The dialectics of religious conflict: Church – sect, denomination and the culture wars Warren S. Goldstein* Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University, Center for Critical Research on Religion, MA, USA In this article, I trace the shifting theorisation of religious conflict to argue that religious conflict in the USA is shaped by a dialectic of religious and secular movements. Church-sect theory, which was originally a class-based theoretical framework, was appropriated by the rational choice approach in the sociology of religion, which instead privileged competition in a religious marketplace. Ernst Troeltsch described divisions between church and sect, but H. Richard Niebuhr demarcated a denominational divide in the USA based on class, region, ethnicity and race. In the 1980s, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, Robert Wuthnow and James Davison Hunter observed that the differences in the US were no longer necessarily between denominations but could occur within denominations. For them, what had become known as the Culture Wars were based on a conflict between religious liberals/progressives and religious conservatives/orthodox. This conflict is shaped by a dialectic of secular and religious movements and counter-movements. Keywords: church – sect theory; denomination; culture wars; dialectic; conflict theory Introduction One of the bases of the sociology of religion is church– sect theory. Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr provided the original articulations of it. Church-sect theory has since been appropriated by rational choice theory – in particular by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke. However, in doing so, they have whitewashed it – toning down the class basis of religious conflict and ignoring its implicit dialectic. Church-sect theory has declined in its significance, particularly in the USA. The lines along which religious conflict occur have shifted. Although the conflict between church and sect originally took place along class lines, sects became institutionalised into denominations whose divisions, according to Niebuhr, were based not only upon class, but also upon region, ethnicity and race. In the 1980s, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, Robert Wuthnow and James Davison Hunter observed that religious conflict was no longer necessarily between ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2011.557015 http://www.informaworld.com *Email: goldstein@criticaltheoryofreligion.org Culture and Religion Vol. 12, No. 1, March 2011, 77–99