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Contributions from a conference sponsored by the Institute for Christian Studies in October, 1988.

L'auteur de cet article opère un bilan des recherches qu'il mène en sociologie de la religion des migrants depuis plus de 20 ans. Après avoir successivement considéré la religion comme variable dépendante, indépendante ou externe, il en vient à penser que le concept d'identité est le plus pertinent pour une appréhension compréhensive du phénomène en question. Ce concept a une application très étendue et permet de : 1) cen trer l'attention sur les problèmes de la culture ethnique dans les contextes anomiques modernes, 2) percevoir le rôle « d'amortisseur» des Eglises ethniques. Dans tous les cas observables, la religion sert à delimiter et à fortifier l'identité des groupes sociaux mis en crise dans des environnements culturels étrangers.

The identity model of religion attempts to provide a comprehensive, social scientific accounting scheme covering a large variety of data from both ancient and modem religions. Rather ambitiously, it further attempts to fit in both the prevailing anthropological, psychological, and sociological theories of man and society, and the contemporary ethological accounts of primate behavior. It is only in the last ten years that a dozen or so sociologists in as many countries have begun to use identity as a major variable to account for the religious data of their research. The anthropologist William Christian found in Northern Spain a close correspondence between shrines and the levels on which people formed a community, or had a sense of identity (nation, region, province, vale, village, barriada). Not the least influential in this way of thinking has been Morioka and Shimpo's detection of a similar correspondence in Japan between Buddhism and family identity, Shinto and communal identity, and Christianity and personal identity. Recently a book has been published (Mol 1978) in which a dozen scholars from all over the world relate religion to the identity variable. In this opening address I first want to discuss what this rather recent and novel "identity" model is all about. Subsequently I want to compare it with nine other social scientific