The BYU School of Medicine will be a faith-based one, of course, when it opens in a few years, and that will make it unusual among American medical schools.
“When you think about a couple hundred medical schools across the country, yes, faith-based medical schools are a significant minority, and then within that cluster, there are different charisms and approaches,” says John Hardt, associate professor of bioethics and vice dean for professional formation at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.
How many faith-based medical schools are there in the United States?
Loyola is one of 158 accredited medical schools that grant MDs — doctor of medicine degrees — according to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.
Few of those schools, which educated 75% of American medical students, are religiously affiliated.
Four have Jesuit Catholic ties — Loyola, Creighton, Georgetown and Saint Louis University. Two more are intentionally Christian — nondenominational Belmont and Loma Linda, which is Seventh-day Adventist.
The president of Loma Linda told the Deseret News that its medical school’s religiosity is rare even among that handful of faith-affiliated schools.
“While there are a number of medical schools in this country that began as faith-based institutions, most have not retained that designation or commitment,” Dr. Richard Hart said. “Of the few who still claim to be faith-based, it is primarily in mission statements and does not seem to penetrate other aspects of the school.”
There are 41 additional American medical schools that grant DOs — doctor of osteopathic medicine degrees — according to the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine. A DO is a fully licensed physician who practices a holistic approach to treating the whole person, rather than just symptoms.
Religious affiliations are more common at these schools, which educate a quarter of U.S. medical students and more often than not are private institutions. About 20%-25% of DO-granting medical schools are religiously affiliated. (See a list below.)
They include Liberty University, Baptist Health Sciences University and Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit.
Utah has both kinds of medical schools. The University of Utah grants MDs while Noorda College in Provo and Rocky Vista University in Ivins grant DOs.
BYU’s announcement did not say explicitly whether its medical school will grant MDs or DOs.
How religious are faith-based medical schools?
Loma Linda’s Seventh-day Adventist faith permeates its curriculum and campus, Dr. Hart said.
“While there are quality faculty in many medical schools who are deeply spiritual and teach similar concepts, we are not aware of any other school that makes this level of institutional commitment to spirituality,” he said.
BYU’s devotion to teaching faith alongside secular training in its curriculum is expected to resemble Loma Linda’s among MD-granting medical schools.
The announcement that BYU will launch a medical school was made by the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The three members of the First Presidency also serve as the chairmen of BYU’s board of trustees, and the church sponsors BYU and subsidizes every student’s tuition.
BYU students annually sign an honor code to follow church standards and regularly attend church services. Prayers are held at the beginning of each class. Many campus buildings host Sunday worship services each week. The university’s mission states that “all students at BYU should be taught the truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
A church leader charged new BYU President Shane Reese last fall to be the school’s chief moral and spiritual officer. Reese reiterated the school’s commitment to teach students to be bilingual — to learn spiritual and secular truths — and said Jesus Christ “provides the anchor of our prophetic promise.”
How do religious beliefs affect teaching at faith-based medical schools?
The announcement of BYU’s medical school was brief. No timeline, location or other details were announced, including how faith might inform the curriculum on abortion, contraception or end-of-life issues.
“Those are important ethical issues, right?” Loyola’s Hardt said. “They’re highly contested in our contemporary culture, but there’s this much broader and subtle question about, ‘Who are we training as we train doctors,’ and that, to me, is the real gift that faith-based medical schools can bring to the world.”
Faith-based MD-granting schools do weigh in on those issues.
“We are a Catholic medical school,” Hardt said about Loyola. “We do not train in abortion. We do train for the full knowledge required for accreditation for obstetrics and gynecology.”
Medical students at Catholic schools train at Catholic hospitals guided by the church’s “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services”
“Our hospitals function formally as a ministry of the church that lays out Catholic teaching on those issues in a pamphleted, paragraph-numbered form,” Loyola’s Hardt said.
Those students also work at other hospitals, and Loyola trains students how to evacuate a uterus in an emergency during the delivery of a child.
Hardt teaches bioethics at Loyola and stresses that powder keg issues like abortion should be discussed, but he said they obscure what faith adds to a doctor’s life and are “the least interesting part of our faith-based identity.”
“When we talk about spirituality and faith in medical school, our eyes are always drawn to controversy,” he said, “when the much more interesting and serious questions are: How do we train physicians of compassion, conscience and competence? And what does Christian tradition offer us to help students to become the kinds of physicians that you and I would want to trust with our bodies and the bodies of those we love when they need them?”
