ROOTS — A Composite Territorial Presence Index for Faith-Anchored Communities

Introduction — the measurement gap

Classic instruments of demographic and sociological measurement — censuses, religious-practice surveys, confessional mapping — produce a static image of communal presence. They count individuals at a given moment, register declared affiliations, and locate infrastructure. They do not measure the vitality of that presence: its capacity to reproduce, to transmit, and to resist the centrifugal pressures of emigration, residential mobility, secularisation, or economic crisis.

This gap is especially sensitive for minority faith communities whose territorial presence is both their historical substrate and the condition of their symbolic survival. A Christian village in northern Lebanon counting 200 residents may be a living bastion — active school, functioning parish, an investing diaspora — or a territory in effacement, where the 200 are mostly elderly and houses are sold season after season. The census cannot tell the difference. ROOTS is designed to.

The index emerged from a reflection developed in Géographies Maronites: Territoire, Foi et Mémoire (Khalil, 2025), which proposes a systemic reading of Maronite communal geography in the 21st century, built around the doctrine of Circles of Presence — four nested scales (lived place, nation, region, world) — and the central analytical distinction between a visible map and an invisible map.

Theoretical framework

Territorial presence, as used here, exceeds mere physical occupation of space. It designates a community's capacity to produce place in the sense of de Certeau (1990) — to turn a geographical space into a practiced space, inhabited by meaning, memory, and project. This capacity rests on the articulation of several regimes of existence: a physical presence (bodies, buildings, infrastructure), an institutional presence (governance, representation), and a symbolic presence (narrative, memory, sacred value).

This reading connects to Halbwachs (1941) on collective memory and spatial frameworks: a community anchors itself in places not only through physical occupation but through the memorial charge it deposits there and retrieves from it. Physical disappearance does not necessarily imply the extinction of presence — and conversely, physical occupation does not guarantee a community's permanence if the transmission of meaning is interrupted.

The visible / invisible distinction is the analytical pivot of ROOTS. It belongs to a tradition of geographic thought distinguishing measured space from lived space (Lefebvre, 1974; Tuan, 1977), while shifting register: where phenomenological approaches focus on individual experience of place, ROOTS aims at a collective and communal measure of that experience.

This distinction also has operational value: effective interventions on the visible map (infrastructure rehabilitation, economic support) can fail if the invisible map is degraded — if residents perceive their presence as having no future, if the diaspora has severed its ties, if identity transmission is interrupted. The reverse also holds: a strong invisible map can sustain a residual physical presence for decades, or even revive it through return or diaspora investment.

The three-figure classification (Bastion, Mixed Zone, Lost Territory) belongs to well-established typological traditions in human geography and the sociology of religion. Work on enclaves (Brubaker, 1996) and refuges corresponds to what we call Bastion. Literature on contact spaces and intercommunal frontiers (Barth, 1969) informs the Mixed Zone figure. Work on heritage without heirs and memory without place (Nora, 1984; Connerton, 2009) connects to the Lost Territory figure.

Measurement protocol — the eight dimensions

ROOTS is structured around eight dimensions, split into two sub-indices corresponding to the two analytical maps. Each dimension is scored on an ordinal scale from 0 to 10, with three semantic anchors: 0 = absent / collapsed, 5 = present but fragile, 10 = strong and dynamic. The respondent — resident, native, or informed observer — positions their appraisal on this scale in response to a question phrased in plain, non-technical language.

Dimensions 1–4 (Essential Equipment, Commerce/Work/Income, Built Fabric & Upkeep, Governance/Solidarity/Security) form the visible sub-index. Dimensions 5–8 (Identity & History, Network & Diaspora, Symbolic Value, Confidence in the Future) form the invisible sub-index.

3.1 Scoring formula

The two sub-indices are simple arithmetic means of their component dimensions — a deliberate choice at this exploratory stage: in the absence of empirical data to calibrate differentiated weights, equal treatment is the most neutral hypothesis.

3.2 Collection modalities

Public participatory mode. The questionnaire is accessible online via the ROOTS/BÊMA platform. Anyone familiar with a place can assess it. The platform aggregates scores per locality and visualizes them on an interactive world map. This mode produces collective-perception data whose value is epistemological as much as empirical: divergence between assessors of the same place is itself information.

Private consultancy mode. The questionnaire is administered as part of a BÊMA engagement by a practitioner trained in the method. In this mode, the full matrix — seven analytical dimensions × four scales of presence — is deployed to produce a detailed field diagnosis. ROOTS scores serve as an entry dashboard before deeper work through interviews and direct observation.

