This piece lays out a new conception of religion applicable to contemporary post-secular conditions. In these conditions, neither the secular model of religion, typical of modernity, nor the pre-secular understanding of religion / religiosity comports with sociocultural reality. The article emphasizes that the secular understanding of premodern religion distorts religion’s nature by allotting it a fixed and therefore limited place in line with the idea and practice of functional differentiation typical of modern European societies. In this way the article unpacks the “hidden” worldview behind secularism as an ideology. Kyrlezhev suggests that this conception should be replaced by one in which the “religious” is regarded as one pole of a bipolar sociocultural whole (the other being the “eternal” secular) and that the benefit of this model is that it can be applied to various historical periods and sociocultural settings.