Young Christian churchgoers attend services in search of authentic religious feelings. Young conservative Christians leave the Church in search of an authentic religious message. Young priests write their sermons in accord with the dominating individualism in order to fulfil their own view of authenticity. Young Muslims discuss democracy and the relevance of the Quran in their search for personal meaning. Young Hindus doing yoga and reading the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhists meditating, thinking their parents’ traditional, cultural religiosity is old fashioned.

All these descriptions give examples of how members of the young generation reinterpret the religion they have been raised in. Simultaneously, they also express tendencies in relation to cultural and religious transformation. There is a need to analyse such developments in order to understand the complex relations between contemporary religion and society.

This project aims to investigate how late modernity’s focus on individualisation and authenticity has affected and challenged religious traditions and religious authorities in Denmark.

It is our hypothesis that a research focus on authenticity ideals can reveal changes of religious authority and thus of general tendencies within contemporary religion as such. It is furthermore hypothesised that such authenticity ideals are being expressed differently in different religious and ethnic contexts.