In a footnote to Chapter Six of this book, David B. Hart laments that “one still encounters educated persons who believe that Galileo was tortured by the Roman Inquisition or imprisoned in its dungeons,” and cites, “for example, A. N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral.” I was stunned, not because Wilson had gotten so elementary a point wrong, but because my own lousy memory had conflated Galileo and Joan of Arc, and placed the former on a bonfire, whispering “E pur si muove” (“And yet it moves”) where the latter is said to have whispered the name of Jesus.

I’m proof that, as Alexander Pope’s famous bumper sticker has it, “a little learning is a dangerous thing”—but a lot of learning has its drawbacks, too. What pleasure is there in knowing that much “common knowledge” is at best half-remembered and at worst false? How does the expert feel, watching gadflies deepen this general ignorance with every word they write? Ask Hart, who has had to watch the New Atheists scale the bestseller list for some time now.

This book, a rebuttal not of their atheism but of their historical and cultural claims about Christianity, is astonishingly calm and courteous next to the works of its “fashionable enemies,” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and, especially, Sam Harris. But Hart has his fun. His writing, a marvel of both complexity and lucidity, is no stranger to the slyly understated putdown, which he might follow with: “A note