Word.ws English Dictionary

confessionalism

confessionalism noun: a belief in the importance of full and unambiguous assent to the whole of a religious teaching.

Noun

confessionalism (countable and uncountable, plural confessionalisms)

  1. A belief in the importance of full and unambiguous assent to the whole of a religious teaching.
  2. A system of government that proportionally distributes political and institutional power among religious and ethnic communities.
  3. A style of American poetry that draws on the personal history of the poet.
    • Her rendition of "Dry Land" from her first album, Back to the Night, was a poetic fusion of music and lyrics that achieved an intimate tone too often sacrificed to confessionalism by other singers.1977 April 23, Steve Blevins, “Armatrading: "Sit Back And See"”, in Gay Community News, page 11

Forms of confessionalism

pluralconfessionalisms

Origin of confessionalism

From confessional + -ism.

Questions about confessionalism

What does confessionalism mean?
Confessionalism means a belief in the importance of full and unambiguous assent to the whole of a religious teaching.
What part of speech is confessionalism?
Confessionalism is a noun.
What is the plural of confessionalism?
The plural of confessionalism is confessionalisms.

Words near confessionalism in the dictionary

  1. confessional state
  2. confessionalise
  3. confessionalised
  4. confessionalises
  5. confessionalising
  6. confessionalism
  7. confessionalisms
  8. confessionalist
  9. confessionalistic
  10. confessionalists
  11. confessionality

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: confessionalism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “confessionalism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/confessionalism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.