Traveling in the new year? It is very likely there is a chapel or meditation room tucked away somewhere in one of the airports you’ll pass through. Sixteen of the country’s 20 largest airports have chapels, as do many more around the world.

I am a sociologist of contemporary American religion and have written two recent articles about airport chaplains and chapels. My interest in airport chapels started as simple curiosity – why do airports have chapels and who uses them? After visiting a few – including the chapel at Logan, my home airport here in Boston – I have concluded that they reflect broader changing norms around American religion.

How airports came to have chapels

The country’s first airport chapels were intended for staff rather than passengers and were established by Catholic leaders in the 1950s and 1960s to make sure their parishioners could attend mass.

The first one in the U.S., Our Lady of the Airways, was built by Boston Archbishop Richard J. Cushing at Logan airport in 1951 and it was explicitly meant for people working at the airport. A neon light pointed to the chapel and souvenir cards handed out at the dedication read,

“We fly to thy patronage, O Holy Mother of God; despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us away from all dangers, O glorious and blessed virgin.”

Our Lady of the Airways inspired the building of the country’s second airport chapel, Our Lady of the Skies at what was then Idlewild – and is today John F. Kennedy airport in New York City.

Protestant chapels came later. The first was in New York – again at JFK. It was designed in the shape of a Latin cross and was joined by a Jewish synagogue in the 1960s. These chapels were located at a distance from the terminals: Passengers wishing to visit them had to go outside. They were later razed and rebuilt in different area of JFK.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Protestant chapels opened in Atlanta, and in several terminals of the Dallas airport in Texas.

Becoming more inclusive

By the 1990s and 2000s, single faith chapels had become a “dying breed.”Most started to welcome people from all religions. And many were transformed into spaces for reflection, or meditation for weary travelers.

The chapel at San Francisco International Airport, for example, known as the Berman Reflection Room for Jewish philanthropist Henry Berman who was a former president of the San Francisco Airport Commission, looks like a quiet waiting room filled with plants and lines of connected chairs. A small enclosed space without any religious symbols or obvious connections to things religious or spiritual is available for services.

The scene at the Atlanta airport chapel is similar, with only a few chairs and clear glass entrances, to provide space for quiet reflection.

Some airports, such as JFK, continue with their “Our Lady” names, indicating their faith-based origins.

Others include religious symbols and objects from a range of religious traditions. The chapel in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, has multiple religious texts alongside prayer rugs, rosary beads and artistically rendered quotes from the world’s major religions.

Pamphlets on topics ranging from grief to forgiveness are available for visitors to take with them at the Charlotte airport.

Different airports, different rules

As these examples show, no two airports have negotiated chapel space in the same way. What is permissible in one city is often not in another. Often, it is local, historical and demographic factors, including the religious composition of the region, that influence decisions. These could even be based on who started the chapel, or how much interreligious cooperation there is in a city.

Certain airports such as Chicago’s O’Hare have strict rules regarding impromptu religious gatherings whether inside the chapel or out. Some use their public address systems to announce religious services. Others prohibit such announcements and do not even allow airport chaplains to put out any signs that could indicate a religious space.

If they are included in airport maps, chapels tend to be designated by the symbol of a person bent in prayer. But even then, they can be difficult to spot. About half of the existing chapels are on the pre-security side of the airport and the other half accessible only after passengers pass through security.

Only four large American airports – Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York’s LaGuardia – do not have chapel spaces, although opening such a space is under consideration. In the interim, at LaGuardia, a Catholic chaplain holds mass in a conference room.

What’s the future?

The reasons for these spaces and their variations are idiosyncratic and intensely local. These chapels reveal a range of approaches to contemporary American religion and spirituality.

So on your travels, keep an eye out for these chapels. Note their similarities and differences and recognize how important local histories are to how church-state issues are resolved – at airports and beyond.

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Boston celebrated its maritime heritage in June by welcoming tall ships from around the world into Boston Harbor for the celebratory event, Sail Boston. Thousands of people visited the magnificent vessels at anchor to learn about Boston’s rich maritime history.

I saw the tall ships with representatives from the New England Seafarers Mission (NESM). Founded in the 1880s by the Swedish Covenant Church, the NESM today serves seafarers in Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts. In Boston, chaplains are connected to the NESM and the Seafarer’s Friend, a second nonprofit organization that brings support and assistance to thousands of seafarers on the ships that pass through the port every day.

