The hidden religion
This article discusses the concepts of religion and belief in contemporary everyday understanding and in the science of religion. The article outlines three different ways of understanding religion: religion as an awareness of ultimate values, religion as a system of ideas and a ritual practice and lastly religion as a social institutional domain in secular society. These three different dimensions of religion are compared to recent anthropological critique of reification of the concept of culture, and the article sug-gests that the study of religion in contemporary society offers special attention to the first dimension. In the tradition of Emile Durkheim and Thomas Luckmann, this focus allows special focus on modern, secular forms of reli-gion inside and outside traditional religious institutions. This point is illustrated with examples of different ways of believing in the Danish Luthern Evangelical Church. The examples show that there is a rich variety of (conflicting) ways of believing, which are hidden from studies that focus on the second and third dimension of religion
