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

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 re-articulation to the constructs of liminal competence and the recognition paradigm, offering a sociologically grounded account of how a contemplative profession might retain its distinctiveness.