Make spirituality normal again
77 years ago, Britain did something crazy. It founded a health service that assumed everybody had the right to receive care.
On the 5th of July 1948, the National Health Service opened it’s doors, and it offered medical treatment for free at the point of use for the whole population. This wasn't a private charity, but it was the result of a Labour government who were determined to make a welfare state out of the rubble of war. Prime Minister Clement Attlee appointed South Wales miner-turned-politician Aneurin Bevan as the Minister of Health, and together they shepherded the National Health Service Act 1946 through Parliament and negotiated with reluctant doctors and dentists.
The NHS is now woven into British identity. Yet, it’s founding story is important in how we see ourselves. The system was created to care for bodies—i.e. stitches, operations, and vaccinations. The assumption behind the service was that physical illness is real and it demands a collective response. But it left behind a different kind of issue: mental health. Keeping the mind healthy by contrast, was largely left in the shadows. In 1948, people with mental illness were locked away in Victorian asylums and stigmatised with words like lunacy and mental deficiency. It would take decades for society to recognize that a real healthy person is mind and body.
There were various plans through the 50s and 60s to try and aid people with mental health, but shockingly, it wasn't until 1999 when the National Service Framework for Mental Health came into being. In the early 2000s, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) produced its first guidelines around schizophrenia, and since then more than 80 pieces of mental health guidance have been issued. And it wasn't till the 2019 NHS Long-Term Plan promised 24/7 crisis response services and a major expansion of mental health provision. That plan is underfunded and has much left to do. All the major shifts advancing mental health integration have happened within my lifetime. I can’t believe it was that recent!
There's a phrase which has only just come into being recently—policymakers have started talking about the parity of esteem. The idea that mental health should have equal status with physical health. Equal access to services, equal quality of care and equal resources allocated based on need, And even now, the journey is far from over.
The reason for that little tour through history is that it's clear that we humans resist integration. We draw neat lines around our bodies and medicalize them, and only recently have we expanded the circle to include the mind. But I think a big problem that still remains is that spirituality—the soul—is still left on the outside. Even though this is the place from which we make meaning, build hope, trust, and love. All essential things for human life- let alone flourishing.
A holistic approach to healthcare means we needs to support the whole person, including their physical, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the soul and the body are not two separate substances but one composite being—that we are neither ghosts nor machines. The Eastern theologian Irenaeus famously said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." And more contemporary periphery theologians like N.T. Wright emphasize the embodied nature of faith—that we are what we love and how we love, not merely what we think. Dallas Willard spoke about the renovation of the heart as the ultimate project of discipleship. Each of these voices, and way more across history, tell us that human flourishing can't be restricted to the physical or even the psychological. We are ultimately mind, body, and soul.
So what would it look like to normalize spirituality in a culture that has only just acknowledged mental health?
We could expand our definition of care. If the NHS was born to prevent people dying because they were poor, perhaps the next radical step is to prevent people from withering because their souls are starved. We accept that stress and trauma warrant therapy—could we accept that spiritual crisis—questions of meaning, guilt, loss, transcendence—warrant pastoral and communal care? As the founder of the NHS, Bevan insisted that inability to pay should never bar someone from medical treatment. Might we insist the inability to believe or belong should never bar someone from spiritual companionship?
Chaplains are already around in hospitals, prisons, and schools. But what if they could be woven even more deeply into mental health teams, the community, and GP practices? People experiencing depression and anxiety often carry spiritual questions too. We seem to enjoy privatizing those questions or treating them as irrelevant, but we could provide spiritual professionals to accompany people in greater depth. This isn't about proselytising, but it is recognising that meaning-making is a part of healing.
Tell better stories. The story of the NHS began with a vision—a society that refused to let people die because they were poor. The story of mental health reform began with the belief that minds matter as much as bodies. To normalise spirituality, we need a story that values the soul. Perhaps it begins with the ancient intuition that each person bears the imago Dei—the image of God—and that to care for one another is to honour that image.
Use different labels. The label religion doesn't seem to have much weight or use in modern society, largely in part because it deals with things both unseen and sometimes untreatable. But I think Jesus would balk at the idea that it has it’s own societal category when religion is to do with how we live our life. It’s about how we connect with the world and the people around us, how deeply we can live in harmony with God and the impact of our lives will touch on areas like health, business, politics, entertainment, and work. Normalising spirituality means being honest about the deep roots of words, but also being able to use labels which invite rather than exclude. I don't want to defend our vocabulary; I want to explore venturing into new language.
