This paper discusses how a global policy system adopts local customs, places and knowledge as cultural heritage, and how the "value" of heritage is constructed. That is done through an analysis of the process by which Sefa Utaki, a sacred place in Okinawa, Japan, became a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage (WCH) site. As a backdrop to that theme, two interrelated problems may be pointed out. The first concerns the structure of discourse over WCH. Due to a recent change in UNESCO's world heritage strategy, not only material heritages such as historical buildings or monuments, but also intangible heritages such as people's living spaces, religious places, and traditional rituals have been included among WCH under the name of "cultural landscapes" or "living heritages". Similarly, the core value of Okinawa's cultural heritage - "Gusuku Sites and Related Properties of the Kingdom of Ryukyu" - was specified as not being limited to archaeological value, but also to comprise living religious beliefs as well. That means that UNESCO's cultural policy continuously overlaps with the research fields of anthropologists. Secondly, in spite of those circumstances, little anthropological research has been conducted on that new cultural heritage trend. Cultural heritage, of course, has been dealt with in the anthropology of tourism and regional development research, but discussions there have focused on tourism, people's identities and local community itself. In contrast, an analysis of religious heritage from the viewpoint of that ever-expanding global policy has been rare. Based on those two issues, this paper directs attention to the "value" of heritage by inspecting those religious phenomena that are specifically indicated as "valued beliefs." For that purpose, I examined official documents and discourses authored by UNESCO, local governments and local volunteers working for Utaki. It turned out that the "belief' surrounding Sefa Utaki can be interpreted as having two different meanings. The first is the "belief' considered to be legitimate, having originated in the Ryukyu kingdom era with pilgrimages held by munchu descent groups. The second is the "belief' considered to be private or personal, like ritual and prayer by yuta, the Okinawan shaman. The former corresponds to the "value" of WCH, while the latter is classified as a matter removed from the heritage. In the above situation, where the essentially relativistic concept of "belief' has been divided into valued and valueless parts, I recognized an anthropological subject. I analyzed the subject of religion in modern society from the viewpoint of Anthony Giddens' "disembedding mechanisms." Giddens has shown that modern society detaches social activity from direct interaction between people based on local context, and reconstructs social relations across vast space and time by using, among other methods, an "expert system." I consider UNESCO, local governments, and the volunteers who execute cultural policy to be the "expert system" mentioned by Giddens. Consequently, the process by which a sacred place of local villagers becomes the common heritage of all humankind is the result of disembedding mechanisms. The current situation, in which the cultural heritage system involves local society, consists of a dynamics that promotes the grading of "culture" while newly inventing "valueless culture."