Paul Johnson, also in NR, gives a refresher course on secularism's governance record:
The three big killer regimes of the 20th century — Hitler’s Reich, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s Red China, which slaughtered (at least) 120 million between them — were all stridently secular and anti-religious. So were most of the minor killer-regimes, like Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
It is also significant that the origins of modern genocide are secular. Holy Russia had always permitted a degree of violent anti-Semitism but it was the increasingly secularized czarist state of the 1880s that systematized the pogroms. This was echoed, from about 1909, by the secular Young Turks regime in Turkey, which introduced genocide against the Armenians then and, on a much larger scale, in 1915; this was followed by similar genocide against the Greek minority under the secular dictator Kamal Ataturk. There was a re-echo in Soviet Russia, where Stalin employed race-removal and genocidal policies from the late 1920s...Even the kind of anti-Semitic and anti-white genocide advocated by the present Iranian regime is only superficially Islamic: Its fundamental drive is secular power-politics.
The lesson of the 20th century, in my view, is that humanity, even with religious restraints, is a force for horror as well as progress. Without them, its turpitude knows no bounds. I recall the somber words of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner: “If ever belief in God disappears, and the image of God is eradicated from human minds, we will become nothing more than incredibly clever apes — and the ultimate fate of humanity will be too horrible to contemplate.”
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