Espacio público y espacio religioso en Chile republicano

Abstract

From the perspective of political history, the relation between the public sphere and religion need requires a complementary approach. The first one is modern politics, which attempts to separate the public space from the private one reducing religion to the domain of one's own conscience and private practice. The second approach is the process towards a more lay state in the XIX c. which changes the role of religion, involving it in the public space in quite a different way. This brief article shows these two approaches in the case of the Chilean society, and then provides a critical view on the issue. It deals with the freedom of cult, the new insertion of Catholicism in the civil society through modern associations and finally the transformations in the forms of religious piety