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Article Excerpt
IN the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, Americans found themselves faced with an unexpected choice between radically different perspectives on the proper place of religion in modern Western society. The alternative perspectives were not new. But the urgency with which they were felt, and the intensity with which they were articulated, marked a dramatic departure. Coming at a moment when Americans had been gradually rethinking many settled precedents regarding religion and public life, it seemed to give a sharper edge to the questions being asked.
For many observers, there was only one logical conclusion to be drawn from these horrifyingly destructive acts, perpetrated by fanatically committed adherents to a militant and demanding form of Islam: that all religions, and particularly the great monotheisms, constitute an ever-present menace to the peace, order, and liberty of Western civil life. Far from embracing the growing sentiment that the United States government should be willing to grant religion a greater role in public life, such observers took the September 11 attacks as clear evidence of just how serious a mistake this would be. The events of that day seemed to confirm their contention that religion is incorrigibly toxic, and that it breeds irrationality, demonization of others, irreconcilable division, and implacable conflict. If we learned nothing else from September 11, in this view, we should at least have relearned the hard lessons that the West received in its own bloody religious wars at the dawn of the modern age: The essential character of the modern West, and its greatest achievement, is its tolerant secularism. To settle for anything less is to court disaster. If there still has to be a vestigial presence of religion here and there in the world, let it be kept private and tethered to a short leash. Is not Islamist terror the ultimate example of a "faith-based initiative"?
To be sure, most of those who put forward this position were predisposed to do so. They found in the September 11 attacks a pretext for restating settled views rather than a catalyst for forming fresh ones. More importantly, though, theirs was far from being the only reaction and nowhere near being the dominant one. Many other Americans had the opposite response, feeling that such a heinous and frighteningly nihilistic act, so far beyond the usual psychological categories, could only be explained by resort to an older, presecular vocabulary, one that included the numinous concept of "evil." There were earnest efforts after the attacks, such as the philosopher Susan Neiman's thoughtful book Evil in Modern Thought, to appropriate the concept for secular use, independent of its religious roots. But such efforts have been largely unconvincing. If the September 11 attacks were taken by some as an indictment of the religious mind's fanatical tendencies, it was taken with equal justification by others as an illustration of the secular mind's explanatory poverty. If there was fault to be found, it was less in the structure of the world's great monotheistic faiths than in the labyrinth of the human heart--a fault about which those religions, particularly Christianity, have always had a great deal to say.
Even among those willing to invoke the concept of evil in its proper religious usage, however, there was disagreement. A handful of prominent evangelical Christian leaders, notably Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were unable to resist comparing the falling towers of lower Manhattan to the Biblical towers of Babel, and saw in the September 11 attacks God's judgment upon the moral and social evils of contemporary America, and the withdrawal of His favor and protection. In that sense, they were the mirror opposites of their foes, seizing on September 11 as a pretext for reproclaiming the toxicity of American secularism. But their view was not typical. In fact, it was so widely regarded as reckless and ill-considered that they seem to have damaged their credibility permanently.
The more common public reaction was something much simpler and more primal. Millions of Americans went to church in search of reassurance, comfort, solace, strength, and some semblance of redemptive meaning in the act of sharing their grief and confusion in the presence of the transcendent. Both inside and outside the churches, in windows and on labels, American flags were suddenly everywhere in evidence, and the strains of "God Bless America" seemed everywhere to be wafting through the air, along with other patriotic songs that praised America while soliciting the blessings of God. The pure secularists and the pure religionists were the exceptions in this phenomenon. For most Americans, it was unthinkable that the comforts of their religious heritage and the well-being of their nation could be in any fundamental way at odds with one another. Hence it can be said that the September 11 attacks have produced a great revitalization, for a time, of the American civil religion, that strain of American piety that bestows...
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