Seafarers, or those who work on container ships, tankers and other large commercial vessels, come from all the world – with the largest numbersfrom China, India and the Philippines. Most seafarers work nine months a year at sea, returning home for a short period between contracts.

As a scholar, I have been interested in the history of port chaplains and the work they do with seafarers around the globe. I have interviewed and shadowed many of them in recent years while conducting ongoing research about their work across the United States. I am also working on a larger project on port chaplains that started recently in the U.K.

Most of us barely have contact with the men and women who transport the goods we use every day by ships. Port chaplains provide much-needed services for those who make their living at sea.

Who are port chaplains and what do they do?

A support system around ships

I first learned about port chaplains in 2012 when interviewing chaplains in a range of settings in Boston as part of a broader project. I had never heard of their work and was intrigued as soon as I boarded a vessel and learned that they had been doing this work in Boston since the 1800s. I had heard much in the media and elsewhere about efforts to improve working conditions in garment factories abroad but had not given much thought to how goods get to us as consumers.

As author Rose George argues in her book “Ninety Percent of Everything,” 90 percent of global goods come to us via the global shipping industry, a sector invisible to most of us. While the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs are concerned with the vessel and its cargo, port chaplains are the only people – in Boston and around the world – whose exclusive job it is to care for the crew.

In Boston, representatives from NESM operate from a building in the Boston Cruiseport Terminal. The seafarers served are mostly non-American workers from developing nations who staff the container ships, tankers, cruise ships and “ro-ros” (ships that cars roll on to and off of) that arrive in our ports every day.

Chaplains welcome seafarers to Boston and see if they need any assistance. They sell prepaid SIM cards for voice calling and broadband data (at almost no mark-up). They loan modems so crew can connect with home. They also offer local newspapers and items like puzzles, toiletries and books.

Chaplains at the NESM run a MoneyGram Terminal so seafarers can send paychecks home to loved ones and sell comfort food from around the world in their building adjacent to the cruise ship docks.

A fraction of workers every week are detained, meaning they do not have the visas required to leave their ships while in port. Port chaplains try especially to connect with these seafarers, some of whom go months without leaving their vessels. For those who do have visas, port chaplains take them to visit local malls.

Perhaps most importantly, port chaplains offer a confidential listening ear when a seafarer is ill or if there are problems on board or at home.

History of port chaplains

Port chaplains are not new – they date to the early 19th century in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In Boston, Edward Thompson Taylor and other leaders of Bethel Churches built inns where sailors stayed between voyages. They held educational programs, offered religious services in the sail loft over the arch on Central Wharf and provided religious libraries to departing vessels.

Initially focused on both proselytizing and social services, port chaplains today work across religious traditions through the North American Maritime Ministry Association. They are not permitted to proselytize.

In Boston the work of port chaplains has changed several times, most recently in 1968 when facilities for container ships opened at Castle Island in South Boston and on the Mystic River in Charlestown. Containers allowed crews to be smaller and turnaround times shorter. Rather than bringing seafarers to their inns, port chaplains began to board vessels and connect with crew there.

In 1986, when the port of Boston opened to cruise ships, hundreds more workers arrived regularly on these vessels. As Stephen Cushing, executive director of NESM and a senior chaplain himself, told me, port chaplains adapted again – initially offering rows of telephones just off the vessels and helping cruise ship workers send paychecks to their families back in their countries.

Port chaplains are active at the majority of large ports in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in ports in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa.

Everyday work of port chaplains

As I shadowed port chaplains in Boston and interviewed chaplains in ports across the country, I saw them humanize ports and show foreign workers the United States at its most compassionate and hospitable.

I have seen chaplains use maps and even cookbooks with photos to act as conversation starters and bridge language barriers. They laugh and joke with crew members who have seen no one but each other for weeks at sea. Most of the time, I heard port chaplains talk with seafarers about families, children and the difficulty of being so far away for so long. I watched one chaplain celebrate with a seafarer from the Philippines when he met his newborn by Skype for the first time.

I have seen them provide support in many moments of crisis. I have seen them take seafarers to hospitals. And on occasions that seafarers are not able to continue with the vessel, I have seen how they help with their passage back home.

They are there with seafarers through moments of crisis or pain. I have listened to them provide words of comfort and solace when seafarers have died at sea. In the tragic event of a seafarer’s death at sea, they receive the body and conduct memorial services.

So, as the tall ships recently departed from Boston, I reflected on the importance of the invisible safety nets port chaplains offer as they welcome foreign workers on their brief pause from traveling around the globe.

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