Religious Labor at the Edge: AIDS, Religion, and Spirituality in San Francisco’s Ward 5B

This paper examines how boundaries between “religion” and “spirituality” were negotiated and re-negotiated in three interrelated but distinct San Francisco organizations that engaged people with AIDS in the first four years of the epidemic. The three groups overlapped in personnel, purpose, and history. They came together in Ward 5B at San Francisco General, the first hospital ward dedicated exclusively to AIDS. They all engaged in work that could be deemed spiritual, and all had functions that traditionally fall under the rubric of religion. The paper examines how each group claimed and/or disavowed “religion” and “spirituality” in both what it did and how it described itself. It shows that grappling with “spiritual” versus “religious” is not just a question of individual identification but also an organizational grappling with particular tensions in a field, tensions that encourage groups to embrace and/or disavow religion and spirituality internally and in relation to other groups.