Better Together: A Critical Survey of Conceptions of Religious Literacy, and Analysis of Their Implications for Application to Healthcare Settings in the United States

Abstract

Healthcare and religion are deeply intertwined facets of human experience. Each has existed as long as the other in human history, and influences between them are accordingly protean. This is true globally and especially in the United States, which is one of the most religiously diverse industrialized nations but, ironically, also one plagued by religious illiteracy. This thesis will argue that United States healthcare settings are particularly treacherous areas regarding the lack of religious literacy. Although recent decades have witnessed an increased awareness among scholars and some healthcare providers of the importance of religion/spirituality for patients in these settings, the ability of healthcare providers to incorporate religion/spirituality in the care of their patients is lacking, due in large part to a lack of religious literacy. This thesis will examine how work in this area has been limited by a lack of agreement on how to define religious literacy, by several barriers to the religiously literate provision of spiritual care, and by the lack of a quantitative instrument with which to measure religious literacy. Reviewing four prominent notions of religious literacy – based on 1) knowledge, 2) understanding, 3) faith, and 4) practice – this thesis will further argue that an understanding-based notion of religious literacy is most amenable to application to healthcare but is informed in important ways by the other three, which function better together with the one.