ABSTRACT
Religion and violence was a marginal issue for sociology. The link between the debate over religious violence and the secularisation debate lies in an enlightenment script that holds that religion is irrational and violent and needs therefore to be forcibly expelled from the political realm into the purely private, and violently rooted out. Secularisation is implicated in the classic dispute over Weber's thesis about the Protestant Ethic, where the Protestant Ethic is understood as an agent of rationalisation. Empirical sociological studies articulate the historical and contemporary sources of conflict. The role of religion may be minor but when it comes to major narratives, sociology may more easily line up with Enlightenment presuppositions. Voluntary denominations leave behind the territorial emplacement of the Church and the communitarian segregation of the radical sect, to emphasise personal conversion, and from time to time they adopt positions between the radical pacifism of the sect and the ecclesiastical acceptance of the just war and violence.
