Ben Shapiro’s book, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, relies heavily on the Miltonian conceit that the use of Reason alone, absent God’s moral law and universal will, dooms us to live in the abyss. And, like Milton, Shapiro’s attempt to demonstrate that secular civilization needs to rekindle the Judeo-Christian teachings upon which it is based, inadvertently shows us why we were right to leave them behind in the first place.

— Jared Marcel Pollan. “We.”