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Podcast: New Books in Political Science
Episode: Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)
Description: A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA 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 s...