Classification framework

The Score_Global determines membership in one of the three territorial figures, according to provisional thresholds intended to be calibrated empirically as the database grows:

• Bastion — Score_Global ≥ 6.5
• Mixed Zone — 3.5 ≤ Score_Global < 6.5
• Lost Territory — Score_Global < 3.5

4.1 The six-profile matrix

Combining the territorial figure with the dominant map produces a matrix of six profiles, each calling for a distinct programme of intervention. This combination — not the raw score — is the true diagnostic output of ROOTS.

4.2 The three action priorities

At the end of each assessment, ROOTS identifies the three lowest-scoring dimensions and generates a recommendation calibrated to the score level (critical: ≤ 3; fragile: 4–6). This mechanism turns the diagnosis into an operational starting point, without claiming to replace in-depth fieldwork.

Contextual adaptations

While ROOTS's architecture is universal, the questions operationalising each dimension vary by communal and geographic context. The current version focuses on Lebanon — villages and towns, with questions centred on physical occupation, demographic continuity, and the diaspora-territory link (dimension 6 is pivotal: investment, returns, bidirectional flows). Adaptations for Eastern Christian diaspora communities and for rural Catholic parishes in Europe are in development, following the same eight-dimension architecture with reformulated questions.

Methodological limits and identified biases

Respondent selection bias. The public participatory mode over-represents people most engaged in communal life and diaspora members who are digitally connected. The most withdrawn populations — elderly residents, poorly connected rural communities — are under-represented.

Equal weighting of dimensions. The assumption that all eight dimensions contribute equally to territorial presence is not demonstrated. It is plausible that some dimensions (confidence in the future, diaspora network) are more predictive than others. A factor analysis on empirical data will test this hypothesis.

Subjectivity of assessments. Scores are perceptions, not objective measurements. Two respondents from the same place can diverge significantly depending on social, generational, or geographic position. This subjectivity is an assumed feature, not a flaw: the dispersion of scores is itself data.

Fixed classification thresholds. The thresholds (6.5 / 3.5) are provisional and not empirically calibrated. They will be revised as the database allows identification of natural distributions and statistically significant breaks in scores.

Limited geographic scope. The current version covers Lebanon. Transposability to other traditions (Orthodox, Protestant, non-Christian) remains to be validated. The conceptual framework (visible / invisible) is nonetheless generic enough to lend itself to this.

Absence of a temporal dimension. ROOTS measures a state at a given moment. It does not capture the dynamics of change — a place may be rapidly improving with a current score of 4, or declining rapidly with a score of 6. Repeated longitudinal assessments are needed to address this limitation.

Research perspectives

The immediate priority is collecting a sufficient corpus of assessments to allow psychometric validation of the index: internal consistency analysis (Cronbach's alpha), confirmatory factor analysis to test the two-factor (visible / invisible) structure, and convergence studies against available objective measures (census data, departure rates, land-occupation statistics).

The conceptual framework is potentially applicable to any community whose identity is tied to a territorial anchor — independent of religious tradition. Adaptations for diaspora Jewish communities, Armenian communities, Northern European Protestant parishes, and Indigenous communities are envisaged within a comparative research programme.

The current version of ROOTS focuses on the lived place, the first circle of the Circles of Presence doctrine. An extended version is in development, articulating the four scales (lived place, nation, region, world) to produce a synchronisation index— a measure of coherence between the different levels of presence of a given community. A strong local bastion cut off from its global diaspora and without a national project presents a low synchronisation profile, even if its local ROOTS score is high. This systemic dimension is at the heart of BÊMA's 2025–2027 research programme.

Conclusion

ROOTS responds to a simple question that lacked an adequate instrument: how can we rigorously and accessibly measure whether a faith community is still really there in its territory — and what that means for action?

The answer proposed here is as methodological as it is conceptual. It rests on the conviction that territorial presence is an irreducibly two-dimensional phenomenon — visible and invisible — and that the distance between these two dimensions is the principal indicator of a community's fragility or resilience. A bastion whose two maps align is infinitely more robust than a bastion with a strong visible map and a crumbling invisible one. And a lost territory whose invisible map remains vivid is more recoverable than it appears.

ROOTS is a work in progress. Version 1.0 presented here is an invitation to contribute — by assessing places, submitting methodological critiques, proposing adaptations for other communal contexts. The robustness of the index will be built collectively, at the scale of the atlas it seeks to constitute.