September 11. No matter how much time goes by or what has happened since, it still seems unbelievable. A dividing line in all our lives. Before and after.
Whether we watched it unfold on television from far, far away, or knelt in the ash-strewn streets of Manhattan, or lost someone we loved in the fireball at the Pentagon or in the field in Pennsylvania, it is a universal touchstone of horror and violation.Catastrophe.
C. S. Lewis said that in every human story, as in divine history, there are two catastrophes. The first is utter ruin: the catastrophe of disintegration and undoing, the end of life as we know it, light extinguished and death's dark triumph. The crucifixion.
The second is the good catastrophe: the reintegrating and remaking, new hope rising out of the ashes-the good that would otherwise not be. The resurrection.
Both catastrophes dwell in the unsought stories of September 11. We cannot begin to do them justice. We cannot capture the horror of evil's fiery day.
Nor can we adequately portray the triumph of hope: every candle lit in a nation whose heart was broken, every selfless act of service to those who were hurt and bereaved, every pint of blood given, every fragile tie of community restored where it once was not.
Like the unity of the heroes of Flight 93, who made sure their plane plunged into a Pennsylvania field rather than through the White House or the Capitol dome. They said farewell to their families on the phones. They prayed the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, their hoarse voices rising together in the shadow of death. And then they took a last deep breath and rushed the plane's long aisle to the end-in order to save others.
Just as we cannot do justice to September 11, we could not begin to detail all the ways that churches across our nation lived their faith in its wake. In the darkest hour, so many of the people of God stood as His church, doing what the church does best: being the community that brings hope and comfort to brokenness and pain.
Think of that New York homeless shelter, a beacon for the weary and burdened, where cups of cool water were offered in Jesus' name. Or of the churches that helped widows and orphans in their distress . . . the essence of "true religion," as the book of James says. Or of the communities of believers gathering together in homes and churches across that great city-singing praises to God, bringing their pain to Jesus, and drawing their grieving neighbors to the love of Christ.
Think, too, of the service at Washington's National Cathedral a few days after the disaster. Government leaders, foreign dignitaries, and four ex-presidents gathered for an extraordinary service of remembrance.
Speaking with humility and power, Billy Graham laid out the gospel. "This cruel plot," he said, leads us to "confess our need for God. We've always needed God . . . many who died [in the attacks] are in heaven right now. They wouldn't want to come back. . . . Each of us must realize our own spiritual need. . . . The cross tells us that God understands our sin and suffering. He took it upon Himself. And from the cross, God declares, 'I love you!'"
Billy Graham went on to challenge Americans to use this terrible calamity as a wake-up call to focus on the reality of the hope of the gospel. Hope for the present, that this be a time of spiritual revival, and hope for the future-"not just for this life, but for heaven and the life to come."
In the weeks that followed, networks carried profoundly moving memorial services for those heroes-firefighters, police, and ordinary citizens-who died in the tragedy. Life as usual was no more, and millions of Americans went about their daily tasks with a thoughtful reverence born of brokenness.
Complacency-the greatest enemy of spiritual vigor in the West-had been shattered by the catastrophes of life and death, good and evil, hope and despair. Churches filled across our nation, as thousands of people realized-or subconsciously sensed-that the terrorist attacks of 2001 had actually changed everything.
In 1992, the year The Body was originally published, professor of public policy Dr. Francis Fukyama published The End of History and the Last Man. It became a bestseller, voicing the exhilarating hope of the times: The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Iron Curtain had rusted away, the Soviet Union had crumbled, the Cold War was over. The world as we had known it had changed, and America, to its exuberant surprise, found itself the lone remaining superpower: King of the World.
The End of History became standard fodder for commentators and op-ed writers, its ideas trickling down to the masses. It was an irresistibly seductive notion: Western liberal democracy had won the great ideological struggle of the twentieth century. Communism and fascism had been vanquished. A new era of enlightenment had dawned. Defense budgets were slashed, fueling the great economic boom of the nineties. Nothing could now derail a future of peace and prosperity, with America and its ideas reigning throughout the planet.
