Peter Leithart on 9/11

From First Things:

When nineteen jihadist hijackers slammed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and another into the Pentagon ten years ago, they saw themselves as heroes of an apocalyptic holy war. For a moment, it seemed that they had instead given new life to secular modernity.

During the decades preceding 9/11, religion of an intense variety made a surprising comeback. Pentecostalism blazed through South America, an exotic stew of indigenous Christianities bubbled up in Africa, Chinese churches grew at an astonishing rate, Evangelicals had political clout in the U.S., Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise. As the Economist’s John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge put it in the title of their 2009 book, “God is back.”

Some found the news of God’s return alarming and after 9/11 they said so, loudly and repeatedly. Days after the attacks, Richard Dawkins wrote in The Guardian, “To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.”

Stateside, Sam Harris interrupted his studies to write The End of Faith, which lumps jihadism with the Christian political theology of Antonin Scalia. “We should not be misled” by the apparent benignity of Western religion, Harris warned. The influence of religious ideas on the U.S. government “presents a grave danger to everyone.” For Christopher Hitchens, September 11 proved that the “poison” of religion “was beginning to reassert its challenge to civil society.” New Atheism rose from the ashes of the WTC. “Yes, God is back, and look where He got us!”

Scholars of religion got well into the fray. Religious violence was already a subject of scholarly interest, but after 2001 it became an academic cottage industry across a variety of disciplines: Charles Kimball’s When Religion Becomes Evil (2002), Charles Selengut’s Sacred Fury (2004), M. J. Akbar’s The Shade of Swords (2002), J. H. Ellens’ four-volume collection of essays on The Destructive Power of Religion(2004), Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s Is Religion Killing Us? (2005), and on and on….

Others learned a more lasting lesson from 9/11. Tony Blair seized the opportunity to establish the Tony Blair Foundation “to promote respect and understanding between the major religions.” Without attention to religion, politicians are hamstrung in today’s world. “We in the West tend to see people of religious faith as people to be pushed to one side,” Blair said earlier this year. “That quite aggressive secularism you see in the West does not understand what is happening in the rest of the world.” Blair wants to see religious passion harnessed to “make globalization work,” but he resists secularists’ efforts to use fears of holy terror to bludgeon believers back into their hovels.

Ten years on, all this is now obvious. Resurgent secularism is a blip on the screen, New Atheism a rearguard action in a losing battle. The ferment among Muslims and Christians continues apace, and in some places it will again turn tragically violent. We have no choice but to deal with it. The message of 9/11 was always this: The gods are still back, and they are here to stay.