The concept of Implicit Religion has been popularized through the activities of the Network for the Study of Implicit Religion (which was registered as a charity in 1985) and the Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality (registered, 1995). Its prevailing usage dates from 1969, although the odd precursor can of course be found.
The term has been defined in terms of ‘commitments’, or ‘integrating foci’, or ‘intensive concerns with extensive effects’. So it refers to commitments that are unconscious as well as deliberately chosen; to nodal points within social life, as well as in the lives of individuals; and to influences that may be low-key but are all-pervading, rather than those that are dramatic, but self-contained.
Its initial conceptualization in terms of ‘secular religion’ (1967-9) indicates its discourse of origin. On the one hand, observation of ordinary life-situations (as an assistant curate in a working-class parish) had shown how real could be the influence of religion (whatever its ‘truth’ or ‘value’). On the other hand, the parallel attempt to understand those who were not religious in the conventional terms of the day, suggested the need to ‘credit’ them with matching commitments in order to comprehend their motivation. In other words, religion, whether or not it was sui generis, was sometimes (indeed often) a reality, not merely an epiphenomenon; and secularity could itself be a ‘religious’ phenomenon, even if of a different sort of religion.
The concept therefore straddles various frontiers. These include the various levels of consciousness (the sub-, and un-, as well as the conscious itself—and those heightened moments that might be termed ‘sur-conscious’); and the differing widths of sociality (the intra- and inter-individual, the social of all widths, and the species, the cosmic and the corporate); as well as the putatively onto-logical division between the religious and the secular.
In view of this catholicity of interest, and a reluctance to see useful distinctions become assumed divorces, it is important to say what the concept does not suggest, as well as what it does.
First, and most obviously (but it still sometimes needs saying), the concept of implicit religion does not mean ‘implicit Christianity’, or ‘implicit any-other-religion’. In the same way, no value judgement is assumed regarding any particular form of implicit religion that might be discovered. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that ‘the great religions of the world’ must relate in some way, be it confirmatory or contradictory, to their adherents’ needs, or else cease to function. So it is not altogether surprising to find Religious Education syllabuses in the UK placing Implicit and Explicit Religion on facing pages. The problem only arises when they are assumed to be a simple match.
Second, and most insidiously, to suggest that phenomena (albeit in an unexpected setting) which we may wish to describe as religious in character, may appear anywhere, is not the same as saying that all behaviour is religious. ‘Any thing may [upon consideration] turn out to be religious’, is a million miles away from saying ‘every thing is religious’. Indeed, the appellation is far more focused than the conventional usage of ‘religion’ itself. For, far from resting content with some actor’s or observer’s division into the religious and the secular, it ventures the phenomenological question, ‘How meaning-full is it?’ Recognizing that subjectivity is involved in the (humane) study of all that is distinctively human, it invites dialogue based on inter-subjectivity, rather than resting content with anyone’s diktat.
Third, and most generally, the concept of Implicit Religion no more assumes that ‘everyone has a religion’, than it assumes that religion is ‘a good thing’ or is ‘everywhere’. What it does, is to open up the possibility that those who lack [conventional] religion may yet be understood ‘better’ (more deeply and widely, more fully as persons) through the lenses provided by what we now know about religion(s). They may be seen to have parallel structures of beliefs, activities and solidarities; or they may be found to have a different set of characteristics, which can still be seen as collectively ‘religion-making’. Thus the concept avoids the eschatological notion of the Semitic religions, whereby conversion to belief in a single God is assumed to expunge all other traces of religion. Rather, it echoes the East Asian assumption, whereby individuals in practice use different religions for different purposes. Religiosity may be implicit within all prioritization, and so be a human universal, like sexuality, politics or economics; but the purpose of the concept is heuristic, not the proof of any such dogma.
The need for attention to this underlying but oft-hidden congeries of world-views, attitudes and identities has been expressed by scholars and practitioners of all sorts (Bailey, 1997:10-44). Students of religion, however, will be most familiar with ‘invisible religion’ (Luckmann, 1967) and ‘civil religion’ (Bellah, 1967). The latter was necessarily restricted by its brevity to description and consideration of the ‘civic theology’ aspects of civil religion, but was pregnant with suggestions that were frequently overlooked by its critics in the 1970s. The former’s phrase and meaning differed mainly from the one used here in that its author seems to have left its testing in the field until after his retirement.
The current concept was used in three studies (each of which, it was subsequently realized, had drawn mainly upon a different one of the three verbal ‘definitions’). The first asked individuals a series of open-ended questions, beginning with, ‘What do you enjoy most in life?’, and ending with ‘Who are you?’ The second took the form of participant observation (as a barman) in a public house. The third (which is ongoing) could be described as ‘observant participation’ (as Rector) in the life of a local community. Perhaps the key finding was the apprehension of ‘self’ as sacred (see Self-religion, the Self and Self). Together, they have allowed (Bailey, 2001) the integration of the concept of Implicit Religion within a developmental model of society, and of consciousness, religious experience, and secular Spirituality. Not, of course, itself a religious movement, the concept of Implicit Religion has facilitated consideration of a propensity towards religiosity, which seems to ever anew express itself in both the religious and the secular fields.
