Abstract

After recalling the key points of what Joas proposes in The Power of the Sacred, the author takes up the question of secularisation which obsesses religious traditions and prevents them from discerning the specific features of the contemporary era: unprecedented and the innovative developments, bearing quests and refusals, which must be deciphered, and which are part of a redistribution of what makes up the social. The game of collective desacralisations-resacralisations dear to Joas no longer responds to this, compelling us to move away, in order to emphasise that the social is first and foremost disseminated and de-institutionalised and that the religious is not limited to the sacral function mobilised here. Religion or the religious also, fundamentally, a mark of difference. The author believes that this aspect must be validated in the light of contemporary transformations and outlines what this means for the status and forms of religious traditions.