Faith influences attitudes toward health, healing, and the role of healing practitioners in the lives of individuals and their communities. Because of this intersection between faith and wellness, it is critical for nurses to be sensitive to diverse patient backgrounds and belief systems. By understanding multiple faith systems and how those systems' worldviews impact patient attitudes, behaviors, and communication styles, nurses can provide more appropriate and effective interventions. Even if the majority of patients are of the same background as the nurse, it is necessary to remain open to alternative worldviews. Moreover, even within one faith category individual differences will warrant scrutiny towards the patient's attitudes toward existential questions.
Christianity is itself a highly diverse faith. Different denominations espouse various attitudes toward illness and health, healing and wellness. Therefore, the nurse should never assume that all Christian patients have the same values. When it comes to working with patients from radically different religious backgrounds such as Buddhism or Hinduism, then the nurse faces additional challenges. Agreeing with the patient's worldview or theology is unnecessary for delivering optimal holistic care, because there are always ways to find points of reference and work with those on the path to healing. In Called to Care, Shelly & Miller (2006) point out that there are several core questions nurses can contemplate for understanding multiple worldviews. Those questions address issues such as the nature of prime reality, the nature of daily reality, and the nature of human beings. The essential questions also pertain to critical care concerns such as belief in life after death and issues related to morality. Knowledge and authority are also key components of the patient's worldview. It is important to address all aspects of worldview to develop a cohesive paradigm for nursing.
As Shelly & Miller (2006) point out, Christian nurses locate the answers to critical questions in the Bible. Other religions look towards their respective sacred texts. The answers to these core questions determine the individual's fundamental assumptions, attitudes, emotions, and beliefs, and these can tremendously influence health care decisions and behaviors. When the patient's worldview differs radically from that of the nurse, finding common ground becomes essential to promote respect and communication in health care. Buddhism, for example, is a religion that is as diverse as Christianity in that many different nations and cultures practice their own form and there are several sects of the faith. Because Buddhism differs significantly from Christianity, Christian nurse may be initially perplexed to meet Buddhists from places like Vietnam or Taiwan and find that they do not necessarily believe in God but do believe in life after death. Finding the critical common components shared by all belief systems is a preferable and more constructive starting point than fixating on the points of divergence between faiths. When working with patients from diverse backgrounds, it is also important to know how important faith or religion is for that individual, rather than assuming the person's worldview is religious in nature at all. Many patients will deny the efficacy of faith.
Common critical components to all religions and belief systems include the efficacy of religion in promoting moral behavior, health-seeking behavior, and community identity. Research has shown that religious affiliations, regardless of the type of faith, is linked with better health outcomes (Yeary, et al., 2011). Some of the connection between religion and health can be explained in part by health behaviors triggered by social norms and other psychosocial issues, but social capital generated by religion also plays an important role in ensuring the individual's access to health care and impetus to seek care (Yeary, et al., 2011). Deistic religions offer the opportunity for individuals to pray to their God (or gods), with the firm belief that those deities will offer either a direct intervention in the form of healing, or will alternatively offer the means by which to gain psychological acceptance of the outcome, even if that outcome is mortality. Religions of all types assuage fears of death and thus, even non-deistic religions like Buddhism share in common with deistic religions an acknowledgement that the physical body is only one small part of the totality of being. Fear of death is counteracted by faith in all cases except for those who deny religion altogether.
Patients whose faith background differs from that of their health care practitioner will want respect more than anything. Respect means that the nurse does not impose any one method of prayer, instead permitting the patient to meditate or communicate...
Nurses can also warmly invite friends and family members who can offer spiritual support during the patient's program of healing, as one of the core components of all religions is the sense of community fostered by faith.
While Buddhism and Christianity share in common elements like community and a belief in some kind of life after death, these two faiths exhibit major differences on the seven key dimensions of worldview as outlined by Shelly & Miller (2006). Those differences and their potential points of convergence are as follows.
1. Prime Reality
Prime reality for the Christian is answered relatively simply: it is God as Creator of the Universe. However, some Christians might emphasize the dualistic nature of prime reality more than others. The Buddhist concept of prime reality is quite literally nothingness, as the Buddhist believes that all reality is temporary, fleeting, and impermanent. Unlike Christians, Buddhists do not believe in God. The Buddha is an enlightened human being, not a deity or even a prophet of God. As an enlightened being, Buddha understood prime reality via a life dedicated to meditation and ascription to basic moral behaviors. One's view of prime reality underscores all other aspects of the worldview, influencing the large paradigms through which the patient views health, wellness, healing, and health care systems.
2. Nature of the World Around Us
The Christian and Buddhist worldviews of mundane reality are somewhat similar to the nature of prime reality, particularly for the Buddhist. For the Buddhist, the world around us is transitory and impermanent, and therefore of no lasting importance except for the fact that human actions do have direct and tangible consequences: a phenomenon known as the law of karma (Monier-Williams, 1889). Connected with its predecessor faith Hinduism in a way similar to the connection between Christianity and its predecessor faith Judaism, Buddhism sets out to show the practitioner that the body and all other elements of the natural world and daily life are impermanent. The goal is non-attachment, which is an attitude that will undoubtedly impact health behaviors among patients. Christian patients are not indoctrinated to believe that non-attachment is a goal, and yet the act of placing all faith in Christ confers a similar type of psychological and spiritual surrender. In both cases, the patient perceives that there is more to life (and death) than what the human being is capable of knowing at this time.
3. What is Human Being?
For the Christian, the answer to this question is outlined directly and explicitly in the Bible. God created human beings in His image: "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them," (Genesis 1:27). Human beings are God's creation and God's extension of His love for all creation. For the Buddhist, there is no similar moment of creation and there is also no creator-God. Rather, human beings simply exist and are characterized by potential for suffering due to persistent craving, desire, and attachment (Matsuoka, 2005). Whereas the Christian goal of human life is to have faith in Christ and therefore achieve eternal life through Him, the Buddhist goal of human life is to reach a state of enlightenment or pure knowing, which is itself characterized by the conscientious release of suffering, desire and attachment. The role of the human being in the universe will determine the patient's attitudes toward health care and their own responsibilities for health decisions.
4. What Happens After Death?
Death is a focal point both in Christianity and in Buddhism. The Christian and the Buddhist are both taught that death is not to be feared, but for different reasons. For the Christian, death is not to be feared because through faith we can achieve eternal life. The message of Christ is essentially that eternal life comes through death. Interestingly, the Buddhist worldview is not dissimilar even though Christ plays no role in that worldview. The Buddhist believes that death is only a transition point, as well as the end of the physical body. Enlightenment may liberate the Buddhist practitioner from the otherwise perpetual cycle of life, death, and rebirth (Monier-Williams, 1889). Desire is what creates attachments, leading to rebirth. The Buddhist seeks to die and never again be reborn as the individual consciousness dissolves into the collective energy of the universe (Monier-Williams, 1889). Beliefs in life after death strongly impact decisions regarding end of life care and impacts patients with terminal illnesses.
5. Why is it Possible to Know Anything?
In the Buddhist worldview, there are different…
