BONFIRE OF THE VERITIES

The book tells us a little of Ahmari's own remarkable path to Christian faith, from a middle-class family of Westernized Iranians under the mullahs, to American freedom, to questioning whether America was too free in the wrong ways, to acceptance of Roman Catholicism as the source of a more demanding but more genuine freedom. A master storyteller, Ahmari tells how a smug young man at Oxford, made secure in his apostasy and sinfulness by the belief that his ideas were modern and scientific, was surprised by joy, a joy he eventually recognized as God's grace. Ahmari takes us back to the racist world of early-twentieth-century America, where casual contempt for people with darker skin was a ubiquitous feature of society and upheld by law and custom. Too often, this way of life was tolerated by Christians and justified in language drawn from the Bible and Christian tradition.