The French speaking scholarly journal Religiologiques, as some of you possibly know already, published a special issue, a couple of years ago, dedicated to the study of implicit religion -- an issue which, as the director of this journal, I am personally very proud of.

In his introduction to this issue, Edward Bailey, among other things, wrote that, as a historical method, autobiographical elements can at times be quite useful. And he went on, mentioning some observations taken from his own experience to show how such a thing as "implicit religion" had come to form a major part of his interests and study.

Well, I would like to take the liberty of sharing this same epistemological conviction, today, to describe how I myself discovered this network, and why it has appeared fruitful to me, first of all, to have this special issue of our journal published and, now, to come to Denton and share this paper with you.

And sorry, by the way, for my sometimes approximate English, for which I count on your benevolence.

It was 4 or 5 years ago, I think, that I first met Edward Bailey, in Montreal, at a lecture he had come to give in my departement.

I must admit that I am not myself a very avid consumer of academic lectures and that I would probably have missed Edward's presentation if I had not been a little puzzled by the poster announcing it on a university billboard. The poster indeed mentioned that the lecture was going to be about "implicit religion"; it was the first time I heard this expression used, and I confess that it first made me feel a little perplexed and uncomfortable.

The fact is that I have always been -- yes, I could say : instinctively suspicious -- of theories using all sorts of qualifiers to suggest a wide variety of distinctions about religion -- like, you know: crypto religion, pseudo religion, peri, para, quasi religion, secular religion, etcetera religion.

As a matter of fact, I have for many years now tended to believe that religion is somehow analogous to an equestrian monument. That is, a monument is or is not equestrian, it can hardly be "more or less" equestrian, "somehow" equestrian, or "semi" equestrian -- though there might be a case with Picasso and some other modern artists...

Well, that apart, my first theoretical or methodological reflex, if I may say so, has always been to fear that using such qualifiers to define religion says probably less about the complexity of religion itself than about the shyness, the narrowness, or even, at times, the ethno-centricism of its definition.

Anyway, at least, it suggests the general mood I was in before Edward's lecture -- though my curiosity won and, in the end, my perplexity lost.

More precisely, I became quite rapidly convinced that what Edward Bailey and his Network were trying to do through this label of implicit religion was to a large extent very close to what several of my colleagues and myself, in French-speaking Quebec, have been ourselves trying to do for more than 25 years, now, under the term religiology.

To make a long story short, I stayed in touch with Edward and the Network, and I was particularly happy to be able to propose to him a special issue of our journal, with a number of selected translated British papers, most of them already presented at Denton, as examples of this approach, in order to make it a little better known in the French-speaking academic community where it is still quite widely ignored.

But I was also quite enthusiastic about the idea of coming here, to Denton -- to learn more, of course, but also to share a few reflexions mainly on how I see the similarities and differences in both approches, that is, the study of implicit religion and religiology.

In that respect, I would like to develop three points, respectively on the origins of both approaches, on their epistemological basis, and finally on their empirical usefulness in contemporary human sciences.

1.

One of the things that first struck me about the network for the study of implicit religion is what seemed to me to be its pastoral origin, in the very simple sense that, unless I'm much mistaken, it comes to a large extent from the experience, observations and preoccupations of people active in the pastoral life of Christian Churches, and who -- in a manner of speaking -- became quite aware of two things:

On the one hand, that, in this country as well as in most Western societies, more and more people were moving away from the beliefs, practices and rituals of churches and organized religions (a phenomenon that is generally referred to as secularization).

Yet, on the other hand, that a lot of the same people, and probably the majority of them, seemed to be involved in, and committed to other -- what -- activities, beliefs and ideologies, practices in which one, provided one was open-minded and clear-sighted enough to see it, could identify something very close to what one expects to find in traditional religious experience, in terms of intensity, vital importance, commitment -- and above all, perhaps, in terms of a capacity to provide a meaning to life and, as a consequence, some guidance for living.

In other words, besides the explicit adherence or non-adherence of many to organized religions, one could establish the evidence of an implicit religion often as important, and sometimes much more important than any explicit reference to organized religion.

And, again, I insist on it, I was perticularly struck by the discovery that this insight was largely due to pastors, clergymen, bright enough, honest enough, clear-sighted enough, and perhaps I could add: modern enough, to be able to acknowledge, to respect and even to become passionate for new religious realities outside the realm of organized traditions -- of which they remained the explicit pastors.

