Describes the genealogy and construction of the concept of civil religion in Balibar’s work, stressing its relation to Spinoza’s work and opening onto the critique of political and philosophical secularism, this last a “neutral,” mediating position which may be the “true religion of civic life” today, if it is not one pole of two within civil reiligion, the other religion itself, whose oscillating opposition lies at the heart of the contemporary conception of freedom.