Melanie Phillips, whose column in the Daily Mail has made her the bête noire of the British Left, has written a feisty polemic against a new world disorder of irrationality in which “reality [seems] to have been recast, with fantasies recalibrated as facts while demonstrable truths [are] dismissed as a matter of opinion at best, or as evidence of some sinister ‘right-wing’ plot.” Her targets are well chosen and their mendacities duly fileted: apocalyptic greens, cooking the empirical books; fact-challenged critics of the second Iraq War; Israel-haters and their journalistic, academic, and ecclesiastical accomplices; scientists posing as metaphysicians; apologists for jihadism; intolerant gay activists determined to destroy those who oppose their agenda; and the new anti-Semites, in whose passions Ms. Phillips finds the apotheosis of what she calls the “disenchantment of reason.”

The originality of Melanie Phillips’s argument lies in her ability to demonstrate how these various forms of gauchiste political correctness, which imagine themselves the heirs of the Enlightenment’s determination to replace the imbecilities of priestcraft with the light of reason, share a common, debilitating flaw: the willingness to jettison reason and evidence in the name of ultramundane ideologies embraced with a radical fideism. This corruption of intellect and will is what glues together what Ms. Phillips neatly dubs the “Red-Black-Green-Islamic Axis” which, among other things, has managed to shift anti-Semitism from the fever swamps of the Right to something perilously approaching the center of the European Left.

The flaw in the argument lies in Phillips’s seemingly uncritical adoption of one facet of the Whig theory of history. She writes that “the 18th-century Enlightenment ushered in the modern age by breaking the power of the church to control the terms of debate and punish heresy.” A few paragraphs later, she describes that-which-the-Enlightenment-overcame as a “religious totalitarianism” exemplified by “medieval Christianity,” which, she writes, “like contemporary Islamism, stamped out dissent by killing or conversion.” The roots of such wickedness run deep, for, the author informs us, “the New Testament accuses the Jews of deicide and curses them for all time.”

To be as candid as Melanie Phillips always is in her columns, this is embarrassingly flat-footed. There is no wholesale condemnation of Jews in the New Testament, neither the Jews of the time of Jesus nor the Jews of all time; nor does the word “deicide” appear in the canonical Christian Scriptures. As for Ms. Phillips’s missing the rich pluralism of medieval social, cultural, and intellectual life, well, let’s just say that no one familiar with the history of the European university (which was the creation of the Catholic Church), and with the public debates over quaestiones disputatae that were a staple of European university life in, say, the 13th century, could possibly suggest that “debate” in Europe began with the Enlightenment. There was a lot more genuine debate between defenders of the received neo-Platonic and Augustinian theology of the day and men like Thomas Aquinas, who wanted to bring Aristotle to bear on Christian self-understanding, than there was between Voltaire and his sparring partners.

This historical myopia is unhappily reminiscent of the new atheists whom Phillips rightly dismisses for the intellectual charlatans and in vitro authoritarians they are. That is doubly unfortunate, and indeed a little bizarre. For, as other facets of her book make clear, and as she underscored in a recent article in the British journal Standpoint, Phillips fully understands that reason detached from the Jewish and Christian sources of Western civilization — and especially from the idea that God impressed a certain rationality on creation, thus rendering it intelligible — has become the parody of reason that is postmodernism: the witches’ brew of metaphysical nihilism, epistemological skepticism, and moral relativism that underwrites the political correctness Phillips correctly deplores.

Melanie Phillips’s reputation for courage in going against the grain of received political wisdom in Great Britain has been well-earned, and hard-earned. Still, more than courage in facing the politically correct mendacities of the present is going to be necessary if the West is to recover its commitment to reason, and thus its civilizational and cultural morale. Courage in rereading the past, and in building a much more nuanced historical narrative about the relationship between faith and reason, religious conviction and intellectual exploration, is also required. Thus Ms. Phillips would have strengthened her argument if she had explored how the West is suffering from a false story about itself — a distorted narrative built in large part on certain black legends about Christianity — and then set about correcting the record by reference to the best of contemporary historical scholarship.

Does publicly assertive religion lead inevitably to wars of religion? The most recent study of the Thirty Years’ War, which was an indisputably ghastly business, nonetheless demonstrates that its slaughters had far more to do with dynastic politics and the formation of modern nation-states than with contending theories of the theology of justification.

Do Islamists and self-loathing members of the Western chattering classes continually harp on the cruelties of the Crusades? Then perhaps they should be reminded that the most sophisticated current scholarship on that period demonstrates that, for all their mismanagement and brutality, the Crusades were a legitimate response to Islamist aggression and were primarily motivated by religious devotion and self-sacrifice, not by the testosterone-driven aggressiveness of second and third sons with nothing better to do with their lives under the laws of primogeniture then prevailing in Europe.

Do scientists imagining themselves a new clerisy look down their noses at religious believers? Then perhaps they could be challenged to explain why what we know as the scientific method arose only in cultures formed by the Bible: Is it a coincidence that this method emerged only in an intellectual climate that accepted the Biblical conviction that God created a world of inherent intelligibility?

Ought Christians to feel ashamed of the Inquisition? Yes, for using coercive state power to enforce doctrinal claims is always an offense again the God who wishes to be adored by people who are free. By the same token, however, the most recent Inquisition scholarship (often produced by Jewish scholars) demonstrates beyond reasonable dispute that Communism killed more men and women in a slow week than the Inquisition in its various forms did over centuries. Moreover, the Catholic Church, led by John Paul II during the Great Jubilee of 2000, has publicly repented of this ill-becoming alliance with state power; when will the contemporary European Left, which Phillips skewers with such relish for its stupidities and authoritarianism, publicly repent of the Gulag, the Ukrainian famine, or the fact that Pol Pot (in percentage terms, perhaps the greatest mass murderer of a century of mass murder) was trained at the Sorbonne in the days when a self-confident secularism was in flood tide?

Meeting the challenge of 21st-century authoritarian political correctness thus requires going on offense, not just playing good defense. Moreover, playing good defense means recognizing that the Whig narrative of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the modern freedom project is flawed, and that the deepest taproots of the civilization of the West run into soil cultivated by Biblical religion. That recognition is an essential part of the reconnection of faith and reason for which Melanie Phillips calls in this bracing, but occasionally mistaken, book.