Although religious freedom, secularisation and secularism are universal concepts, they have had a particular way of being specified in the reality of Latin American and Caribbean countries. Religious freedom refers to the right to freedom of conscience and religion, which also carries the right to free expression of ideas and beliefs. Secularisation is the long-term process of autonomisation of the spheres of life and society in relation to the religious, with the consequent loss of centrality of the religious in society. Likewise, the term ‘secularism’ is limited to the specific processes by which new organisational forms are reflected as a result of the secularisation process, which in particular cases such as the Uruguayan has generated a secular movement (see below). Religious freedom is enshrined in the Constitutions of the Latin American and Caribbean countries. All are non-denominational except those of Costa Rica, whose 1949 text proclaims the Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church as that of the state, and of Argentina, whose Constitution establishes that the federal government supports Roman Catholic Apostolic worship.

However, despite having been established during the colonial period and inherited from the tradition of the Christian West, the ‘system’ of Christianity has a relative validity in the religious imaginary of Latin America. Since its establishment by Roman Emperor Constantine, it is accepted that the Christian religion, through the life of the church, inspires a social and cultural order that the temporal power must develop. In turn, the state provides the means for the church to advance its mission and, at the same time, legitimise the power of the state. Under this order of things, which has roots in the Constantinian era and was consolidated in the medieval era, religious and political institutions were mixed until modernity began a process of separation. With independence and the difficult process of construction of national states in Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the central proposals of liberalism was to establish the separation of church and state. At the same time, this trend generated resistance, and even today various non-Catholic Christian churches advocate a return to a Constantinian model of Christianity.

In some places, such as Guatemala, liberalism triumphed and the separation of the Catholic Church and the state was established.