required by law. Humanity deserves ethical and professional standards for spiritual scaffolding.
The requirements for pulpited religious leadership should be steep. For reciprocity’s sake, the asking of people to give our hearts and minds — our lives — to a belief system likely to disappoint us should cost religious leaders dearly — maybe even everything.
That is my unqualified, unpulpited opinion.
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Excellent defense, Janet, of the need for clergy to be well and deeply trained to understand different faith traditions, including secular humanism, and to provide spiritual guidance. I fear that too often non-denominational megachurches are led by people trained only in effectively displaying their ego.