Faith in Secular Life: Implicit Religion and Sublimated Spirituality

Faith in Secular Life

Implicit Religion and Sublimated Spirituality

26.02.2026

Faith in Secular Life finds signals of transcendence in the most unlikely places. Drawing on film, novels, popular culture, music, sport and secular buildings, the Very Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy shows that the modern world teems with transcendent debris. He tracks how quotidian ‘Implicit Religion’ (a term coined by Edward Bailey, 1935-2015) reveals sacred currents lying just beneath the surface of ‘secular’ life.

Following Bailey, Percy holds that the lens of Implicit Religion is essentially ‘bifocal’ in nature. It allows simultaneous focus on elements in the foreground and aspects which lie at a greater distance. Observing immediate, ordinary human activity against the more distant horizon of ‘secularisation’, Bailey’s bifocal aperture brought the two together and placed them in a single framework for discussion.

However, whilst Implicit Religion was fundamentally about identifying people’s commitments, Faith in Secular Life pursues the idea further to analyse specific areas of contemporary culture which would normally be seen as faithless. Individuals may be unconscious that their actions can be understood as ‘religious’, yet, Percy maintains, their participation remains saturated with sacredness and spirituality.