Editorial: Religion and Health

Abstract

For a variety of reasons, religion and faith, with their accompanying beliefs and practices, are once more becoming overtly visible in public life and discourse. Sometimes this increased visibility focuses on problems such as accommodating the needs of groups of service users or staff. Sometimes it ranges round the increased role that religion and faith might have in promoting and providing better health and care services. One thing seems to be clear; religion in all its many forms and manifestations is not something that can be ignored in publicly used and provided health services. It is here, and it is here to stay. In fact, faith and religion never went away. If the blinkers of a certain kind of secularist Enlightenment rationalism are removed, it is clear that religion and faith communities have been integral to the philosophy, formulation, delivery and motivation for providing health care in the West. From the hospices of medieval Europe right up to the hospices inspired by the palliative care movement, religion has been a motivating and sometimes an inhibiting force. It has often been intrinsic not only to institutional and social provision, but also to personal motivation, practice and survival. The health service in most developed nations accommodates a variety of patient beliefs and practices, and draws professionals from an increasingly diverse range of backgrounds. In the contemporary context of enormous religious pluralism in supposedly secular society and liberal, egalitarian health care structures, the time has come to reprise critically the nature, place and actual and potential position and contribution of religion and faith groups in all their aspects. Should religion, for example, be