Journal Article

Approaches to engaging faith communities in public health efforts regarding vaccination, genetics, and colorectal cancer: a systematic review

Yaeger, Lauren H., Baker, Lauren L., Baldwin, Kari, Iltis, Ana S., DuBois, James M., Cruz, Lucas

2025

Overview

Background Public health professionals regularly engage faith communities to improve public health. This systematic review characterizes approaches that public health professionals have used to engage faith communities and evaluates them using the Theory of Planned Behavior. It examines engagement regarding vaccination and genetic and genomic healthcare, which have generated significant controversy within religious groups and, for comparison, colorectal cancer screening, which has not. Methods This systematic review followed PRISMA reporting guidelines. We searched 8 online databases (e.g., Medline, Embase, Scopus). Publications in English that reported engaging a faith community on genetics, vaccination, or colorectal cancer screening were included. We screened 13,117 articles and extracted information from 121 articles reporting on 96 distinct projects. Results This review includes 121 articles reporting on 96 distinct projects. 67% of projects took place in the United States. Of these, 73% reported engaging racial or ethnic minorities; only 5% of projects reported engaging primarily White, Christian communities. Only 35% of projects reported addressing religious values that might inform attitudes and beliefs. The majority of publications ( n  = 74; 77.1%) reported primarily engaging faith communities for reasons unrelated to faith. Conclusion Because the Theory of Planned Behavior is widely used and our focus was on faith communities, we expected to see engagement with faith values and beliefs that might inform attitudes toward behaviors or social pressures community members perceive. Fewer than half of the projects reported addressing values or attitudes. There are missed opportunities to engage faith communities on religiously controversial public health initiatives in ways that are most likely to affect health behaviors. Evaluation of the outcomes of such engagement is needed. Trial registration The protocol is registered on Open Science Framework (OSF) at osf.io/r2c9n.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Analysis / Attitudes / Biostatistics / Cancer / Cancer screening / Cancer vaccines / Colorectal cancer / Colorectal Neoplasms - diagnosis / Colorectal Neoplasms - genetics / Colorectal Neoplasms - prevention & control / Community / Diagnosis / Environmental Health / Epidemiology / Ethnic factors / Ethnicity / Faith / Genetic aspects / Genetic screening / Genetics / Genomics / Health behavior / Health promotion / Humans / Immunization / Librarians / Medical personnel / Medical screening / Medicine / Medicine & Public Health / Minority & ethnic groups / Online databases / Public Health / Religion / Religion and Medicine / Religious aspects / Religious beliefs / Religious communities / Religious groups / Social aspects / Social behavior / Systematic Review / United States / Vaccination / Vaccine