Abstract

What this paper proposes is a reflexion on the role religious institutions play in nowadays societies come out from religion. A society that maintains a place for religion where churches are dismissed aside onto the civil society. What we verify is that the social forces conserve a certain vocation to allow for the credo to make it through modern times and to coexist with an exit from religion. The paper is divided in five different parts. The first one sets about conceiving the correlation between the public and the private, distinguishing the stance of religion in these two spheres. The second part displays the permanence of religious institutions as the result of some paradoxal re-legitimation which emerges as a religion of the individual. Part three discusses the liberal idea of a republican religiosity in which the democratic liberty takes the form of a spiritual historic of metaphysical outreach. Part four deals with historic identity and its transmission, as well as with the de-traditionalization of churches and of their role amidst the loss of their very sense. The fifth and last part shows the role that religious institutions can still exert face to a contemporary background, witness to an insidious process of dehumanisation.