“When Europeans watch American television, they are often astonished by the money-grubbing crassness of the present-day Elmer Gantrys,” writes Ian Buruma in his latest meditation on religion and politics, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. “Here, they think, is a culture that truly divides the New World from the Old: the sheer vulgarity of the howling, sweating televangelists and the primitive notion of America as a land blessed by God, a City on the Hill, inhabited by a chosen people, glassy-eyed, in double-knit suits.” Buruma reminds us that revivalism actually originated in Europe in the 18th century, but he still finds something particularly worrisome about American piety. “Furious and violent stages of religious enthusiasm?.?.?.?have a way of coming back,” Buruma warns. “One does not have to be a ferocious anti-American to see evangelical enthusiasm behind the hubristic attempts to transform the world by force.”

It all sounds very ominous—until you realize Buruma’s primary concern is that evangelical faith might lend too much support to liberal internationalism, the effort to build democratic institutions beyond America’s borders. Whatever one thinks of democracy promotion, it would seem a far cry from the religious wars of 17th-century Europe. But for Buruma, the principled certainty of liberal internationalists does not much differ from the religious certainty of, say, John Calvin or a radical jihadist.

This is a familiar trope for Buruma. A prominent Dutch journalist, regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College, Buruma provoked a furious debate with his 2006 book, Murder in Amsterdam, in which he chronicled the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist radical. Van Gogh had collaborated with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born activist, on a film about the oppression of Muslim women; after gunning him down, the assassin stabbed into van Gogh’s chest a note threatening Hirsi Ali as well. Many saw the episode as a fundamentalist assault on Western tolerance, but for his part, Buruma saw two competing fundamentalisms at play.

 “One can’t help sensing that in her battle for secularism,” Buruma wrote of Hirsi Ali, “there are hints of zealousness, echoes perhaps of her earlier enthusiasm for the Muslim Brotherhood, before she was converted to the ideals of the European Enlightenment.” Buruma judged Hirsi Ali an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” whose “absolutist” position with respect to women’s rights and secular liberalism mirrored that of Islamic extremists. Because Hirsi Ali single-mindedly opposes forced marriage and honor killings as vigorously as her antagonists support such things, Buruma regards them as basically the same.

In Taming the Gods, Buruma revisits this debate and elaborates on the ostensible tension between liberal democracy and religion. The two enjoy a strained relationship, he writes, because democracy is about “resolving conflicting interests through negotiation and compromise,” while religion claims to represent “absolute or divine truth” and therefore cannot compromise. Democracies, he says, must find a way “to stop irrational passions from turning violent” and to prevent “religious irrationality from interfering with rational inquiry.” Buruma explores the dilemma in three essays that discuss religion in America and Europe, religion in East Asia, and the challenge of radical Islam in the West.

Buruma does not make many distinctions among the religions he considers. “All major religions are fundamentalist in the sense of claiming absolute truth,” he explains. Because Buruma regards the claim to absolute truth as the quintessential characteristic of any religion, the main opposition one finds in his book is not really between religion and democracy but between certainty and doubt. At the outset of the book, Buruma compares some political ideologies to religious beliefs and notes the danger that arises when “the state claims to be the source of absolute truth.” Such claims, he writes, “are always lethal, whether they are enforced by commissars or by priests.” Democracy is different: “It is not the task of a liberal democratic state to provide answers to the deeper questions about life, let alone impose metaphysical beliefs on its citizens.”

Well, yes—and no. One need only glance at America’s Declaration of Independence, which invokes “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and declares certain “truths” to be self-evident, to see that even democratic politics cannot easily be separated from religion, let alone from claims of absolute truth. Speaking on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration, President Coolidge declared that “in its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.”

Coolidge’s formulation offers a reason beyond mere reason for the ideas enshrined in the laws governing democratic societies. Buruma, who insists on an entirely secular understanding, argues that if citizens of a republic are “to play by the rules of democracy, there has to be a common view that those rules are not only just but worth defending.” Yet he never indicates how such a view might be established. Buruma even disapproves of helping moderate religious leaders to reform their communities in a democratic direction. A democratic state “has no business being an arbiter in theological affairs,” he says.

Instead, Buruma insists on “a certain discretion” about religion in a democracy, a drawing of the veils intended to mask its power and limit its authority to the private sphere. But religious conviction was central to the revolution in ideas that made it possible to limit the reach of the state and to create the conditions for an enduring private sphere. Buruma quotes John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration: “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.” Buruma fails to recognize that Locke’s was a rational argument about religious belief. Locke argued that according to the gospel, Christian faith could not be imposed by force but must be sincerely embraced in the conscience of the believer. That was not always the predominant view of Christian faith. But Locke’s arguments convinced enough believers so that liberal democracy could take hold in Christian societies. Jesus may have told his followers to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” but it took an argument to regard that teaching as a mandate for separating church from state.

Buruma fails to consider the ways in which a religious understanding might itself foster democratic government. As Peter L. Berger has argued, evangelical Protestantism privileges individual choice: “One cannot be born a Christian; one must be ‘born again’ to merit that designation.” That is, evangelical Christian faith must be voluntarily chosen. This experience matches the individualism and the voluntaristic impulses of modern democracy. Evangelicals have no problem seeing the church as a voluntary association, for that is their religious self-understanding. The sociologist David Martin has argued that evangelical Protestantism serves as a “school for democracy” among its adherents. In this way, America really is a modern as well as a profoundly religious society.

Buruma conceives of democratic politics as a politics of doubt, uncommitted to any “absolute truth” (let alone self-evident truths). This view makes it impossible for him even to argue for democracy’s moral primacy as a political system among other political systems. And it is central to his scandalous argument that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s commitment to liberal democracy is just as ominous as the religious fanaticism of her Islamist castigators. Democracy, in Buruma’s view, requires strict neutrality concerning competing conceptions not only of the good but even of reality. If he is right, then democracy can’t be certain even of itself.

Indeed, this ambivalent notion is a primary cause of the problems Buruma identifies in Taming the Gods. In his chapter on radical Islam in Europe, Buruma recounts the stories of Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo van Gogh, and Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 bombing of the London Underground. Both young men had enjoyed a Western upbringing but became disaffected by the liberal societies in which they were raised and sought a sense of purpose in radical Islam. At least in part, their discontent resulted from the West’s lack of confidence in itself, for Western ideas about the spiritual emptiness of the West helped to form the moral core of radical Islam. Before he became the chief ideologue of the Iranian revolution, for example, the sociologist Ali Shariati studied continental philosophy at the University of Paris and translated Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist work Being and Time and Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonialist The Wretched of the Earth into Farsi. Sartre and Fanon had melded Marxism with Heidegger’s critique of modern rationalism. Shariati wedded this revolutionary ideology to Shia Islam. Among Sunnis, Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Muslim Brotherhood, advanced the same attack on the spiritual emptiness of modern life. Like Lenin, he called for a revolutionary “vanguard” to spread a purist form of Islam that “gives meaning to life and makes it worth living.” The Western world, wrote Qutb, had lost those “life-giving values which once enabled it to become the leader of humanity.”

For those like Buruma who want to champion modern liberal democracy but have lost the moral framework to argue the case, perhaps what is needed is not “a certain discretion” but rather an unapologetic conviction—the conviction that the radicals are wrong, and that they are right.