Secularist Violence in Modern History

In his latest book, “Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History,” Thomas Albert Howard presents three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment: passive, combative, and eliminationist. Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone and says Westerners do not fully grasp this because they often mistake passive secularism for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges when you adopt a broader global vision.   On today’s episode, John Pinheiro, Acton’s director of research, talks to Howard about secularism, what about it we often misunderstand, and his book.   Subscribe to our podcasts   Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History | Yale University Press   Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard | Valparaiso University   The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn   The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression