History and religion are back in business. Those who predicted the end of either or both, from Hegel and Marx to Freud and Frank Fukuyama, have had a good run. But events almost every day make it clear that the 21st-century is not going to lack big themes: themes, moreover, that are as old as Western civilization.

Pope Benedict XVI identified one of these themes in his Regensburg lecture — which, like the presidential speeches setting out the Bush Doctrine, is sure to become a key text for future historians. The dialectic of faith and reason is the key to the pathology of Islamist terrorism. However, it is also the key to the pathology of moral relativism. Mired in this antinomian swamp, European societies are failing to offer robust resistance to Islamo-fascist violence. Moral relativism disables democracy.

This week Europe was given a vivid illustration of why a sense of right and wrong is essential to civil society. “People power” returned to the streets, not of Kiev or Minsk, but of Budapest. The protests against a socialist government led by a former communist come exactly half a century after the 1956 uprising against communism was brutally suppressed. That uprising sent hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s best and brightest into exile, where they have added immeasurably to the intellectual capital of the West.

Riots on the streets of what is now once again a democracy in the very heart of Europe are unlikely to provoke mass emigration this time, but the scenes in Budapest present an alarming spectacle of instability to a world in which democracy and the rule of law are still precarious. It was legitimate to seize the state television station as a means of toppling illegitimate tyranny. I watched people power do just that in Central Europe in 1989 — but in those days there was no other method available to throw the scoundrels out. Now there is.

Yet I am not disheartened. In fact, the new Hungarian uprising is proof that civil society there has put down deep roots since 1989. The cynical admission by Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany — that he had lied for years, “morning noon and night” about the chaotic state of the economy in order to win an election earlier this year — has strong echoes of 1989.

The “reform communists” of those days thought they could cling to power by admitting that the countries they had ruled for 40 years were bankrupt. The people’s answer in every case was to evict them unceremoniously from office, if necessary by force. Unconstitutional regimes are only ousted by unconstitutional methods.

In those days Mr. Gyurcsany was a leader of the communist party’s youth wing. He used his connections to make a quick fortune and, having “traded in” two wives (a practice he openly recommends), he later married the granddaughter of a Stalinist apparatchik. The view of most analysts is that Mr. Gyurcsany, who models himself on his friend Tony Blair, will get away with the confession that he “screwed up” by making a virtue of his “honesty” in messages posted on his own blog, a typically slick touch.

Some of these analysts miss the point, though. What is driving the protest is not opposition to economic reform, on which there is a national consensus, but outrage at the conduct of the man in charge of that reform.

The protest, then, is as much about morality as politics, just as it was in 1989 and 1956. Those who abuse the democratic process, whether blatantly (by rigging the elections) or more subtly (by deliberately deceiving the electorate), must be held to account. Whether the protest succeeds is not necessarily important.

Wisely, opposition leader and former Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made the test of Mr. Gyurcsany’s survival a democratic one. Rather than a trial of strength between riot police and demonstrators, Mr. Orban wants Mr. Gyurcsany to submit to the verdict of the municipal elections on October 1. If he loses, he should go immediately.

Hungary is a small country, but the clash over morality in public life there has a global resonance that derives from a parliamentary history that goes back to 1848. Outside the West, democracy is still by no means the only or even the usual method of regime change. In Thailand, a military coup has just removed a corrupt but popular prime minister while he was attending the United Nations. None of his fellow leaders gathered in New York seemed concerned. The international arena is still a jungle.

Instead, the focus was, as usual, on the clash between Islam and the West, symbolized by the speeches of President Ahmadinejad and President Bush. The Iranian president denounced the Security Council as a tool of America and Britain, in order to undermine Israel’s right to exist and the West’s right to defend itself.

This is the man, of course, who envisages a “world without America and Zionism,” who only last month demanded that “America and England … [who] are guilty and criminal must be put on trial,” and who not only denies the Holocaust but is working hard to develop nuclear weapons in order to carry out a new one. To further his aim, that “Islam will … conquer all the mountaintops of the world,” Mr. Ahmadinejad regards any means, including terrorism and nuclear war, as justified.

The BBC reported the Iranian president’s bully pulpit in full this week, but ignored the leader of the free world. President Bush spoke more softly, but then, like Teddy Roosevelt, he carries a big stick. He reiterated his peaceful intentions and his respect for Islam, but reserved the right to defend freedom and democracy, if necessary by interventions in Muslim countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

No room for equivocation there, you might have thought. Mr. Bush and Mr. Ahmadinejad represent not merely contrasting political viewpoints, but incompatible moral universes. Yet there was one figure at the U.N.ready to sit on the fence: Jacques Chirac. Did the French president speak up for the Security Council, of which France is a founding member, in reply to Iranian demagoguery?

No fear — Mr. Chirac’s new obsession is an international conference about Palestine, where he can grandstand while turning the heat on Israel — as if 4,000 Hezbollah missiles weren’t enough. He doesn’t really know what the conference will achieve, and he doesn’t greatly care. At best, Mr. Chirac’s new Versailles will end the diplomatic isolation of Hamas. At worst, like the Munich Conference of 1938, it could herald a betrayal of Israel.

This U.N. General Assembly makes the pope’s point for him. If Mr. Ahmadinejad illustrates the lethal fanaticism that may result when faith elevates itself beyond all rational reference points, Mr. Chirac shows what happens when secular rationalism excludes not only faith but the moral compass that comes with it. The fact that, unlike these two, the president of America happens to be guided by firm moral principles, founded equally on faith and reason, is truly providential.