Secularism, far from transcending sectarianism and violence, is responsible for some of the most heinous, murderous regimes this planet has ever witnessed. Indeed, though many of its adherents argue that secularism is objective and indifferent, it “carries normative assumptions and frames of reference” that evince its own peculiar paradigm.

More than a decade ago, I had the privilege of visiting Tuol Sleng, a museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, that displays in horrific detail the murderous brutality committed by the totalitarian Khmer Rouge, which governed the country from 1975 to 1979. Originally a school, Tuol Sleng was turned into a prison housing more than 18,000 “enemies of the state,” almost all of whom were murdered. Visitors to the museum today will see walls covered with photos of deceased inmates, cabinets filled with human skulls, and testimonials of those who survived. I remember one inmate describing how the daily ration was so meager that the prisoners could practically count the individual grains of rice. The next time you eat rice, you’ll recognize how little that is.

Scholars estimate that the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people out of a population of about 6.5 million. Many of the victims died because of starvation, forcibly removed from their homes to work on massive (and largely pointless) agricultural projects. But the regime also targeted those associated with the previous government, ethnic and religious minorities, and the intelligentsia. Simply wearing glasses—a supposed sign of being educated, and thus a threat—could be a death sentence.

As Valparaiso University professor Thomas Albert Howard notes in his new book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, the Khmer Rouge was a virulently secular regime. Its foot soldiers targeted not only the small Catholic population that owed its existence to French missionaries during the colonial period but also representatives of the Buddhist majority and the Cham Muslim minority population. Of a pre–Khmer Rouge Buddhist monk population of 65,000, only 2,000 were alive in 1979. Mortality rates among Protestants and Catholics in Cambodia during this time was likely close to 1 in 2. The Khmer Rouge also systematically exterminated Cham villages—almost a third of this religious minority died.

The anti-religious character of the Khmer Rouge regime is important, Howard argues, because in both academia and popular media, it is often an a priori assumption that it is religion and violence that go hand in hand. There is a Journal of Religion and Violence and academic texts such as the Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence and the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. Millions of Americans believe our nation is terrifyingly close to realizing the dystopian religious authoritarianism of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “For many educated Westerners,” Howard observes, “ the idea that religion promotes violence and secularism ameliorates the problem is a settled certainty, a doxa, an unstated premise of right thinking.” Yet, he further notes, if we are talking about numbers, the death and destruction exacted upon religious communities by secularist governments in the 20th century far exceeds the violence committed by premodern or early modern European confessional states.

But Howard’s argument moves far beyond the typical talking point (however accurate) that the anti-Christian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Indeed, the professor of humanities and history begins by differentiating three different manifestations of secularism that are visible in modern political institutions: passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism.

Passive secularism describes those regimes that, although intentionally secular, are not hostile to religion. In this category, Howard places the United States and the 1831 constitution of Belgium. Though I understand what Howard is trying to describe, I think his presentation is a bit simplistic, for reasons I outlined in a review for Religion & Liberty. Even if the framers of the U.S. Constitution did not craft a confessional state, they certainly created one that was demonstrably preferential toward religion, given that religion is protected in the First Amendment and that God is explicitly cited in the Declaration as knowable by nature. Churches enjoy tax exemptions, and chaplains are employed by Congress, legislatures, the military services, and public institutions. Presidents (such as Washington and Lincoln) proclaimed public religious festivals or fast days. We have judicial oaths and (once had) Sabbath laws. That doesn’t sound like a disinterested approach to religious faith and practice, even if some of these traditions have of late receded.

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