Background: Ethical competence is a core outcome of medical education, yet the degree to which personal religiosity shapes moral reasoning, professional conduct, and bioethical judgment among medical students remains contested. 

Objective: This narrative review synthesizes empirical and theoretical literature (2015–2026) comparing religious and non-religious medical students across four bioethical domains: end-of-life decision-making, academic and professional honesty, empathy and moral sensitivity, and attitudes toward curricular integration of religious values. 

Methods: A structured search of PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect yielded 777 records; after de-duplication and eligibility screening, 52 sources were retained, spanning cross-sectional surveys, qualitative interview studies, systematic reviews, and normative bioethics scholarship, with particular attention to Islamic bioethical frameworks relevant to the Indonesian context. 

Results: Religious students consistently reported more restrictive positions on withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and medically assisted death, lower self-reported academic dishonesty in several but not all samples, and stronger endorsement of faith-based ethics instruction, while empathy and moral-sensitivity scores showed comparatively weak or inconsistent associations with religiosity. Institutional culture, gender, and year of training frequently moderated these relationships as strongly as religiosity itself. 

Conclusion: Religiosity functions as one of several interacting determinants of ethical reasoning rather than a uniform predictor of "better" or "worse" professionalism. Medical curricula, particularly in pluralistic and faith-affiliated institutions, should integrate secular principlism with religiously grounded virtue ethics to cultivate reflective, context-sensitive moral reasoning rather than privileging either tradition in isolation.