Had human nature indeed been transformed and evil banished?
Any such utopian hopes collapsed the day the Twin Towers fell.
Perhaps a more prescient prophet of the twenty-first century was Harvard professor emeritus Samuel Huntington, who in 1996 wrote The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington's controversial book posited that the world is divided along the lines of the great religious civilizations: those states comprising the Eastern religions in one bloc, the Judeo-Christian West in another, and yet another being the scattered nations of Islam, which form a belt around the globe's girth from Nigeria in the west, eastward to Indonesia. The great confrontation, predicted Huntington, would be between the Muslim world and the West, a clash that Huntington said Islam will win.
While we challenge Huntington's ultimate conclusion, his analysis was prophetic. Many Christians did not see the coming confrontation between Islam and the West; we were distracted by the simmering culture wars between Judeo-Christian tradition and the aggressive forces of secular naturalism.
Then 9-11 jolted us to the reality of another, more chilling front in the war of world-views. While the culture war, for the most part, is conducted with clever words in Hollywood, on Capitol Hill, and in newspaper editorials, this new war of world-views is literal. It is waged with bombs and hijackings and murderous annihilation.
Islam is intrinsically a militant religion, which, if true to its own doctrine, expands by force. Some moderate Muslims say the term jihad, which literally means struggle, is used figuratively as a picture of the individual's struggle to achieve holiness. That is doubtless so for millions of Muslims. Yet it was during an intense time of local wars that Mohammed, seeking to unite his people against aggressors, wrote of jihads. Many scholars believe that he meant it quite literally; indeed, the new religion Mohammed founded soon vanquished its enemies by the sword.
Some Muslims still follow that paradigm today, including terrorist cells scattered throughout the world. This is why those who have been privy to classified information, like former CIA Director Jim Woolsley, believe that we are in the middle of World War IV. (The Cold War was World War III.) That's a harsh thought; it pierces any complacent visions of the end of history.
Any who question the seriousness of the confrontation with radical Islam should examine the differences between its world-view and Christianity's.
First, consider their respective views of human nature. The Muslim believes that human beings are inherently good, that all that hinders paradise is the failure to advance Islam, and that once it is fulfilled (by whatever means), there will be peace and happiness.
What militant Muslims seek, therefore, is no different than what Hitler and the Marxists desired: Give us power and we will usher in the perfect state, the super race, or the workers' paradise. The greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by utopians, who always suppress liberty (usually with bloodshed) because they will, by force if necessary, put their views of what is good ahead of your right to determine that for yourself.
The Judeo-Christian world-view believes that human beings are sinful people who need individual redemption and the continuing restraints of law and culture. (As G. K. Chesterton said, this doctrine of original sin is the only philosophy validated by thousands of years of recorded human history.) Paradise is not achieved by anything we can do-spiritually, politically, or otherwise-but by the gift of God.
Second, Islam is a theocracy. The Koran is the law, and under that law, those of other faiths cannot truly exercise full rights of citizenship. This is why Christians are not allowed to practice their faith, even in private, in Saudi Arabia-and why in most Islamic states, people other than Muslims cannot hold office and indeed in some places must pay extra taxes. There is intense persecution of Christians in many Muslim states like Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
While secular elites in the West carp about religious groups (usually meaning Christians) "imposing their view on others" (as if we could) or chipping away at the proverbial "wall of separation between church and state," nothing in our experience is even remotely close to theocracy.
In reality, the democratic ideal of the West-one that is not understood by those who seek to banish religiously informed values from public life-is genuine pluralism. This is the religious freedom and healthy tolerance that respect people's unalienable rights-not just Christians'-to pursue and practice their religious beliefs. As for religious persecution, it is noteworthy that the West came to the aid of Bosnian Muslims against their Serb oppressors, who were largely...
