Narrating the position of spiritual well-being in history
Fisher et al. (2002) describes the phrase spiritual well-being as a new term which links spirituality to health. They maintain that the term was coined by the National Interfaith Coalition on Aging (NICA) in 1975. Payne (1990) locates the signifier four years earlier, at the 1971 White House Conference on Aging. She describes “historical accident and public policy” and avoids “church-and-state issues” leading to the development of the concepts of spirituality and spiritual well-being, with Moberg’s paper for this conference provid-ing the initiative to develop the concepts further. Heintzman and Mannell (2003) locate the roots of spiritual well-being in the quality of life movement of the 1960s and 1970s which suggested the significance of spirituality to wellness. They describe developments in the health and wellness counselling literature from the 1980s onwards which identify spiritual health and wellness as significant components of a holistic health perspective.
This has been challenged in the writings of the self-same Moberg cited above (1984) who gives the construct of spiritual well-being a longer life-span. Moberg argues that enhancing spiritual well-being has always been the central concern of world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Those who call this an emerging field may be perpetuating “a misnomer and an injustice to those pioneers in this field … spirituality has been studied in the fields of counselling and theology, which has been overlooked by mainstream psychology” (Calicchia & Graham, 2006: 310).