European secularism secured domestic peace by displacing religious violence onto the colonized world.

Evidence

At its inception in Europe, secularism as political doctrine guaranteed the peace between warring religious factions by shifting the site of violence from within Europe to outside of it. Secularism’s triumph as political doctrine is closely connected to colonialism and to the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states. Of all the things that secularism can mean, it has not always meant tolerance. Those who do not fit the public personality of the state are simply defined as religious minorities and find themselves in a defensive position. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 369

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the familiar ‘secularism = tolerance and progress’ story into a colonial displacement mechanism — dense enough to sit with. The claim that secularism is constitutively tied to colonialism and capitalism as a single system is genuinely paradigm-shifting.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s note that a holy war tradition is Western, not originally Islamic — both are colonial-ideology points about who gets to define the barbaric other. — connects to: Western peace was bought by exporting violence to an outside that is Western essence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 454
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The colonial origins of ‘neutral’ secularism’ — tracking how putatively neutral state neutrality was built on pushing violence outward, which bears directly on the sharia debate.