The following article appeared on Front Page Magazine and was reposted with permission.
Jim Wallis, CEO of Sojourners, was among several major Christian leaders that commented on 9/11. (Photo credit: The Guardian) |
Of course, the Religious Left commemorated the decade anniversary of 9-11 with the usual apologies for America and Christianity while carefully avoiding critique of the virulent Islamist hatred behind the attacks. Many of the Religious Left events were blandly multi-faith, recalling satirist Florence King’s sardonic comment that the last interesting interfaith summit was the St. Batholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.
At the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, a retired United Methodist bishop bewailed America’s seeking to “eliminate enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.” He complained of fear and “hate,” but not apparently as it related to 9-11’s killers but instead to Americans who treat President Obama “poorly.” A Muslim chaplain told of his multi-faith “Caravan of Reconciliation” touring America to denounce “anti-Islam sentiment” and “discouraging anti-Sharia legislative efforts.” (See full report here).
Left-wing Catholic group Pax Christi USA hosted its 9-11 commemoration at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. by featuring Evangelical Left activistJim Wallis, whom Pax Christi introduced as “one of our nation’s most prophetic and eloquent religious leaders.” Wallis bemoaned a “total decade of war that took more innocent lives than victims of 9/11.” He complained: “We had a possibility for reflection, but it alluded us because our leaders said, ‘We will erase your vulnerability through our superior force and power.” (See this report here).
Soon afterwards, Wallis sped to New York, where he convened a 9-11 press conference at Ground Zero with the World Evangelical Fellowship to denounce supposedly widespread anti-Muslim prejudice in America. “America must be a safe place for all our citizens in all their diversity,” Wallis pronounced, evidently more worried about anti-Muslim American bigots than about Islamist terrorists. World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) chief Geoffrey Tunnicliffe also warned: “We have seen increasing fear, insecurity, profiling and racism” in America. (See full report here).
At Duke University’s divinity school in North Carolina, an interfaith 9-11 commemorative panel featured a Muslim chaplain who recalled 9-11 as a “very disturbing wakeup call” for American Muslims. Previously, they could “practice their religion and blend in” but now they are “grieving over lost dreams that they lost in 9/11.” Nobody seemed to grieve as openly for the past and future victims of radical Islam. A Buddhist chaplain speculated that a Buddhist U.S. president perhaps would have shunned war after 9-11. Duke’s Christian chapel chaplain regretted that Americans needed to believe they could eliminate evil by going to war and in a Manichaean fashion to “put all rights and wrongs on bin Laden and military leaders.” (See report here).
More thoughtfully, Southeastern Baptist Theological School in Louisville, Kentucky, convened its own 9-11 remembrance panel featuring theological minds from America’s largest Protestant communion, the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Seminary President Al Mohler regretted U.S. inaction towards Islamist terrorism prior to 9-11. “We had already been warned…We had witnessed the U.S.S. Cole…Osama bin Laden had threatened us already…We had been filtering out too much.” He also noted that post-9-11 the word “evil” reemerged, having previously “been banished by postmodern relativism, by political correctness, by a sort of humanism, by perhaps an American triumphalism…” Mohler warned: “We are now culturally and intellectually disarmed in this country to have a discussion about Islam” due to relativism.
A Southern Baptist missions official commented that vulnerable overseas Christians missionaries had already been well aware of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before 9-11. And he noted: “Islam at its core has a theology that says, ‘We should be in charge. We need to be on top’…And after centuries in their mind of humiliation at the hands of the Christian West, this was a chance to get back.” He also rejected apologetic, multiculturalists who portrayed the 9-11 killers as impoverished victims of Western power: “Since the creation of Israel, there was a faction within Islam that felt itself increasingly helpless in the face of precisely the kind of technological and military might that America had…It didn’t have anything to do with the usual ‘They’re the poor, they’re the oppressed.’ Those that carried out the attacks were wealthy educated men…They simply had found a way to humble the Great Satan.” He noted Christians can love Muslims and at “same time believe they are deeply eternally fundamentally wrong.”
Another panelist at the Southern Baptist event challenged the infatuation with interfaith jamborees. He recalled one post 9-11 interfaith panel effectively surmising: “Sure this is evil, but has this evil been done to us or were we the perpetrators of this?” And he detected “no moral clarity in a room of a panel filled with people with Ph.D.s.” (Here’s a report on this Southern Baptist exchange here).
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, with over 2000 students, is one of the world’s largest seminaries. Its faculty almost certainly represent more Christians in America and globally than any Religious Left institution. Unlike the chronically apologetic and pacifist Religious Left, the Southern Baptists understood that 9-11 represented unprovoked evil that cannot be appeased or ignored. And the ultimate remedy for evil that churches offer is not numbing political correctness but their faith’s message of redemption.
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