The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to the debate on secularization taking place today in our intellectual milieu. I believe that a discussion of the process of secularization independent of those processes taking place in the societal space of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is doomed to descend into prejudice. For this reason, I attempt to link two significant processes which began in world history around 1800 and which continue to this day in various corners of the world. These are the formation of national identity and the process named secularization almost from the moment of its inception. In this paper, I shall survey theories of the origin of secularization and anti-secularization, and of national identity and national consciousness. This minor research results in eight propositions, some of which represent conclusions that follow from current quantitative and historical data, and others are hypotheses still to be proven. One significant outcome of these, I believe, is finding arguments against a kind of secularizational segregation. For example, I attempt to show that living as a society in a developed country neither theoretically nor practically means unconditional secularization, and the converse. We may say the same regarding fundamentalism. As far as the concept of secularization itself is concerned, I believe that the very process christened secularization in the nineteenth century is in direct opposition to the essence of this word, and we could call it rather the ‘institutionalization of the sacral’. The process of the transformation of a religion into a universal institution, in the same way as the process of the formation of national identity, began spreading at one and the same time and with the very same instruments (education and the mass media). As a result, we obtained two processes which challenged societies with their own versions of collective identity. I shall attempt to show that two types of institutional religion were formed as a consequence of this ‘rivalry’: transcendental (which works exclusively on a strategy to save the soul) and detranscendentalized (which is incorporated into national identity and which elaborates actions and future strategies from a perspective of national tradition). The numbers of their adherents in any society differ radically from each other. In any specific society, the percentage of religious people and, similarly, that of churchgoers, as well as the presence or absence of fundamentalism, are dependent on which of these two types is present. I shall show below how this typology of currently existing religions explains quantitative material that is at first glance so inexplicable and which has accumulated over the last century as a result of research into world religions and secularization.