Secular regimes have matched religious ones in systematic cruelty

Evidence

A major motive of secularism has clearly been the desire to end cruelties—the deliberate infliction in this world of pain to the living body of others, and the causing of distress to their minds—that religion has so often initiated and justified. Only a secular legal constitution (so it is argued) can restrain, if not eliminate altogether, religious violence and intolerance toward religious minorities. This firm linking of institutional religion to cruelty has its roots in Western Europe’s experience of religious wars and in the complex movement called the secular Enlightenment. But this perspective tends to overlook the devastatingly cruel powers of the twentieth century—Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Imperial Japan, the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s China—that were anything but religious, and the brutal conquests of African and Asian societies by European powers in the nineteenth century that had little to do with religion. Of course these instances of secular cruelty do not prove that institutional religion cannot generate cruelty and violence. But then religious movements have also preached (and practiced) compassion and forbearance. My simple point is that an equation of institutional religion with violence and fanaticism will not do. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 485

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Complicates the sacrificial-violence framing of the ‘sacrifice’ article by decoupling cruelty from religiosity per se; bears on the secular-vs-religious coding question central to the Cooper bridge.
• XREF: This is the standard secularization narrative (‘religion causes violence, secularism tames it’) that both Cooper and Asad interrogate; also resonates with Zizek’s and Gray’s critiques of equating secularism with enlightenment.