This post is cross-published here on Narrative Paths Journal
I fielded a query from a University of Tennessee campus newspaper about legacies of 9/11/2001. The reporter asked: “How did 9/11 strengthen or weaken the religious faith of Americans? How did it change the way people think about mortality, evil, and hope? In what ways are we still dealing with the fallout?”
As I've discussed here and here before, I seem to lack an aptitude of pumping out the sort of soundbites that reporters wish for. Whether this is a virtue or vice, I always seem to want to push back at how the question was framed and what I suspect the reporter expects to get as the answer. They just want a quick and dirty quotation, presupposing what I want to dispute.
In any case, I got a post out of it for my "1000 words or less series." I replied as follows:
“Dear [reporter],
First, framing a question about “THE religious faith” of “Americans” [ALL or most of them] will get us into trouble. It is like asking about the impact of COVID on all “families” in the entire world, or something equally unfocused. Are you sure that this is not a category mistake?
If we narrow to trends that hold for many who are white and Christian—which lumped together does represent a majority of “American faith,” although not by a large margin—maybe we could get more leverage. Lumping them could create more category mistakes, but if we stress how 9/11 deepened cracks in their culture war, that probably helps. I worry about even this as a generalization because there are so many things going on besides culture war, but it's part of a big picture.
Definitely 9/11 was used to stir up arguments for the neoconservative goals of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, including appeals to US military power throughout the world against “radical Islam” and “terrorism.” Definitely this translated into a lot of ugly repression of Muslims (another group we can’t lump together as one bloc) as well as people who didn’t want a war in Iraq or an intensified national security state at home. There was a lot of talk about national unity—some of it “protesting too much,” enough to undermine itself—and we suffered the strongest climate of censorship and self-censorship that we have experienced in our country since the McCarthy era. The campaign to destroy the Dixie Chicks’ career is a famous example, and of course Guantanamo Bay prison was in the background.
If we consider how 9/11 was a big step forward for conservatives proving willing and able to pursue their goals in an authoritarian way—disregarding majority will on the ground and acting in line with Cheney’s idea that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”—this is a sobering legacy. It gets us half-way to a hypothesis that I suspect [the reporter] wanted me to support with my soundbite: that 9/11 was a milestone like Pearl Harbor, moving the goalposts of legitimate discussion toward the right. I have heard this often enough from students to gather that local churches and schools teach this is as simple truth.
Nevertheless, if we focus on reasonably broad democratic legitimation of national priorities, this line of thought is half true at best.
Even Bush himself pulled back from “crusade against Islam” messaging after 9/11 because it was counterproductive for him. We might say that he dog-whistled about it anyway. But when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the top leaders of the Christian right, famously said “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…[and groups like the ACLU] who have tried to secularize America” were partly responsible for the attacks, with 9/11 as a sign that “God will be not mocked,” they got so much blowback they walked it back, however grudgingly. (Falwell said he forgot to include a “sleeping church that is not praying enough” on his list of the guilty.) This was off-message from Bush/Cheney’s efforts to build legitimacy for their goals. Then Falwell and Robertson’s quote was used more often to attack them than to support their ideas.
A lot of people have defected from the Christian right because of this sort of thing since 9/11—it's a strong generational trend among white evangelicals, and it distorts the standard talking point about steady white evangelical support for Trump around 75-80% because the “pool of 100%” in the background is shrinking.
Approached from this angle, it may be that 9/11’s biggest long-term effect was to hurt the religious right and to help secularists and the religious left. Think of how the Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks) reputation is better today because of sympathy from the campaign against them than it would have been if they had kept silent.
This does not deny that many on the right wing of the culture war did think the second Iraq war was a religious crusade, prophesied in the Bible. This idea was pushed overtly by Falwell and dog-whistled by Bush and Cheney. Obviously that matters. Many who watched FOX thought Bin Laden (whose family were business partners with Bush and whose rise was funded by the US) was hand in glove with Saddam Hussein. To a remarkable extent, propaganda encouraged people simply to conflate these two, and according to country star Alan Jackson, this was good enough for a “singer of simple songs”: “I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran/But I know Jesus and I talk to God.”
Still, a lot of people knew that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks (he was a secularist authoritarian who was a long-time enemy of both Sunni Islamists like bin Laden and Shi’a Muslims in Iraq and Iran). They knew that Bush and Cheney were lying about supposed reasons for the war (and let’s be frank, that makes them criminals under international law and grossly evil in Christian terms). They knew Bin Laden had risen as an ally of the US military. They rallied to defend Muslim civil rights and religious freedom (remember how we narrowed to white Christians before?—this leaves out a lot of “American faith,” including Muslims suffering from harassment and outright repression.)
Even Jackson presupposed that religious people should stand for “faith, hope and love” and only go to war as a lesser evil. That's a double-edged sword because many fans probably assumed he was implying that “our God”—but not bin Laden’s—was for love. That's wrong because “Allah” and “God” are two words for the same concept, like “I love you” and “te amo.”) Still Jackson's underlying presupposition was that God would prefer peace to a war justified by lies. That remains a religious common sense of most Christians and Muslims.
Later a solid majority of citizens rallied to the Obama campaign in a sort of wave of disgust against Bush and Cheney. So the “consensus” unity promoted by (censored) news turned out to be a bubble that popped in 2008. The antiwar movement in 2003 was probably the largest in US history, and here again the debacle of the war likely hurt conservative legitimacy in the long run.
Today Trump and Biden both downplay how much they supported the war. That makes sense because the ability of Obama to say he had opposed the war was one of the key reasons he beat Clinton for the 2008 nomination. Later, Trump’s ability to claim he had been lukewarm about the war—misleading but non-trivial compared to the other GOP candidates—was a key to him winning in 2016. He used this as a talking point against Clinton to win the electoral college and is trying to repeat the technique against Biden today. Trump’s talking points about helping working people were more important, but part of that idea was shifting money from funding foreign wars toward helping ordinary folks at home. It should go without saying that this turned out to be a con, a mere bait and switch, but still it shows an interesting legacy resulting from the debacle of the war.
If we want to boil this down to a single sentence, 9/11 was either a link in the chain that we now call the culture war, or a step in deepening it—but emphatically helped both sides.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, the Knoxville News-Sentinel's memorial issue featured a picture of a U.S. flag hanging from a wooden cross. I have shown it to a generation of students and it seems to resonate deeply. Since I don’t have permission for this photo I’ve switched it below for a related "God Bless America" graphic, but this is the slide I use.
Emphatically, I don’t say that the flag/cross imagery is consensual—an image of “the faith” of “the Americans.” It provoked an equal and opposite reaction on the left-liberal side, including an infusion of strength for the religious left and many others people who assume that both Jesus (as they understand) and democracy (at its best) favor peacemaking over crusading.
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