And though it is probably less relevant in academic terms, I admit that I have some curiosity about the influence or impact of such an approach on pastoral work itself.

The origin of what we have come to call religiology in Quebec, towards the end of the 60s, is in many respects different.

I would like to note, in passing, and without developing it since I don't think it is directly relevant to my topic, that we did not coin the term religiology, which seems to have first appeared around 1967, more precisely in the English translation of an article by the eminent Japanese scholar Hideo Kishimoto, to render the Japanese neologism shukyogaku. Well, something like that...

Though it was used for a while by some scholars, notably in the US , it seems that it did not have a tremendous success.

Even in French, it did not impose itself outside of a loose network of scholars, in Quebec, and never really managed to seduce our French colleagues, for example, who are not always very keen on new scientific labels -- all the more, I guess, when they come from the colonies...

Quebec, in the 60s, was a fast changing society. Indeed -- and that, I think is relatively well-known --, within a little more than a decade, one of the closest-knit Roman Catholic cultures, to which people often referred as a "priest-ridden province", turned into one of the most secularized societies in the Western world.

The influence of the Roman Catholic Church dropped dramatically in almost all spheres of cultural, public and private life -- education, politics, welfare, morality, etc. .

And since, in francophone Quebec, religion had always been more or less identified with the Roman Catholic Church, the fact is that, in the mind of a lot of people, including probably most intellectuals, the fast decline of the Roman Catholic Church was spontaneously identified with a general erosion of religion itself, in a world at last come of age.

In this general context, several intellectuals, themselves with a theological background, and themselves often clergymen and members of Catholic religious orders, came to withdraw from the Church, or at least from the clergy and its pastoral functions, as well as from theology as hermeneutics of a particular faith or belief-system.

Some of them, however, happened to gather, at the end of the sixties, to create the department of religious studies of a new public and non-denominational university in Montreal.

Now, not only had these scholars abandoned all pastoral functions and theological interests, but they happened to be the founders of a new department of religion in a new, very secular university and even, at that time, very Marxist-oriented -- which, needless to say, was not spontaneously very enthusiastic about religion, and about the existence of a department dedicated to its study.

Yet they themselves were quite aware that if religion in its Roman Catholic traditional variance was indeed losing a lot of ground in Quebec -- but also elsewhere --, a number of new phenomena, among which one can of course mention the infatuation for a number of cults and movements inspired by Eastern philosophy and spirituality, tended to suggest that religion itself was probably far from agonizing, though it seemed to be taking new forms.

And, well, I guess they came to understand their own scholarly mission, if I may say so, in terms of saving, preserving, rescuing, maybe, the cultural, social, and also academic relevance of this object -- religion -- proposing that it could be studied in its historical and cultural diversity as a basic, fundamental anthropological dimension of humankind, along with other fundamental dimensions -- social, cultural, psychological, political, economical, etc.;

a dimension which, by its own right, deserved to be part of the spectrum of human and social sciences, one which could and had to be studied in the same scientific, non-denominational fashion with which other human sciences -- sociology, anthropology, etc. -- tried to grasp their own object.

In other words, their conviction was that a new discipline was needed in the landscape of Québec Academia, a new discipline which had to offer strong credentials of its academic respectability, If I may say so, given the more or less hostile or, at least, sceptical attitude of intellectuals towards the study of religion.

I say "a new" discipline. NEW, in our own academic environment, of course, since such a discipline had actually developed for nearly a century elsewhere, in different countries (especially European), within various intellectual traditions (notably that of Liberal Protestantism), with different theoretical sensitivities, if I may say so, and under different names -- for example, science of religion, religious phenomenology, Religionswissenchaft,

-- but nonetheless already providing an impressive conceptual toolbox for a scientific study of religion,

-- a toolbox which possibly only needed to be more systematized, or more integrated, perhaps, given its mutidisciplinary origin,

-- and which could also be given a greater autonomy from the various disciplines which had produced it,

-- in order to bring up a real science of religion in which religion would not be reduced to another dimension of the human -- sociological or other.

2.

Now -- and this is going to be my second point --, it seems to me that, for a good part due to this difference in origin, but also in part due to other factors, and despite their empirical proximity (to which I will come back later), the study of implicit religion and our own religiological perspective developed along quite different epistemological avenues.

