If you’ve browsed the magazine section of your local Barnes & Noble lately, you might already have noticed the oversized white cover of the first issue of Standpoint Magazine, which has just arrived from across the Atlantic. It is not just physically that Standpoint stands out from other British magazines of culture and opinion. Its mission and list of contributors will land this new journal — edited by Daniel Johnson, our London columnist — in the first rank of English-language magazines.

Standpoint’s “core mission,” according to its editors, is “to celebrate our civilization, its arts and its values — in particular democracy, debate and freedom of speech — at a time when they are under threat.” In its defense of Western values in the face of ideological challenge from within and without, Standpoint is heir to Encounter, the Anglo-American journal that raised the banner of freedom during the Cold War. Today, it is Islamist extremism that presents the greatest threat. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “a new Encounter,” Mr. Johnson writes, “again became an urgent necessity.”

In Britain and Europe there is a danger that Western values and traditions will be undermined from inside, owing to the timidity or relativism of those who should be their defenders. Over the last few years, Americans have looked on with dismay as the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested that the United Kingdom adopt elements of sharia law and as the British literary world hardened into reflexively anti-American, anti-Israel postures. Against this background, as Mr. Johnson says, “To defend and celebrate Western civilization is not merely desirable, it is imperative.”

Standpoint recognizes that our civilization is diverse, and makes room for competing interpretations of Western values. The debut issue contains an essay by Michael Nazir-Ali, the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, arguing that Britain must remain a Christian nation if it is to remain free and happy. But it also opens its pages to the philosopher Alain de Botton, who yearns for a “secular religion,” and to the science writer Michael Hanlon, who praises the Large Hadron Collider as a “cathedral of science.”

This kind of pluralism is a sign of intellectual health. So is Standpoint’s taste for the best work in the arts. The tenor Ian Bostridge writes in the debut issue about singing Bach, and David Hockney sketches the flowers of Yorkshire. We recognize in Standpoint’s approach some of the same values that animate these pages. And we look forward to drawing ideas, information, and illumination from its pages.