Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History

Language: English

Published by Yale University Press, 2025

0300263619 / 9780300263619

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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.

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Title
Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History
Author
Thomas Albert Howard
Publisher
Yale University Press
Publication year
2025
Condition
Good
Binding
Hardback
Language
English
ISBN 10
0300263619
ISBN 13
9780300263619

World of Books Inc

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