Abstract: Secularism is becoming increasingly problematic and is giving rise to clashes of ideas and people. The aim of this article is to help construct a meaning of secularism by avoiding any confusion between secularism, which is the political, legal, and institutional regulation of religion, and secularization, which refers to the decline of the symbolic, cultural, and social role of religion. This multisemantic approach to secularism not only highlights questions that challenge personal and collective educational traditions, but also, and above all, draws on a methodology of semi-structured interviews on the theme of secularism, put into perspective by consultations with 75 students, aged 18 to 24, in their first and second years of a bachelor's degree in modern literature at the University of Parakou in northern Benin. These interviews, developed in 2022 and conducted using a guide consisting of broad categories reflecting the cognitive, social, and subjective aspects of their experiences of secularism, made it possible to gather the knowledge, understanding, and perspectives of these students on secularism, thus revealing their own visions of the concept of secularism. In general, the survey highlighted a lack of knowledge about secularism among some, and also a rigidity of the concept among others, which is not the focus of this work.
Dr NADOHOU Hermann Juste* (Fri,) studied this question.