A peep through the Windows to Anarchy: From Prague to the Present, How Religion Casts Humanity into the Abyss.
On a May morning in 1618, a group of angry Protestant nobles seized two Catholic governors and their secretary in Prague Castle and hurled them out of a window, some seventy feet above the cobbled courtyard. They survived the fall with Catholics claiming that angels cushioned their descent, while Protestants sneered that a dung heap had done the job. But symbolism mattered more than survival. This act: the Second Defenestration of Prague, did not merely assault three men; it tore Europe apart. Within months, the Bohemian Revolt had escalated into the Thirty Years’ War, a cataclysm that depopulated swathes of Central Europe and left entire generations scarred.
It was not the first such act in Prague. In 1419, radical Hussites had stormed the New Town Hall, dragged councillors to the windows, and pitched them onto the spears of the mob below. That earlier defenestration ignited the Hussite Wars, long before Martin Luther had nailed his theses to the church door. Twice in two centuries, Czechs declared their dissent by throwing authority out the window. Twice, religious faith transformed anger into anarchy.
These episodes are not quaint relics of medieval turbulence; they are mirrors. They reveal a truth as urgent in the 21st century as it was in the 15th, that when religious belief fuses with political power, societies fracture, violence escalates, and the claim to divine truth becomes a licence for bloodshed.
The Anatomy of Religious Wars find its foundation in faith and fire. The Hussite Wars were not about theology alone. They were about power, authority, and the right to define identity. The same is true of the Thirty Years’ War, often simplistically remembered as Catholic versus Protestant. In reality, it was a scramble for supremacy in which princes, mercenaries, and monarchs cloaked ambition in the language of faith.
But faith gave the conflict its ferocity. To kill a heretic was not merely to silence an enemy but to serve God. The religious imagination, once politicised, transformed neighbours into devils. And when the killing was over, when treaties had been signed, Europe was left haunted by reduced populations, wasted fields, and a creeping recognition that perhaps God had been less present in the smoke of battle than men had supposed.
The temptation is to dismiss Prague’s defenestrations as a peculiarity of Central Europe. But the pattern repeats itself wherever religion asserts its monopoly over truth.
• In the Middle East, millennia-old rivalries still masquerade as sacred duty. Sunni and Shia Muslims remain locked in cycles of suspicion and slaughter, their schism rooted in a seventh-century dispute over succession yet fuelled by modern geopolitics. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is drenched in the blood of competing religious claims to land and prophecy.
• In South Asia, the Partition of India in 1947; a simple act, ostensibly about self-determination, became a theatre for Hindu and Muslim violence. Up to a million were slaughtered, entire communities uprooted. Here again, religious identity fused with statehood turned a political problem into a humanitarian abyss.
• In Africa, Sudan’s long wars, and Nigeria’s current struggles with Boko Haram, show how religion still provides not just consolation but justification for chaos. Each sermon declaring God’s will becomes a spark in dry tinder.
From Jerusalem to Jos, Ayodhya to Abuja, the lesson of Prague is tragically alive: when divine truth enters politics, windows to anarchy are flung wide.
What makes religion uniquely dangerous in the public sphere is its absolutism. Unlike ideology, which can be debated, or policy, which can be revised, religious truth claims often brook no compromise. If God has spoken, what space remains for negotiation? To dissent is not merely to disagree, it is deemed to blaspheme.
The only thing absolutism does is turn rulers into zealots and dissenters into heretics. The Catholic Habsburgs of the 17th century could not imagine granting lasting freedom to Protestant nobles without betraying their role as guardians of the true faith. Likewise, the Hussite radicals of 1419 could not tolerate councillors they saw as enemies of God. From this perspective, defenestration was not violence but purification.
Today, the same logic fuels those who bomb, burn, or ban in God’s name. It is not reason but revelation that drives them, not negotiation but salvation that justifies them.
If there is a lesson in the shattered glass and broken bodies below Prague’s windows, it is not simply that religion causes violence. It is that certainty, when claimed as divine, destroys the possibility of peaceful coexistence.
Europe eventually learned this lesson. Out of the ashes of the Thirty Years’ War came the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which for the first time enshrined the principle that different faiths could coexist within the same political order. Out of centuries of religious slaughter arose the slow, hard-won idea of secularism: that the state should govern by reason, not revelation; that belief belongs to the private conscience, not the public sword.
What humanity needs now is not another sacred war but a secular ethic of doubt; the willingness to admit that our grasp of truth is partial, that our convictions may be flawed, that no faith has the right to dominate all others. Doubt is not weakness but wisdom. It is the guardrail against the intoxicating poison of certainty.
In conclusion, the Defenestrations of Prague are more than historical curiosities; they are warnings. They show us what happens when religion and power climb into the same room. The windows open, the bodies fall, and nations are plunged into decades of fire.
We live in an age where religious nationalism is again on the rise, Hindu majoritarianism in India, Islamist insurgencies in Africa, Christian fundamentalism shaping American politics, Jewish and Muslim absolutism feeding conflict in the Holy Land. Each believes itself righteous. Each risks opening a new window to anarchy.
To keep those windows shut, we must resist the siren song of certainty, and embrace the humility of doubt, the universality of reason, and the secular conviction that no single belief should dictate the fate of nations. Only then can we hope to live together without throwing one another, once again, into the abyss.
Dr. EK Gwuru writes form Nkolo Ikembe.
