ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 defines the present form of the autonomy of religious lifestyles as “the fourth secularisation”. In recent decades the secularisation theme has aroused great interest among scholars of both social sciences and the humanities. Lately the theme has enjoyed a revival stimulated by the opposition between those who see a return of the sacred and those who attribute lasting heuristic validity to the theory of secularisation, albeit divided into different declensions. The present tome tends towards the latter interpretation. After the secularisation from Greek mythology to Classical philosophy, after the secularisation from the abstract Logos to Christianity, and after the third secularisation of science at the dawn of the modern age, the fourth - current - one will be the secularisation of individual lifestyles. The secularisation of lifestyles implies that they depend decreasingly upon one’s religion of belonging and increasingly upon individual choice. In this process of personalisation and stylistic self-awareness, spiritualities and religious individuals without a fixed religious status proliferate.
