Better together: a critical survey of conceptions of religious literacy and analysis of the implications for application to healthcare in the USA

Healthcare and religion are deeply intertwined facets of human experience. Each has existed as long as the other, and influences between them are accordingly protean. This is true globally and especially in the USA, one of the most religiously diverse industrialised nations but, ironically, also one plagued by a paucity of religious literacy (RL). This paper will argue that US healthcare settings are particularly treacherous areas regarding the lack of RL. Although recent decades have witnessed increased awareness of the importance of religion/spirituality (R/S) for patients, the ability of healthcare providers to incorporate R/S in the care of their patients is lacking, due largely to a lack of RL. This paper will examine how work in this area has been limited by a lack of agreement on how to define RL, by several barriers to the religiously literate provision of spiritual care, and by the lack of a quantitative instrument with which to measure RL. Reviewing four prominent notions of RL-based on (1) Knowledge, (2) Understanding, (3) Faith and (4) Practice-this paper will further argue that one of these (understanding) is most amenable to application to healthcare but is informed in important ways by the other three, which function better together with the one.