Secularist Violence in Modern History: Interview with Thomas Albert Howard

In his new book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History (Yale University Press, 2025), historian  Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard takes the readers on a tour of modern world history to investigate what happens as the world secularizes. Proponents of secularization and outright state atheism in places like the Soviet Union have been asking for a while: what has religion—and especially Christianity—ever done for this world? Wouldn’t removing religion from the state lead to progress and peace? Howard’s book offers some answers, but they are probably not ones that these proponents would like. It is the absence of religion, he shows, that gives rise to significant state violence and oppression. 

Thomas Albert Howard is also the author of three other books, including most recently The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021). He is professor of humanities and history and the holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. 

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Nadya Williams: Your book confronts a popular assumption that religious regimes are violent, whereas secular ones are not. Would you tell a little bit about the backstory to this project: How did you come to be interested in telling this history? Why do you think this project is particularly timely right now?

Tal Howard: Work on a previous book about the history of interreligious dialogue "globalized" my reading in unexpected ways. Throughout this process, I realized that for many communities, modernity was not experienced as a liberation from religious repression but rather as an imposition of draconian, state-enforced secularism.

This secularism not only stifled religious expression but, in some cases, actively sought to dismantle or destroy existing religious beliefs and social structures. This was particularly true in areas of the world shaped by Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, although other ideologies, such as Kemalism in modern Turkey, pursued similar aims. If religion was not outright suppressed, it was often, through a process of “conflictual integration” (a term I borrow from the political scientist Timothy Samuel Shah), brought under the purview of and tightly regulated by the state at the expense of religious freedom.

Nadya Williams: I've always assumed—and presumably I'm not alone!—that secularism is just one general concept, amounting effectively to the possibly hostile absence of religion in a given society. You explain, however, that there are three different types of secularism, and we need to understand the differences between them. Can you explain a bit what these are and why we should be aware of these three distinct types?

Tal Howard: "Secularism" is a rather ambiguous term that can be used in different ways and in contexts. It can refer to the decline of religion in society or to specific political structures that aim to separate religious institutions (whether church, mosque, or temple) from the state. In the book, I primarily use it in the latter, political sense. However, for analytical clarity to serve the book’s main thesis, I find it helpful to distinguish between three distinct forms of political secularism:

The first form is passive secularism, which is the most familiar in the North Atlantic world. This version of secularism traces its roots to thinkers like John Locke, William Penn, and James Madison and is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and in other constitutions. I regard this form of secularism as rather benign and, in fact, beneficial, particularly for religious minorities.

In contrast, combative secularism emerged from the ideas of Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot and took shape during the Jacobin phases of the French Revolution after 1792. This form of secularism did not seek simply to protect freedom of religion but rather to achieve freedom from religion. Historically, it has been associated with intense anticlericalism and a desire to constrict religious expression. Examples of this form of secularism can be found in Kemalist Turkey, among the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, and in the early phases of the Mexican Revolution.

The third, and most extreme, form is eliminationist secularism. Rooted in the ideas of Karl Marx and other radical thinkers from the mid- and late nineteenth century, including Vladimir Lenin, this form of secularism came to prominence after the Bolshevik Revolution. More explicitly anti-religious than anticlerical, eliminationist secularism has often aimed to eradicate religious belief altogether. Its influence extended to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Mongolia, China, Tibet, and Cambodia, with a long history of state-led repression of religious communities and the partial or extensive destruction of these communities’ material culture.

Nadya Williams: Your book is impressively global in scope, which I appreciate. How did you decide on the case studies to include? Was there a case study that you would have liked to include but had to leave out in the interests of space?

Tal Howard: Generally, I selected case-studies according to which countries adopted species of combative or eliminationist secularism, as I had defined these terms. I probably should’ve profiled Ethiopia too, because the Derg regime’s application of Marxist-Leninist principles (1974-1991) sought to eradicate religious influence from both the public and private spheres, which resulted in the suppression of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the promotion of a strictly secularist identity. What is more, I only treated North Korea and Cuba in a cursory way; I probably could have said more about these countries. The former in particular would certainly qualify as regime committed to eliminationist secularism.

