Relations between laicity and religion. Remarks about a permanent tension

The aim of this paper is to set some reflections about actual relations and tensions between laicity and religion. Taking the relations between state, nation and democracy, as well as the laicity'sfrench model, as a starting point, we discuss the crisis of republican-democratic civic and political values and the actual problems related to the classical laicity. We argue that these problems arise from the radicalization of the modern imperative of individual autonomy, the desregulation of the religious and from the growing efficacy and symbolic pregnancy of religious-based processes of collective identity.