Broken Altars

Thomas Albert Howard

Reviewed by: David VanDrunen

Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, Thomas Albert Howard. Yale University Press, 2025. Hardcover, 296 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by OP minister and professor David VanDrunen.

Thomas Albert Howard notes that scholars and the media in recent decades have given extensive attention to the problem of religious violence—that is, violence committed in the name of religious conviction. Howard doesn’t deny that such violence exists but seeks to correct the corresponding lack of attention to secularist violence against religious communities. According to Howard, the latter problem has actually been far worse.

Chapter 1 identifies three primary ways in which proponents of “modernity” have tried to resolve tensions and conflicts related to religion and politics. The first, passive secularism, recognizes broad religious liberties and is exemplified by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This approach has been generally friendly toward religious practice and isn’t Howard’s focus here. The second is combative secularism, exemplified in France’s Third Republic (1871–1940), the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910, areas of Republican-controlled Spain in the 1930s, and Kemalist Turkey following World War I. Combative secularism wasn’t anti-religion per se but was strongly anti-clerical and sought to suppress religious influence and keep it out of public affairs. Finally, eliminationist secularism views religion itself as problematic and retrograde. This emerged from Europe’s far left and animated communist regimes around the world.

The remaining chapters provide the horrendous details of the last two secularisms. Chapter 2 considers the “combative secularist” regimes mentioned above. As bad as their atrocities were against religious communities, they can hardly be compared to the twentieth-century communist regimes discussed in the remaining chapters. Chapter 3 focuses on the Soviet Union, chapter 4 on Eastern Europe (particularly Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Albania), and chapter 5 on Red Asia (particularly Mongolia, China, Tibet, and Cambodia). Many of these places had considerable religious diversity. The vast USSR, for example, contained not only Russian Orthodox but also large numbers of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Roman Catholics. Even a relatively small country such as Romania had Lutherans, Reformed, Roman Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in addition to Romanian Orthodox. Howard describes how the degree and methods of religious persecution varied from place to place, from time to time, and from group to group, but all these regimes despised religion, slaughtered religious people (especially clergy), destroyed religious buildings, and often used torture that Howard describes as “unspeakable” and “sadistic.” The book’s conclusion includes brief discussions of contemporary communist regimes that continue to treat religious believers harshly: North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and especially (because of its size) China.

This isn’t a pleasant book, but it is a good one. If nothing else, it chronicles an enormously important part of twentieth-century history that would be tragic to ignore. I recognize that I belong to the last generation of people who grew up during the Cold War and imbibed a cultural ethos that regarded communism as evil. (I was a college freshman when the Iron Curtain began falling across Eastern Europe in late 1989.) In the light of the continuing romanticization of communist figures and allure of socialist politics, younger generations especially need to know this history. Broken Altars may also help Christians be better informed as we engage with people indoctrinated with the idea that religion is inherently divisive and violent and thus that some form of non-religious secularism is the only plausible way to attain peaceful societies.

Finally, Broken Altars should encourage gratitude in Christians who live under the First Amendment or similar constitutional protections. In a day when many people on the so-called left and right, including professing Christians, downplay or criticize religious liberty, it’s useful to consider what recent alternatives have been.