ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how individual religiosity relates to the institutionalized social form of religion. Just like a sacred cosmos constitutes and orders a world view and structures society, the religious layer of individual consciousness represents a constitutive element of personal identity. In societies where there is a clear and dominant institutional form of religion, it is likely that its religious representations will exist in a distinct stratum of the individuals’ consciousness. But even in these cases, the overlap between the official church model of religion and its individual representation is never complete and always endangered. Its norms and theological expressions may not conform to the individuals’ norms and their lifeworld experiences. These differences are one source of what sociology of religion that is focused on church religion terms secularization.
