Implicit religion, explicit religion and attitude toward substances: An empirical enquiry among 13-to 15-year-old adolescents

A recent research tradition has employed Bailey's (1997, 1998) notion of implicit religion to explore the ways in which Christian believing in the UK may be persisting in spite of declining levels of church attendance. Working within this framework the first aim of this study is to explore the prevalence of implicit religion, operationalized as attachment to traditional Christian rites of passage, among young people living within the UK. The second aim of this study, following the analytic model proposed by Francis (2013a, 2013b) exploring the psychological functions served by explicit religion and implicit religion, is to test the hypothesis that explicit religiosity (operationalized as church attendance) and implicit religiosity (operationalized as attachment to Christian rites of passage) are both associated with proscriptive attitudes toward substances among young people. Data provided by a sample of 12,252 13-to 15-year-old young people support this hypothesis.