Armenia’s Struggle and a New Look at Secularist Violence

Armenia’s Struggle and a New Look at Secularist Violence January 13, 2025

Book cover of Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History

I hope I might be forgiven for using this post to make known two publications (one out already and another forthcoming) that I think (hope!) will be of interest to Anxious Bench readers.

The first is an essay, “Armenia Sighs,” based on a trip I made in March to the country of Armenia, which remains locked in conflict with its neighbor, Azerbaijan, due to the latter’s invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani province predominantly peopled with Armenians—that is until recently. Here is the article:

When Pope Francis named the Armenian monk Gregory of Narek (951–1003) the thirty-sixth universal doctor of the Catholic Church in 2015, many were caught off guard. Gregory who, from where? This was my response, too. But reading Gregory has convinced me of the pope’s rationale—this and the fact that the Vatican’s actions coincided, intentionally, with the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, known by Armenians as the Metz Yeghern (the Great Evil). Put this together with a research project that’s prompted me to consider Armenia under Soviet rule, and you’ll understand why I bought a plane ticket to Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

If you’ve followed the news, however, there’s another reason to reflect on Armenia today—one relevant to both Gregory of Narek and the Armenian Genocide. This small Christian country, only independent since 1991, stands at an inflection point in its recent history. In October 2023, with Turkey’s tacit support, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani province predominantly peopled with Armenians, most of whom (around 100,000) are now refugees in Armenia proper with little prospect of returning to their ancestral home. The cultural erasure practiced during the 1915–1923 genocide—which ruined Gregory of Narek’s monastery in western Armenia (eastern Turkey today)—has returned, as Azeri forces plundered Nagorno-Karabakh (referred to by Armenians as Artsakh). And all of this fails to mention the deaths and casualties occasioned by these actions. Where even to begin?

This piece first appeared in the journal Touchstone. One can read the remainder of the article here.

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The second publication is my book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, which will be published by Yale University Press in March 2025. Here is a link to the book and below is the cover description:

A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.

Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting different species of secularism, greater historical perspective, and case studies drawn from the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries, Howard calls into question the conventional tale of modernity as the pacifying triumph of secularism over a benighted religious past.

About Thomas Albert Howard
Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard is Professor of History and the Humanities at Valparaiso University, where he holds the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics. He is the author of several books, including The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford, 2017), Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford, 2016), and God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford, 2011), winner of a Christianity Today Book of the Year Award. You can read more about the author here.
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