This talk reconsiders prevalent late modern discourses that all too unambiguously link religion and violence, rendering occidental conceptions of reason sacrosanct. In a first part, I flesh out the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control in times of manifold crises, recently named "polycrisis," a situation prone to acceleratingly motivate recourse to religious semantics and narratives of liberation. Secondly, I demonstrate how especially the "liberal imaginary" revolves around conceptions that short-circuit freedom and sovereignty and thus structurally turn parasitic upon imaginations of disorder and otherness that are tied to religious violence, finally to the extent of performatively producing it as the very other of discursive reason. I conclude that we need to develop a new understanding of the revelatory, and therefore apparently "violent" force of religious imagination, as something that enables us to transcend oppressive social imaginaries and neo-myths, be they called progress, globalization or "reason.