Religious Literacy as a Clinical Competency in Clinical Pastoral Education in the USA: Reframing Hospital Chaplaincy Formation for Pluralistic Healthcare

Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) has long shaped hospital chaplaincy through supervised clinical practice, pastoral reflection, self-awareness, and formation in the use of self. These strengths remain essential, but religious diversity in the USA increasingly requires chaplains to navigate beliefs, rituals, family systems, and moral frameworks that can affect medical decision-making. Using a theoretical and conceptual synthesis of interdisciplinary literature from chaplaincy studies, religion and health, palliative care, and religious literacy scholarship, this article examines the USA healthcare context and argues that religious literacy should be treated as a formal clinical competency within CPE rather than as an informal supplement to pastoral presence. Religious literacy is framed not as memorization of facts about world religions but as the capacity to recognize traditions as internally diverse, historically changing, culturally embedded, and clinically consequential. The synthesis identifies five competency domains: tradition-sensitive knowledge, critical self-awareness, patient-centered inquiry, consultation, and interprofessional communication. Integrating these domains into didactics, verbatims, supervision, community consultation, and assessment may strengthen ethical, accurate, and patient-centered spiritual care in pluralistic healthcare environments.