Émile Durkheim's distinction between the sacred and the profane is one of the founding moves of the sociology of religion. Living Value Theory reads it as a theory of value boundaries: the mechanisms by which societies distinguish between what is to be treated with special care and what can be handled in ordinary ways.
The sacred, in this reading, is not primarily a theological category but a social one: it names those things, persons, places, and times that a community has invested with extraordinary value, and which must therefore be approached through special protocols. The profane is not the opposite of the sacred but its complement — the domain of ordinary value transactions that the sacred both depends on and is distinguished from.