p85-87 discusses alienation. Keep in mind the context in which this is being written.
p85. Berger discusses the strangeness of the internalization of both one's social identity and other's being. This contains a parallel thought with Santer's Psychotheology of Everyday Life in which he discusses the strangeness of both the Other and the internal alienness inherent in living. I quote: "What makes the Other other is not his or her spatial exteriority with respect to my being but the fact that he or she is strange, is a stranger, and not only to me but also to him-or herself, is the bear of an inner alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule-governed reciprocity..." The strangeness of the other according to Santer's reading of Freud derives from the strangeness inherent in having an unconscious that desires and wants, that pays no heed to the rules governing the social world, that is raw feeling without regard for the other. In Berger's conceptualization the unconscious is absent. The strangeness of ourselves and other derives from an "internal confrontation between socialized and non-socialized components of self, reiterating within consciousness itself the external confrontation between society and the individual."
In Berger's conceptualization there is no unconscious per se, but there is a non-socialized component of the self. Earlier in Sacred Canopy Berger discusses how the "individual becomes that which he is addressed by others". But it seems then that there is a part of the the individual which cannot be addressed by the social world or others in that world. There seems to be some surplus of selfhood which then remains out of reach: this is what Berger continues on to refer to as alienation. He goes onto to say that "alienation is the process whereby the dialectical relationship between the individual and his world is lost to consciousness. The individual "forgets" that this world was and continues to be co-produced by him." What are the implications of this? This is an interesting form of subjectivity where three parts of consciousness exist: (1) the part produced by the individual (2) the part produced by socialization (3) the leftover part of consciousness that is beyond socialization.
Berger continues on to define three features of alienation: (1) it is a phenomenon of consciousness, specifically false consciousness. False consciousness is defined as experiencing social relations as value relations between things (wikipedia). Berger states that on p 86 "man can never actually become a thinglike facticity - he can only apprehend himself as such, by falsifying his own experience." (2) "consciousness develops...from an alienated state to what is, at best, a possibility of de-alienation." (3) alienation is different from anomy in that alienation "serves to maintain its nomic structures with particular efficacy, precisely because it seemingly immunizes them against the innumerable contingencies of the human enterprise of world-building"
So the individual starts out in an alienated state and can only move to a state of de-alienation. How does this occur? Presumably when the individual "remembers" or sees that his consciousness and the social world is produced by him during the process of externalization. The individual must pull back the degree of objectivation prior to internalization and recall his participation, his agency in world creation. So what role does religion or the sacred play in this process? Berger doesn't give much of an answer except to say that these instances are rare.
Berger's work is emerging as a contextualizing piece of scholarship that is describing the deconstruction of religion. His thought represents the modernist view of religion in the 1960s. He views religion as a "projection of human meanings into the empty vastness of the universe - a projection, to be sure, which comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers" p 100. This haunting occurs because it leads to a state of false consciousness whereby the religious realm is associated with a facticity, an status as a real other world that lies beyond this one. He continues on to make the point that this other realm is not available for empirical investigation and an attitude of methodological atheism must be assumed.
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