ABSTRACT
The matter of how religion is responded to in healthcare services is one of international relevance. How do healthcare organisations manage the religious diversity that characterises most societies today? To what extent is spirituality related to the core business of healthcare? Should healthcare organisations delegate this matter to specialised spiritual care (chaplaincy) departments or is it the concern of healthcare professionals and the organisation more broadly? These questions are made more complex by the way religious identities intersect with race, gender and class, the complex role religion performs as a force for both social inclusion and exclusion, and the contested nature of secularism. In this chapter, we draw on a programme of research that examines religious and cultural plurality in Canadian healthcare,1 to tell a story of reluctant accommodation. We focus on how the role of religion in the public space of healthcare is constructed and what this means for religious inequalities. Our concluding comments offer a call to move beyond reluctant accommodation to responsible pluralism and equity.
