Secular ideologies have caused genocides comparable to religious ones

Evidence

Critics of secularization have two answers to this charge. One, they offer counterexamples of violent conflicts motivated by secular ideologies that lack a religious dimension: the two World Wars in the twentieth century (including the carnage caused by Fascism and the Nazis), Stalin’s and Mao’s purges, and the genocidal Pol Pot regime, to name a few. Earlier, starting in 1915, the Committee for Union and Progress, known as the Young Turk Regime, Westernizers who wanted to reform and secularize the ailing (religiously organized) Ottoman Empire, carried out the first genocide of the twentieth century by annihilating most of the Armenian population as well as depopulating the rest of the Ottoman Christians from their ancestral lands. Many of the individual Kurds, Turks, and Arabs who saved some Armenians were pious Muslims. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 509

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s analytical interest in religion and violence — the Armenian genocide by secularizing Young Turks is a strong historical counterexample to religion-causes-violence narratives.