I did myself translate some, and reviewed all of the British contributions to this issue of our journal. And I'm sure that what I would call this intimate contact with several instances of this approach has helped me a lot to understand, and appreciate, its originality. Yet I must also confess that, at times, I was nonplussed.

First, I would say, in the relationship -- or recourse -- to theory that seemed to me to be present in most of the articles.

And here, of course, without falling into simplistic cultural stereotypes, I guess I was nevertheless struck by -- if I may say so -- the rather low profile relationship to theory that could be observed in what appeared to me as a very British, Anglo-Saxon approach, as compared to the probably much more Cartesian perspectives -- one could of course call this an obsession for theory -- that are easily recognizable in our own religiological project, but perhaps more generally speaking in most francophone social and human sciences, from Durkheim to Foucault, anf from Lévi-Strauss to Lacan.

Quite often, for example, while translating a passage from the articles, I could feel this... Cartesian impatience, in me, considering the way most authors seemed to me to be somehow dancing around the concepts, avoiding, however, to label them. Something like : eh! but... he really seems to be talking about what Mircea Eliade calls a hierophany. Why, then, does he simply not use the concept, instead of a long periphrase?

Or, again, for example : God... it would be so tempting to replace this whole paragraph by simply referring to Rudolf Otto's characxteristics of the "sacred", or to Levi-Strauss' enlightening definition of the mana...

Needless to say, I resisted the temptation of doing so -- it would of course have been quite imperialistic on my part to impose such a theoretical protectorate on these texts, and I simply limited myself to some footnotes once in a while.

Yet I was aware that my reaction was deeply rooted in the epistemological conviction that the study of religion, as well as the study of any other phenomenon, including human phenomena, becomes a real discipline, a real scientific discipline, when it is able to build, to develop a systematic set of strong and clear concepts, within a general theory, rather than limiting itself to more intuitive notions.

In that respect, I would say that the religiological project such as we have tried to develop it in Quebec has staked a lot more -- and for better as well as for worse, I suppose -- on a more theoretical and somehow more deductive approach, trying to root itself in a general theory of religion which could help one analyze empirical objects and determine whether or not these phenomena could be considered as religious. And this, naturally, irrespective of their common perception within culture.

In other words, the epistemological conviction, here -- it is a conviction, I know, not a fact -- is that it is theory which builds, determines, constructs its own object, not common culture or everyday language,

-- though theory, of course, usually borrows its concepts from common culture and language, yet twisting them in its specific and unequivocal way.

For example, what Marxist theory calls a "social class" or "proletariate" has a precise conceptual meaning which is different from the meaning of these words in common use. The same applies to what psychoanalysis calls "perversion", for instance, or "narcissism", without the moral and derogatory sense these words have in daily conversations. And, therefore, it is the same with the religiological concept of religion, as opposed to the widespread notion that most people have of it.

It is quite obvious that such an approach is, in a way, more agressive, not to say more imperialistic, in its conscription of common notions and their transformation into sharper conceptual tools to analyze reality.

This does not mean, of course, that it has to be dogmatic or arrogant. But it does mean this: with such an approach, it is not unlikely that one can come to the conclusion that some phenomena are genuinely religious, though not perceived as such by common culture, whereas a lot of what we would otherwise call explicit religion is not -- or, let us say, no more -- religion at all

-- which of course makes -- you see my point, here -- a not negligible difference, at least as far as theory is concerned.

But, I would say that there is another reason, less theoretical, why I think we need a strong and autonomous religiological definition of religion, beyond the -- no doubt fruitful -- distinction between explicit and implicit religion. I will illustrate this with an example.

In my classes, especially with first year students, or beginners, I have often used the famous movie E.T. as a quite remarkable -- and actually rather easy -- example of the fact that we can find religious structures in not explicitely religious objects. The film, indeed, is an almost limpid transcription of the Christian myth, centered around the Christlike figure of the sympathetic extraterrestrial.

And, indeed, students generally have no difficulty in considering the film E.T. as a religious object because it is totally impregnated with explicitely Christian references and narrative structures.

Yet, in the perspective that I try to put forward, here, I would say that it is NOT because E.T. is a Christlike figure that we should consider him a religious character, and the film as a real contemporary myth,

-- but because both E.T. and Christ, and both their stories, are characteristic of what, according to our theory, we consider as religious characters and myths. In other words, because they both fit with our concepts -- no matter what the pope, or the average patron of a country pub, or anybody else may think of it.

