Thomas Howard, Ph.D., professor of humanities and history and Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics has released a new book titled “Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History.” Examining historic perspects and case studies from countries around the globe, Professor Howard calls into question the belief that secular politics are inherently less violent than those based on religious practice.
“Since 9/11, much has been written on religion and violence, and how the former can lead to the latter,” Professor Howard said. “The sheer volume of this material sometimes obscures the fact that one "big story" of modern history is how, not religions, but extreme secularist ideologies, especially Marxism and Leninism, have been violent toward religious communities.”
The idea that violence is somehow inherent to religion and that secularism is liberation from that violence has been a popular one in western civilization since the Enlightenment. In this book, however, Professor Howard divides secularism in three camps: passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism, and argues that the second and third group have, historically, been especially prone to violence of their own.
To illustrate his point, Professor Howard takes an international approach, drawing on case studies drawn from various nations, including the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries.
“In a clear and concise global analysis that spans the European Enlightenment to the present, Howard reminds amnesiacs of the staggering scale of human suffering inflicted by anti-religious modern political regimes animated by combative and eliminationist secularism,” said a review from Brad S. Gregory, historian of Western Europe at the University of Notre Dame.
“Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History” has been published through the Yale University Press, and is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. For more information, visit the Yale University Press page here.
Some of Professor Howard’s other works include “The Faiths of Others: Modern History and the Rise of Interreligious Dialogue’ (Yale University Press, 2020), The Idea of Tradition in the Late Modern World: An Ecumenical and Interreligious Conversation(Cascade, 2020), and Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford University Press, August 2016). For more information on Professor Howard and his bibliography click here.
