Compare methods

	Implicit Religion Measurement	Phenomenology of Religion
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	1957
Originator	Edward Bailey (implicit religion); Thomas Luckmann (invisible religion)	Gerardus van der Leeuw; Mircea Eliade; Rudolf Otto
Type	Conceptual-empirical identification method	Interpretive-comparative descriptive method
Seminal source	Bailey, E. I. (1998). Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society. Leuven: Peeters. ISBN: 9789042909632	Eliade, M. (1957/1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. W. R. Trask). New York: Harcourt, Brace. ISBN: 9780156792011
Aliases	Invisible Religion Analysis, Implicit Religion Fieldwork, Commitment-Integration-Intensity Analysis, Secular Sacred Identification	Religious Phenomenology, Comparative Phenomenology of the Sacred, Eidetic Method in Religion, Study of Hierophanies
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.	Phenomenology of religion is an interpretive, comparative method that seeks to describe religious phenomena as they appear to believers and to discern their essential structures, while bracketing questions of whether the beliefs are true. Developed by scholars such as Gerardus van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto and given its most influential expression by Mircea Eliade - notably in The Sacred and the Profane (1957) - it proceeds through epoché (the suspension of judgment about truth and causal explanation), empathetic description of the phenomenon from within, and eidetic vision, the search for the invariant essence behind diverse instances. Eliade's central concept is the hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred in the profane, and the method assembles such manifestations across traditions - sacred space, sacred time, symbols of the center - into a comparative typology of the forms in which the sacred reveals itself.