&gt; Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don&#x27;t think science can make claims of sacrality.<p>What&#x27;s a claim of sacrality? A claim that a particular set of behavior is concerned with the sacred is, as your second paragraph implied, an unremarkable claim. No more impressive that claiming some behavior is religious, or ritualistic.<p>This is where I&#x27;m struggling to understand you. Something is sacred, in the context of religious studies, if it is something set apart by a community and held deliberately in contrast with profane activities (following the Durkheim kind of definition - the older definition of folks like Otto is well out of favour now). To identify that certain activities, knowledge, experience, or behavior is commonly sacred, is just an observation about how communities organise their worldviews.<p>In a certain sense, no discussion of religion can be secular, by definition (religious and secular are as slippery to define precisely as sacred and profane). But in the sense that you can do secular religious studies, I don&#x27;t know why &#x27;sacred&#x27; for you is a special kind of topic that can&#x27;t be admitted to the rest of the field.<p>On the &#x27;people studying this go weird&#x27; tack. Yup! Very true. I think this is an issue with religious studies generally, and lots of related fields (biblical criticism, say). The people who are attracted to a field are probably more likely to have some affinity for what they are studying, and sometimes language can get a little to &#x27;emic&#x27; for my taste. One does have to be careful to distinguish between the views someone will advocate and the positions they want to put forward as a scientist, or a secular scholar. Though sometimes people will blur those boundaries. Mind you, I get the same feeling from scientists and scholars with strong ideological opinions generally, not just religious folks. But all that said, the term &#x27;sacred&#x27; is not unscientific that I can see, or at least, no more than any other term used to describe human religious activity.