Implicit Religion Measurement

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.