Loyola and the other Catholic schools have robust campus ministries. Several faith-based schools sponsor mission trips to provide healthcare in areas that have become doctor deserts.
Still, at some of these faith-based schools, students can opt in or out of having faith be a part of their medical school experience.
Loyola’s atrium wall is emblazoned with Jesus Christ’s words: “When I was sick, you cared for me.”
It is a passive reminder to all.
“Our approach, generally, is one of invitation over imposition on the faith question,” Hardt said, “and that in large part is because our community is so diverse.”
Grounding future doctors in faith
Opting in to some of the faith-based options at Loyola can provide a rich experience.
Outstanding young college graduates often turn to medical school because they want to help others. Medical school training often drums that out of them, Hardt said.
“Medical School is highly formative,” he said. “What we want to do is make sure that it’s not deformative to who they are as human beings, because the stress is high, the demands are high, they live exam to exam, and we don’t want their lives to narrow and for fatigue to breed any bitterness or sadness about the sacrifices they’re making. So we try to keep bringing them back to those deep wells of meaning and purpose that brought them to medicine in the first place.”
So Loyola offers a four-year curriculum called Patient-centered Medicine that draws about 10% of the medical students and engages them in themes of Christian faith related to medicine.
“We do a long unit on the question of theodicy, which is the question of, how can God be loving and powerful in a world in which there are pediatric cancers and natural disasters,” Hardt said. “Given that part of medicine is acclimating yourself to a world of those who suffer, in figuring out how you might be a compassionate person in that world, we think it’s really important that we engage that very hard question: What do we make of a loving and powerful God and the suffering world?”
In the third year, the program offers spiritual exercises in the tradition of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The fourth year includes a palliative care elective.
“One of the challenges of medicine is that one can be shaped into thinking of medicine kind of mechanistically, in which your job is to fix, right?” Hardt said.
“That is certainly part of medicine, but because we’re all mortal human beings, things happen in our lives that will simply not be fixed. Our destiny is eternal, not here, and we’re all going to die. So what is a doctor’s role in accompanying a patient through the process of loss, diminution and ultimately death, and that is part of what we want them to explore in that palliative care elective.”
Is there a demand for faith-based medical schools?
Loma Linda’s religious mission is overt.
“All our students are required to take courses from our School of Religion that deal with Christian ethics, relationships, biblical concepts, understanding world religions, etc.,” Dr. Hart said.
That curriculum generates far too many applications for the seats available at its medical school.
“We have over 5,000 applicants each year to our medical school and can only accept 170,” said the university president, Dr. Hart. “Many of these applicants come from a deep personal faith who desire the type of education we provide, seeing it as an integral part of quality patient care.”
Loyola received 12,300 applications for its 170 seats. BYU generates enough medical school applicants to fill the seats at both Loyola and Loma Linda. A year ago, 360 BYU graduates applied to medical schools.
The motto of Loma Linda’s medical school is “to make man whole.”
“The concept of wholeness pervades much of what Loma Linda stands for and includes the physical, social, mental and spiritual aspects of life,” Dr. Hart said.
No matter how religious they are, each faith-based medical school is inclusive, leaders said, because doctors will serve people of every faith and of no faith.
“We teach our students that ‘whole person care’ requires each professional to understand and be comfortable with each patient’s belief system and to recognize that everyone has core values of a spiritual nature that need to be accepted and built upon,” Dr. Hart said.
The underlying goal is employ faith to help train excellent, compassionate doctors.
“I may be under your hands someday,” Hardt tells Loyola students, “so I’m taking your work very seriously.”
What DO-granting medical schools are faith-based?
Some medical schools that people believe have religious ties do not.
For example, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine was for years affiliated with Yeshiva University, the nation’s flagship Jewish school, and is regularly mistaken as being affiliated with the faith, but “Einstein is not and has never been a faith-based school. Since its founding, it has been a secular institution,” one of the school’s media relations managers, Elaine Iandoli, said in an email.
Many of the faith-based, DO-granting schools embrace their religious identity.
Liberty, for example, promises a “distinctively Christian” curriculum.
The faith-based medical schools that grant DO degrees include:
- Baptist Health Sciences University in Memphis, Tennessee. (Baptist)
- Campbell University in Lillington, North Carolina. (Baptist)
- Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Catholic)
- Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. (Evangelical)
- Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Catholic)
- Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is expected to open in 2026. (United Methodist Church)
- Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine, with locations in California, Montana, Nevada and New York. (Jewish)
- University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine in San Antonio, Texas. (Catholic)
- William Carey in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. (Baptist)