Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Jan 7, 2026

Thomas Albert Howard, a Professor of humanities and history at Valparaiso University, challenges the narrative that secularism is a pacifying force. He explores the dark side of modern secularist regimes, revealing their significant capacity for violence. Howard distinguishes between passive, combative, and eliminationist secularism, examining cases from the Soviet Union to Turkey. He warns of the dangers posed by fanatic nationalism paired with militant secularism and advocates for passive secularism as the protector of pluralism and religious liberty.

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INSIGHT

Three Types Of Secularism

Secularism is not a single phenomenon; Thomas Albert Howard distinguishes passive, combative, and eliminationist types.
Combative and eliminationist secularisms have driven major 20th-century state violence against religion.

INSIGHT

Passive Vs Combative Secularism

Passive secularism allows pluralism and limits state interference in religion.
Combative secularism traces to the French Revolution's attack on the Church and normalizes state hostility.

INSIGHT

Eliminationist Secularism And State Violence

Eliminationist secularism, linked to Marxist-Leninist thought, seeks to remove religion as an ideological obstacle.
Lenin and Stalin endorsed proactive anti-religious campaigns that became violently repressive.

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A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century
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.

Thomas Albert Howard is professor of humanities and history and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is the author of many books, including The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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