I am very pleased to announce on this post that my new book Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History (Yale University Press) will be released this month. Here is a link to the book and here 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 than those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the sheer numbers, misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.
Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—that have arisen since the Enlightenment, Howard argues that the latter two, embodied especially in radical republican and Marxist-Leninist regimes, 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.
Additionally, here below is a post, “God and the Ghosts of Communism” (a section of the book) that first appeared at Law & Liberty:
If the invasion of Ukraine at the instigation of a former KGB agent were not enough to focus the mind on the legacy of the Soviet Union, 2022 also marks the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s infamous secret memo to the Politburo, expanding the Revolution to include butchering Orthodox priests. Thus began an age of brutal religious persecution wrought by secularist states. By the estimation of leading religious demographers, over thirty million Christians perished under atheist regimes in the twentieth century. Tell this to friends who might insouciantly associate “secularism” with deliverance from religious violence. Tell this, too, to American history teachers, who rightly cover the horrors of Nazism and slavery, but often have far less to say about the Communist tragedy.
While the Soviet Union and Communist China account for most lives lost in raw numbers, nowhere was the logic of Marxism-Leninism vis-à-vis religion pursued more ruthlessly than in little Albania, especially under the dictator Enver Hoxha (r. 1944-1985). His one-party regime went so far as to criminalize religious belief in 1967, making Albania “the first atheist country in the world.” The government crowed about the achievement.
To read the remainder of this post, please go here.
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