The sacramental mechanism: Religion and the civilizing process in Christian Western Europe with particular reference to the peace of god movement and its aftermath

This chapter concerns the sacramental mechanism itself, largely leaving aside the relation between the different mechanisms, a full conception of which would ultimately be necessary for understanding the complex web of relations that drive the civilizing process as a whole. At the same time, contemporary research has also shown that religion is far from an insignificant force in the processes of peace-building and post-conflict resolution. The chapter focuses on the important survey of social scientific attention on the topic, Scott Appleby sensibly suggests that the role of religion in the violent conflicts of the modern world is profoundly ambivalent. Adding the concept of the sacramental mechanism to Elias' theory of the civilizing process allows us to better understand the roles of religion in the longue dure of the increasing constraints on the use of violence and the civilization of human dispositions.