Compare methods

	Implicit Religion Measurement	Ethnography of Religion
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	1973
Originator	Edward Bailey (implicit religion); Thomas Luckmann (invisible religion)	Clifford Geertz (interpretive anthropology); long fieldwork tradition
Type	Conceptual-empirical identification method	Field-based interpretive research method
Seminal source	Bailey, E. I. (1998). Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society. Leuven: Peeters. ISBN: 9789042909632	Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (incl. 'Religion as a Cultural System'). New York: Basic Books. ISBN: 9780465097197
Aliases	Invisible Religion Analysis, Implicit Religion Fieldwork, Commitment-Integration-Intensity Analysis, Secular Sacred Identification	Religious Fieldwork, Participant Observation of Religion, Anthropology of Religious Practice, Thick Description of Religious Communities
Related	3	3
Summary	Implicit religion measurement is a method for identifying and assessing religious-like commitments in settings and lives that look entirely secular. It joins two traditions: Thomas Luckmann's The Invisible Religion (1967), which argued that in modern society religion has not vanished but migrated into a privatized 'sacred cosmos' outside the churches, and Edward Bailey's program of implicit religion, which gave the idea an empirical, fieldwork-based method. Bailey proposed three working criteria - commitments, integrating foci, and intensive concerns - by which a researcher can detect the quasi-religious in ostensibly non-religious activities such as life in a pub, devotion to a football club, patriotism, work, or consumption. The method combines ethnography and interviews to locate these functional equivalents of religion and to gauge how strongly they organize people's lives, treating apparently secular commitments as a site where the sacred persists in disguised form.	Ethnography of religion is a field-based method in which the researcher spends an extended period living among and participating in the life of a religious community in order to understand its practices from within. Its interpretive form was crystallized by Clifford Geertz, whose 1973 essays - especially 'Religion as a Cultural System' in The Interpretation of Cultures - defined religion as a system of symbols that establishes powerful moods and motivations and casts an aura of factuality over a conception of the world. The method combines participant observation, field notes, and interviews with what Geertz called 'thick description': not merely recording what people do, but interpreting the layered meanings their acts carry. The aim is to render an unfamiliar religious world intelligible by attending to ritual, everyday practice, and the symbols through which a community makes sense of existence.