In his deeply informed new book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, the intellectual historian Thomas Albert Howard challenges a widespread contemporary prejudice that identifies religion with violence and irrationality. Machiavelli made clear in The Prince that he could imagine no political evil graver than “pious cruelty.” But it turns out that impious cruelty has been far more destructive than the religious furies of old. “In terms of sheer numbers,” writes Howard in his introduction, “the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century vastly exceed the violence committed during early modern European wars of religion, which are routinely invoked to legitimize the necessity of the modern secular nation-state.”
There is secularism and there is secularism. Howard, a professor of history and the humanities at Valparaiso University, identifies various forms of “passive secularism” whose adherents, though sometimes irreligious themselves, eschew overt hostility
