Between Secularization and Desecularization. What Future does Religion have in a Globalized World?

The aim of this paper is to present a scientific debate on the role that religion plays in modern society. On one hand, many scholars believe that religion has historically been a fundamental institution of social acting and as such it has determined the succession of the founding values of the daily life that continue to be passed down from generation to generation. On the other hand, several other scholars point out how modernity is changing the social role of religion because it is reduced to a simple privatization of the faith and is far from its original features. Starting from a sociological point of view, this reflection on the matter is exactly half way between the above-mentioned ones, proposing a model of analysis that sees religion both changed com- pared to the past and still fundamental to individual’s social acting.