Otherwise, I fear that we remain tributary of, dependant upon the implicit structure of one explicit religion, namely, here, Christianity. In other words, we would still be performing theology, not religiology -- which is good and respectable, no doubt, as far as it goes, but which is of course something else.

Besides, it would of course be much more difficult, and maybe impossible, to uncover the presence of a religious dimension in objects or phenomena that do not fit the pattern of Christianity, as the dominant explicit form of religion in our culture.

To borrow another example from the cinema, I would mention the road movie Thelma and Louise, which some have certainly seen, and which I have also often used for pedagogical purposes, because it is amazinly religious all through -- yet, not according to a Christian pattern.

Now, perhaps I should mention it clearly, this is not a criticism of the Implicit Religion approach as such -- if only because I am well aware that there has been, notably through Edward's works (I am less familiar with other productions), a serious and, I think, fruitful attempt to define religion in broad and inclusive terms.

Besides, in all fairness, I feel I should tone things down somewhat.

For one thing, and for all sorts of reasons, the ambitions of our religiological proposition, in my opinion, have not really managed to set a standard, if I may say so. Most of my colleagues, indeed, have continued to study religion -- even new religious phenomena -- from the viewpoint of already existing disciplines (such as history, sociology, or psychology) rather than with the more radical or specific approach of an autonomous discipline like religiology -- at least in its avowed ambition.

I do not feel that as a tragedy at all, mind you, if only because, at least, I think that, in the past twenty years or so, a number of religious categories have permeated other disciplines which, like sociology, for example (and here, I'm not referring to the sociology of religion, of course, but to general sociology), had long tended to ignore them or even to snob them.

This, I would add, seems to me to be typical of what one could call a very postmodern evolution in the social sciences; and though I won't develop it here, I tend to see it as a rather positive theoretical cross-breeding.

I have also at times tested the Implicit Religion approach with my students, in my classes -- hence the usefulness of this collection of papers in French, of course -- and I must admit that not only did they grasp it pretty fast, but they also found it somehow closer to their own spontaneous experience or instinctive perception. That is, they immediately understood the relevance and operational usefulness of a distinction between an implicit religion and an explicit religion which remains a basic reference for most of them, especially Christianity, no matter how far they may themselves be from it, in terms of personal convictions and commitment.

I would go even further to suggest that a lot of these students often seemed to me to be somehow more comfortable with the more pragmatic, maybe more Anglo-Saxon approach of Implicit Religion than with the more rationalistic -- or maybe more Cartesian -- perspective of religiology.

This is of course a way for me to pay homage to the scholars who have developed this field of study -- beyond mere lip service. In other words, this is, indeed, a pretty good tool, and I have no hesitation to use it, now, together with others, because it works!

3.

But -- and it will be my very short third point -- beyond these differences (which are not without interest for a sociology or an epistemology of religious studies, and which remain open to discussion, of course), what seems to me to be more important remains the bold intuition, common to both approaches, that one can find genuine religion outside of churches, temples and synagogues, provided one looks for it and tries to discover it.

I do share another conviction with Edward Bailey, and it is the fact that the touchstone of our work remains our capacity to demonstrate its relevance and fruitfulness through empirical research. In other words, Implicit Religion, or the evidence of religion outside of existing religions, becomes real if we manage to shed light upon it, to uncover it.

And, in that respect, for me, the best form of encouragement, and I would say the strongest evidence that we are following a good trail, here, remains the numerous M.A. and Ph.D. projects that I have had the privilege to supervize in the past years, and through which students have tried to investigate the presence of a religious dimension in cultural activities and productions as different from each other -- and, at first sight, as "secular" -- as the arts, contemporary dance, street gangs, rock music, literature, comic strips, TV soaps, sexuality and new technologies.

This has also been the conviction of the Network for more than twenty years, now -- and here, I think that we are on the very same wavelength.

In doing so, I also think that we do offer a contribution to the understanding of mankind and its culture on the treshold of the third millenium. This contribution is, no doubt, modest, in the wide sphere of the social and human sciences.

Yet I believe that if we didn't work on it, contemporary scholarship or academic research would simply commit a blunder not unlike the attitude of the ancient Roman world which accused early Christians of irreligion and atheism -- entangled as they were in a much too narrow conception of religion, unable to acknowledge its sometimes implicit reality.