Recomposition du religieux et réaffirmation identitaire dans l’Europe de la fin du XXème siècle

A sense of uprooting, along with the meeting of different cultures, the speeding up of time, the doubt about the certainties of tradition and the promises of modemity, as well as the fact that societes cannot fulfil the aspirations and anguish that they arouse, leadfrom the 1975s onwards to the reconstruction of what gives sense and value to human behaviours in every society and « link » people together : religion. Attempts to reconstruct confiscated identities–whether lost or more and more difficult to assume–, as well as the quest for meaning, are processes which for the most part are the concern of religions. Therefore an important part of the work towards regaining the identities is taking place in the very religious field. It happens in ways that had not been forseen, in two main directions : 1.Ignoring the characteristic (religious and non-religious) frontiers of « traditional » and « rational » civilizations, new religions spring up and, through syncretism. produce novelty, whereas a diffuse form of religiosity, formed within the « New Age » wave, meets with a tremendous success. 2.Holding on to these same frontiers. religions may also reat against modemity by reasserting the value of traditions, that will not mix up this time, but clash. The revival of all forms of fundamentalism in Catholicism as well as Protestantism, Islam and Judaism during the past 25 years can be taken as an example. This paper points out the ambivalence of contemporary religiosity and proposes several concepts : identity universalism and particularisms, which develop in continuous relation to one another in a permanent interaction ; identity by subtraction ; processes of demodernization