Ontological Jurisdiction and Professional Drift: A Sociological Analysis of De-Differentiation in Spiritual Care

Spiritual care professions like spiritual direction and chaplaincy are losing their distinct professional identity by voluntarily adopting the language, credentials, and outcome measures of psychotherapy and counseling. Their original jurisdiction rested on an ontological claim—that experiences such as vocation, discernment, and being addressed by something beyond the self are real and not reducible to psychology. Drawing on sociological theories of professional boundaries and institutional mimicry, the article argues this absorption occurs not through external pressure but through practitioners' own imitation of therapeutic professions to gain legitimacy. Reversing this trend requires explicitly re-articulating what the authors call ontological jurisdiction, grounded in concepts like liminal competence and recognition.

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Abstract

Spiritual care occupations-spiritual direction and professional chaplaincy chief among them-occupy a professional jurisdiction whose cognitive foundation is not a body of techniques but an ontological commitment: the claim that the phenomena they address (vocation, discernment, encounter, the experience of being addressed by something exceeding the self) are real in a manner not exhaustively reducible to intrapsychic process.Drawing on Abbott's theory of professional jurisdiction and DiMaggio and Powell's account of institutional isomorphism, this article argues that these occupations are undergoing a process of professional de-differentiation, by which a once-distinct jurisdiction loses its boundary and is progressively absorbed into the adjacent jurisdiction of psychotherapy and counseling.The mechanism is not external displacement but voluntary mimicry: practitioners adopt the lexicon, credentialing logic, and outcome-measurement regime of the therapeutic professions because these constitute the legitimated currency of the contemporary helping-profession field, and in doing so concede the very cognitive ground that constituted their jurisdiction.Locating this drift within the broader Weberian process of disenchantment and the rise of a therapeutic culture, the article identifies three isomorphic mechanisms operating across four domains of practice, and proposes that re-differentiation depends on the explicit re-articulation of what is here termed the profession's ontological jurisdiction.The analysis connects this rearticulation to the constructs of liminal competence and the recognition paradigm, offering a sociologically grounded account of how a contemplative profession might retain its distinctiveness.