The inverse relationship between democracy and foreign violence, collective domestic violence, or government genocide, is not simply a correlation, but causal. It is no stretch to say that this century's leading cause of unnatural death has been having the misfortune to live in a Communist country. Indeed, one of the best-documented political realities of this century is that governments that combine a policy of militant secularism and political repression have wretched human rights records. This observation may be tested by considering the nations of Islam today. Of course, in the case of Egypt and Indonesia, that acknowledgment arrived only after the near-Marxist regimes of Nasser and Sukarno had ended.
Religion unquestionably helps define a society.
For example, it is often noted that there is no Arab democracy. But one must be careful about too-sweeping a judgment. The third most violent forms of government are those motivated by religious zealotry, especially when that zealotry is predicated on an historical sense of persecution. While such a government will seek to suppress political freedoms, it is itself circumscribed by its confession of a divine authority transcending the state. Here, there is no organized assault on the indigenous faith of a people, and the brutality of any given government may be traced to simple greed and fear rather than a desire for total control.