Blurred Religion in Contemporary Sweden: Health Care Institutions as an Empirical Example

Abstract

The aim of the article is to highlight the blurred religious situation in contemporary Sweden on an individual level by studying religious needs and practices among patients in the Swedish health care system. Focus is on how religious issues are handled by the health care givers and how patients wish it would be handled. The empirical material for the article is twenty-seven in-depth interviews with former patients and representatives from the health care chaplaincy. The results of the study show that there can be a need for religion when one is hospitalized, that these patients wish that their religious needs and practices would be respected and facilitated, and that the blurred religious situation in Sweden is prevalent at the hospitals, but the hospitals—being foremost affected by the processes of secularization—have a tendency not to take this into consideration.