International relations theory tends to build on the conventional narrative of the Wars of Religion (WoR), which holds it was the irrationality of religious violence that generated the modern international system of pragmatic secular states—resulting in the presumed secularized, rational, and unemotive nature of politics. In contrast, this article reorients our focus to Durkheim's more social view of religion as a community of believers and to the continued role of the sacred and shared emotion/affect in social and political life. Specifically, it examines how modern communities (such as nations) remain constituted by a shared faith in conceptions of the sacred and how the corresponding sense of moral order is central to the enduring pursuit of ontological security. Therefore, it argues that international relations should focus on the perennial struggles over what communities hold sacred and that we can better understand the propensity for (“religious” or “secular”) violence by examining the continual interplay between the sacred, ontological security, and the hermeneutics of morality—with the so-called WoR being the locus classicus of this argument. Historical studies exploring how participants in the WoR navigated such struggles over the sacred thus allow us to explore these dynamics and further conceptualize our understanding of the sacred within modern “secular” politics. The article concludes by examining how the prospect for violence is interrelated with the perennial struggles over the sacred within, and between, political orders—a sentiment that brings into relief some of the hazards accompanying growing intrastate moral polarization and interstate ideological rivalry.

国际关系理论倾向于建立在宗教战争（WoR）的传统叙述之上，认为正是宗教暴力的非理性催生了务实的世俗国家的现代国际体系——导致了假定的世俗化、理性和非动机性的本质政治的。相比之下，本文将我们的注意力重新定位到涂尔干关于宗教作为信徒群体的更具社会性的观点，以及神圣和共享的情感/影响在社会和政治生活中的持续作用。具体来说，它考察了现代社会（例如国家）如何仍然由对神圣概念的共同信仰构成，以及相应的道德秩序感如何成为持久追求本体论安全的核心。因此，它认为，国际关系应该关注关于社区神圣性的长期斗争，并且我们可以通过考察神圣的、本体论的安全和宗教之间的持续相互作用来更好地理解（“宗教”或“世俗”）暴力的倾向。道德解释学——所谓的“WoR”是这一论点的经典焦点。历史研究探索了世界运动的参与者如何应对神圣的斗争，从而使我们能够探索这些动态，并进一步概念化我们对现代“世俗”政治中神圣的理解。文章最后探讨了暴力前景如何与政治秩序内部和政治秩序之间对神圣性的长期斗争如何相互关联——这种情绪凸显了随着国家内部道德两极分化和国家间意识形态竞争日益加剧而带来的一些危险。