Nadya Williams: Historians generally go into a book project with at least some basic assumptions, but we also leave ourselves open to be surprised by the evidence. Was there anything you encountered in the course of the research for this book that was surprising or unexpected?  

Tal Howard: I am not trained as a scholar of modern Asia, so the violence inflicted on Buddhism by Communist regimes in the twentieth century was certainly one major “learning” for me as I went about research for this book. Because of the visibility of the Dalai Lama, Westerns tend to know about the persecution of Buddhism in Tibet, but this is only part of the story. The Soviet Union massively suppressed Buddhism in three areas: Kalmykia (north of the Caspian Sea), Buryatia (near Lake Baikal), and Tuva (near China). In nearby Mongolia, the situation was even worse. A Stalinist puppet regime, the People’s Republic of Mongolia banned reincarnations in 1928 and offered incentives for monks to abandon their monasteries. In 1937-39, the so-called Great Repression under the leadership of Khorloogiin Choibalsan resulted in a ghastly series of show trials, executions, and mass deaths, with thousands of high-ranking Buddhist lamas and monks perishing, and nearly every Buddhist monastery being desecrated and destroyed. By 1940, Buddhism in Mongolia had been gravely crippled.

Mongolia’s path set a precedent for China. After the Communist victory in 1949, the People’s Republic of China shifted in a secularist direction, combining Marxist-Leninist ideas with those of previous Chinese modernizers, who promoted the mantra, “smash temples, build schools.” “Religion is poison,” Mao told the young Dalai Lama when he visited China in the 1950s. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76) escalated religious persecution. In a frenzy of revolutionary fervor, Mao convinced idealistic young people, known as Red Guards, to attack the "four olds": old customs, old habits, old beliefs, and old ideas. Buddhist shrines, monasteries, and temples (along with those of other faiths) were desecrated, and monks and other religious leaders were regularly targeted in "struggle sessions," not infrequently leading to death or suicide. Whether in Tibet or China, the period from 1966 to 1976 witnessed, as the historians Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer write, “the most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in China and, perhaps, human history.”

We should also not forget the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Having formulated his own brand of Marxist-Leninist, secularist ideology during a stay in France, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge sought to obliterate Cambodia’s traditional culture and religion of Theravada Buddhism. Spearheaded by so-called “pagoda demolition squads,” pagodas were obliterated, monasteries looted, and sacred objects and texts destroyed. Monks were disrobed and forced into marriage or military service. In the 1960s, before the Khmer Rouge seized power, about 65,000 Buddhist monks and novices lived in Cambodia. By the time the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, fewer than a several hundred remained. The scholar Karl D. Jackson described what happened in Cambodia as follows: “[The] Khmer Rouge policy toward Buddhism constituted one of the most brutal and thoroughgoing attacks on religion in modern history.”

Nadya Williams: What are the larger questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing? And, on a related note, what is next for you? 

Tal Howard: Much of my research focuses on the ways in which various forces of modernity shape religious practice, belief, and the academic study of religion, particularly in the field of theology. At present, I am under contract with Princeton University to complete a book entitled Modern Christian Theology: An Intellectual History. I’m almost done with it after years of work! This work aims to trace the evolution of Christian theological thought in response to the various intellectual and cultural shifts and major events of the modern era—beginning around the time of the French Revolution.

In addition to this project, I am exploring a range of other topics, some of which are quite unrelated to my main research. These include a collection of travel essays I have written, an essay on the Christian conception of wisdom, and possibly a larger book project that examines the discourse surrounding missionaries and missiology. This project would focus on the activities and outlooks of missionaries within the British, French, and German empires in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In recent years, there has been significant scholarship on the relationship between religion and empire, particularly in relation to colonialism and the global spread of Christianity. Notably, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) offers a revisionist examination of the ethical implications of colonialism, particularly within the context of British imperialism. Similarly, Philip Jenkins’s Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions (2024) explores the intersection of religion and empire in many different historical contexts. Not least, one must mention a fine edited volume by Elizabeth A. Foster and Udi Greenberg: Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity (2023). I find the topic of empires (and their declines) and religion quite fascinating. At some point in the future, I hope perhaps to make a contribution to it as well.