Reflections on modern emancipation often involve a disavowal of the contribution of religion. The latter is either criticized or portrayed as conservative criticism. This project wants to challenge this conception of the relation between emancipation and religion. Our main thesis is that monotheistic religions, structured by the concept of justice, have and still can contribute to the constitution of critical subjectivities engaged in the project of modern emancipation. This thesis implies that we consider religion as part of modernity, not as its opposite. We start from the following principle: the specific contribution of religion to the emancipation of our modern societies must be situated in the individuals, their reflexive positions and their critical activities Modern societies are characterized by the fact that the idea of emancipation is inextricably linked to the critical activity of the social actors themselves. Criticism and emancipation are inextricably linked to the reflexive return by socially constituted individuals on society, its normativity and its promises of justice. Consequently, the link between religion and emancipation in modernity has to be situated precisely in the critical subjectivity: in what religion makes subjects do or allows them to do. This is indeed our approach to the link between religion and emancipation. It is the heart of the central thesis of our project: investigate on the relationship between religion and emancipation in modernity means to understand religion as a form of reflexivity that allows subjects to criticize the project of modernity in view of its incompletion. Therefore, we will study religion exclusively in terms of its contribution to the constitution of critical subjectivities. And we maintain that it is an important factor in this constitution, including in modernity. In order to develop this thesis, we refer to the political anthropology of Freud, for whom religion is the model of a collective practice protecting individual criticism against madness. Indeed, Freud demonstrates that the individualization of the subject in its relation to the law produces a new constellation: henceforth the conflict of the desiring subject with the instituting law (society) comes to express itself in the form of neurosis, even madness, where previously the collective (oscillating between respect for the taboo and transgression of the taboo) assumed this conflict. As a result, modern societies open up a double possibility: first, precisely the possibility of neurosis, even of madness. But secondly, it opens the possibility for a process of civilization that realizes itself by the reflexive self-constitution of societies through the return of individuals to the normativity that makes them think and act. By giving individuals a language of collective ideals - namely of justice - derived from common practices and conserved in texts, religion allows them to oppose the established law on the basis of these ideals. In this way, religion supports the critical movement of individuals by providing them with a language of shared justice, and which is shared although the normative scope of this language transcends justice achieved in concrete societies. This role of the religious language in its relation to critique will be examined by studying: 1) the worker’s movement and its ambiguous practical relation to religion; 2) the feminist movement, which radically challenges our research hypothesis of a strong link between monotheisms and the search for practical and symbolic fulcrums for politics of emancipation.