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

Jan 18, 2026

Thomas Albert Howard, a renowned Professor of Humanities at Valparaiso University and author of *Broken Altars*, explores the often-overlooked violence linked to secularist regimes in the 20th century. He discusses three types of secularism and their historical impacts, from Marx's anti-religious policies to modern Turkey’s and Iran’s violent secular reforms. Howard emphasizes the real dangers of combative and eliminationist secularism, suggesting that the narrative of peaceful secularism is misleading and requires a broader understanding of global history.

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INSIGHT

Three Types Of Secularism

Thomas Albert Howard argues that secularism is not a single phenomenon but includes passive, combative, and eliminationist forms.
Combative and eliminationist secularisms have often produced state-sponsored violence comparable to religious violence.

ANECDOTE

Pahlavi Iran Echoes Atatürk

Morteza Hajizadeh connects Howard's account to Iran and the Pahlavi modernization that marginalized clergy and used coercion.
Howard agrees that Atatürk's Turkish secularism inspired similar authoritarian secular projects elsewhere.

INSIGHT

Secularism Can Fuel Religious Backlash

Abolishing the Ottoman caliphate had deep symbolic effects across the Muslim world and fueled some Islamist reactions.
Howard suggests extreme secular moves can engender militant religious responses as unintended consequences.

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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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