Scott Atran: while the term “sacred values” intuitively denotes religious belief, sacred values actually refers to any preferences regarding objects, beliefs, or practices that people treat as both incompatible or nonfungible with profane issues or economic goods, as when land or law becomes holy or hallowed and as inseparable from people’s conception of “self” and of “who we are.” This includes the “secularized sacred,” as, for example, in political notions of “human rights” or in the transcendent ideological “-isms” that have dominated political life ever since the Enlightenment’s secularization of the universal religious mission to redeem and save “humanity” through political revolution (liberalism, socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, etc.