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.
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Nadya Williams
Nadya Williams is the Books Editor at Mere Orthodoxy. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University and is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church; Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity; and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming Zondervan Academic, 2025). She and her husband Dan joyfully live and homeschool in Ashland, Ohio.
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