Interfaith Belonging and Spiritual Health: A Conceptual Analysis of Flourishing in a Religiously Diverse Philippines.

Religion-and-health scholarship often emphasizes religiosity and coping while giving less attention to how relationships across religious and worldview differences shape spiritual health. This conceptual study develops a Relational Interfaith Well-Being Framework for the religiously diverse Philippines. Using integrative, concept-driven thematic analysis, the study synthesizes empirical, theoretical, conceptual, and contextual literature and brings six lower-order themes, organized into three higher-order themes, into dialog with Intergroup Contact Theory and Social Identity Theory. Interfaith belonging is proposed as a central relational and institutional condition characterized by equal dignity, accurate identity recognition, meaningful voice, psychological safety, reciprocal participation, and freedom from coercion across religious, spiritual, questioning, disaffiliated, and nonreligious worldviews. Relational interfaith alignment is conceptualized as a provisional multidimensional framework-level mechanism through which contact quality, identity recognition, psychological safety, reciprocal participation, and institutional support may operate in supportive, fragile, critically misaligned, or mixed configurations. Religious identity security, psychological safety, reciprocal interfaith support, institutional inclusion, collective interfaith efficacy, and contact quality function as supporting conditions or pathways. Spiritual health is positioned as the proximal outcome domain, while human flourishing represents the broader outcome domain. The framework further recognizes that majority-minority position varies across localities, institutions, policy issues, socioeconomic positions, and access to decision-making authority, and that interfaith participation is shaped by intragroup diversity and internal coercion. Proposed pathways connect identity threat, concealment, coercion, and exclusion with spiritual distress, while recognition, reciprocity, and institutional protection may support spiritual security, meaningful participation, and access to supportive resources. All relationships remain interpretive, provisional, and subject to empirical testing.