ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ways in which religion might have a particular significance within health and social care. This appears to be one of the most populated front lines for religious literacy, where public professionals meet great numbers of individuals and a growing diversity of spiritual beliefs and needs. In relation to training for the public professions, students have come to almost entirely lack a framework for thinking or engaging well with religion and belief, yet globalisation, migration, equality and human rights discourses put them in daily contact with the greatest religious and belief diversity in history. Secular literacy is an inescapable part of religious literacy because secularity is the assumed context of religiousness. The use of proxies may itself be indicative of the religious literacy problem, reflecting the inability to talk well about religion and belief, which is identified as a core starting point of the problem.
