Religious cleansing is a euphemism for a form of religious persecution in which members of a religious population are subjected to imprisonment, expulsion, or death by a majority to achieve religious homogeneity in majority-controlled territory. While akin to ethnic cleansing (a better-known form of discrimination throughout human history) religious cleansing is less defined by a group's ancestry and more defined by that religious group's spiritual allegiance of interest. Such cleansing is often precipitated by the declaration of a religion or creed as illegal and outlawed, as in the case of the Spanish Inquisition and the Edict of Fontainebleau.
Famous quotes containing the words religious and/or cleansing:
“I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day ...”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)