Many were surprised by the arm’s length way in which many politicians described Catholic martyrs in the Sri Lanka bombings.
Yet as William Cavanaugh so persuasively shows in his book The Myth of Religious Violence, liberalism is premised on the conceit that it brought an end to “religious violence,” and ushered in peace between all (mostly protestant) religious views. John Locke even seems to envision a sort of Pax Christiana that makes the secular state an neutral agent of Christian unity, and so makes martyrs a thing of the past. So long as liberalism was built on the basis of a (mostly protestant) Christian culture, this claim looked somewhat plausible.
