“Invisible” Religions: Some Preliminary Evidence

Abstract

One historic function of institutionalized religion is the designation of life's ultimate concerns and the provision of strategies for coping with them. Yinger's functional definition of religion is used in this study to discern (1) what the residents of an urban neighborhood in the Deep South define as life's ultimate concerns, and (2) the strategies they use to cope with them. The findings help support Luckmann's contention of the existence of invisible religions in modem society and disclose the existence of privatized expressions of religiosity possibly unconnected with formally organized, institutionalized forms. The data lend credibility to those theoretical innovations which conceive of religion in very broad terms.