Rationalists constantly mock Believers as being anti-rational. It is a dishonest slur--on two levels. At one level the slur represents a confusion of categories as happens when one confuses medicine with poison. Both alike are pharmacological, but with entirely different outcomes. Rationalists believe in a particularly noxious kind of reason--that human reason is the ground of all truth and the highest and final court of appeal. Rationalists believe in human reason as master. Christians believe in human reason as helpful servant.
At another level the slur seeks to conceal a dirty secret (one which makes rationalism self-contradictory and at root irrational): rationalism is grounded upon a foundation which cannot itself be verified by human reason. Try establishing rationally the premise that human reason is the ground of all truth, without arguing in a vicious circle (that is, irrationally).
Here is David Hart's exposition of the matter.
All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempt to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one's first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.
A Christian and a confirmed materialist may both believe that there really is a rationally ordered world out there that is susceptible of empirical analysis; but why they should believe this to be the case is determined by their distinctive visions of the world, by their personal experiences of reality, and by patterns of intellectual allegiance that are, properly speaking, primordial to their thinking and that lead toward radically different ultimate conclusions . . . .
What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments (some of which--"blood and soil", the "master race", the "socialist Utopia"--produce prodigies of evil precisely to the degrees that they are "rationally" pursued).
We may, obviously, as modern men and women, find certain of the fundamental convictions that our ancestors harbored curious and irrational; but this is not because we are somehow more advanced in our thinking then they were, even if we are aware of a greater number of scientific facts. We have simply adopted different conventions of thought and absorbed different prejudices, and so we interpret our experiences according to another set of basic beliefs--beliefs that may, for all we know, blind us to entire dimensions of reality. [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 101f.]
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