Hirsi Ali’s understanding of the Protestant Reformation seems hampered by her secular lens: she fails to grasp how Martin Luther and the early reformers drew deeply on the Bible to defend the rights of conscience against coercion from church or state. This fact alone raises troubling questions about the ability of Islam to reform itself. Nevertheless, Hirsi Ali rightly emphasizes the importance of religious liberty in the struggle for political freedom. “The liberation of the individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority,” she writes, “opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.”

This is one of the great contributions of Protestant Christianity to the West, a fact unknown or ignored by most liberal elites. Hirsi Ali’s recent appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, for example, was another reminder of the appalling historical ignorance that cripples our public debates. The Protestant reformers, Stewart suggested, were really no different than the Islamist extremists in ISIS or Al Qaeda.

“If I’m remembering the Reformation correctly…Martin Luther wanted a purer form of Christianity,” Stewart said, “and so when he put that up there it created a hundred years of violence and mayhem. Isn’t that the process that we’re going through right now?”

No, Mr. Stewart, you were not remembering correctly. In fact, you were not actually engaged in the act of remembering. Indeed, it is unclear whether this kind of argument even qualifies as an act of thinking.