Secular Statist Violence

Just who are the real killers?

Atheists and others have longed claimed that religion is the source of most, if not all, violence in the world. Get rid of religion and voilà, peace on earth and good will toward men will automatically ensue. John Lennon certainly pushed that point of view in his 1971 song “Imagine” where he crooned about a secular heaven on earth:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace

But it takes much more than dreamy-eyed rock stars to give us the actual lowdown on these matters. Many authorities have weighed into this debate with hard-headed realism and actual facts and data. It is their findings that we should be listening to.

Before I mention just three of them, let me point out something of importance. Some religions ARE inherently violent. Estimates are that some 280 million people have been killed by political Islam over its 1400-year history. While Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, Muhammad commanded his followers to slay the infidels wherever they are found. Big difference. See more on this here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2008/11/21/jesus-muhammad-and-violence/

But as to claims that a good dose of secularism and irreligious statism is what we need, that has been thoroughly debunked. My first witness comes in the form of the 1994 book Death By Government by R. J. Rummel (Transaction Publishers).

In it he discusses democide, wherein governments (primarily secular ones) commit mass murder against their own citizens. Thus he details how the Soviets murdered some 62 million people, the Chinese communists, 35 million, and the Nazis, 21 million.

The numbers speak for themselves. The state (along with political Islam), is the world’s greatest killer, especially atheistic communist states. See here for further details: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2014/02/08/atheism-government-and-killing/

And the vitally important 1999 volume of nearly 900 pages, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press) is of course indispensable reading here. First published in French in 1997, the volume carefully documents the true toll of godless communism and how it slaughtered some 100 million people.

My third and most recent witness is Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History by Thomas Albert Howard (Yale University Press, 2025). The well-researched details of his claims are found in the five main chapters, but the book’s Introduction nicely lays out the case he seeks to make. So here I share some quotes from it.

He argues that “for many educated Westerners, the idea that religion promotes violence and secularism ameliorates the problem is a settled certainty, a doxa, an unstated premise of right thinking.” He quotes some authors who sought to show that the progress of secularism meant a move away from violence. Howard responds:

This book raises questions about this conventional wisdom. By no means do I deny that religious energies—particularly when tied up with ethnic identities and economic scarcity—can be turned toward destructive ends, especially by unscrupulous politicians in times of crisis and uncertainty. Think of the Balkans, Kashmir, or the Middle East. . . .  [C]oncentration on or simply assuming religion’s inclination toward violence insouciantly glides past a glaring reality of the twentieth century: namely, that regimes committed to secularism have not infrequently possessed just as much capacity for violence as, and often much more than, those tied to religious identity. Twentieth-century secularist ideologies bear as an ignominious hallmark, moreover, systematic attacks against religious communities. In terms of sheer numbers, 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 modem secular nation-state. (p. 2)

He goes on to distinguish three types of secularism: passive, combative, and eliminationist. His book focuses on the last two types. As to the second, it “descends from the Jacobin stages of the French Revolution after 1792.” And the third, eliminationist secularism,

designates a political solution gestated and shaped by Europe’s Far Left—by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and other socialist intellectuals. anarchists, and syndicalists operating within the swelling Communist cells and political movements of the mid- and late nineteenth century: Despite sharp disagreements among them, they tended to see religion itself as wrongheaded and reactionary. “The first duty of a free and intelligent mind,” Proudhon once wrote, “is to chase the idea of God out of his mind incessantly.” (p. 5)

While the second and third type of secularism have their differences, both “are the offspring of the Enlightenment’s progressive wing—what the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel has called the Radical Enlightenment.”

Howard ends his Introduction this way:

The sheer scope of twentieth-century anticlerical and anti-religious repression, however, should give one pause when encountering the platitude that religion is inherently violent and in need of secular containment. Religious traditions have been complicit in violence, to be sure. The historical record on this is clear and invites ongoing inquiry. But the fact that secularism too has been complicit—and on a massive scale—should make us puzzle over the reliability of our assumptions, narratives, and vocabulary in thinking perspicaciously about these complicated matters. Which secularism, whose religion, under what circumstances, and combined with what other factors, we might more probingly ask. In the final analysis, anyone inclined to invoke modern secularism indiscriminately as an antidote to religious violence might speak well but not wisely, handicapped by potent historical amnesia. (pp. 17-18)

As mentioned, the meat of the book is found in five chapters, dealing with:

-Three Ways
-Secularist Onslaughts
-Soviet Severities
-Eastern Europe
-Red Asia.

Some 40 pages of notes provide the references for the case he makes in those chapters.

In the Conclusion, Howard notes what many conservatives at least have long discussed: how Nazism still tends to offer more moral disgust than communism, which killed far more people. He writes:

Nazism (seen as racist and atavistic) undeniably has elicited more moral attention and remembrance than Communism (seen as egalitarian and universalistic in its aspirations). This is true despite the fact, as the Bulgarian-French historian Tzvetan Todorov observes, that Communist violence “lasted longer . . . spread more widely, to almost every continent, and was not confined to the European theatre; and it killed an even greater number of people.” Quantitatively, credible estimates range as high as reckoning Nazism responsible for around twenty-five million deaths in the twentieth century; Communism for around eighty-five million to one hundred million. (pp. 223-224)

Howard closes the book with these words:

Permit me to conclude by emphatically restating that focusing on violence in the name of militant ideological secularism neither denies nor excuses violence in the name of religious belief. Disputing this regrettable reality is not the purpose this book, although I have raised an eyebrow at the supposition that religion is somehow inherently violent. The theologian David Bentley Hart might have put it best when he wrote, “As a historical force, religion has been neither simply good nor simply evil but has merely reflected human nature in all its dimensions.” Perhaps something similar applies to secularism and the various uses to which it has been put by modern regimes. At the very least, a tour d’horizon of secularist violence in global perspective holds the promise of bringing greater nuance and circumspection to fraught debates about the nature of religion, politics, modernity, and violence. Which secularism, whose religion, where, and under what conditions, we might more discerningly ask. Failure to do so comes at the price of enormous forgetfulness, dishonoring those who experienced persecution and detrimental to a considered and capacious understanding of the modern age. (p. 225)

This important new volume, along with the other two I mention above, make it perfectly clear that we can dismiss the rants of the angry atheists, and the naivety of clueless rock stars. The simple truth is this: secular statism kills – big time.

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