September 11 Impacted Secularism’s Advance

National Catholic Register, 10 September 2021

Prayers will be offered on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. But fewer will be praying than previously, as there are fewer people who pray at all.

Did 9/11 contribute to growing secularization in some parts of the world? Does the rise of the “nones” — those who claim no religious belief — among millennials have anything to do with their coming of age at the time of the attacks?

Secularization — at least in North America and Europe — has been a long-term trend, with many contributing factors. It is likely that, 500 years from now, the biggest contributors to secularization will be identified as the two world wars. If Europe’s Christian faith was not sufficient to prevent depravity and destruction on such a scale, what then was it good for?

Yet for our specific passage through history we might take account of those events, on a smaller scale, which had a significant impact. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of them.

There is no getting around the brute fact that 9/11 was an act of religious hatred, an act of religious violence.

The caveats were all made then and remain valid today, namely that a corruption or perversion of religion does not discredit religion as a whole any more than counterfeit money means that legal tender loses its value. But if counterfeit bills are a big enough problem, or at least are perceived to be, it does jaundice how people think about the real thing. Just ask any convenience store owner who refuses to accept larger banknotes.

So, too, it was with September 11. For the devout Christian, the perversion of Islam that produced the attacks of 9/11 is not a theological problem, let alone a crisis of faith. It belongs to that vale of tears in which even the devout can be guilty. 

For anyone who reads the holy Scriptures, that the devout can be corrupted is not news, no matter how painful it might be to witness, or to suffer.

It might, though, be jarring, even destabilizing, for someone whose religious faith is marginal, just a fading part of his heritage, like the fact that his grandparents emigrated from Dublin or Warsaw or Milan. Combine that with the tendency of such people to think that all religions are the same, different expressions of the same humanist principles of fairness and compassion.

The immediate response of most leaders to 9/11 made that argument, more or less, in the well-intentioned desire not to blame all Muslims for the actions of jihadist extremists. Their comments at the time, namely that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, unwittingly made the argument that Islam was no different, really, from Christianity or other religions. 

A person who rarely goes to a house of worship has little personal contact with actual believers in his own community. What, then, is his encounter with religion? For him, the “face of religion” revealed on 9/11 might be what he considers the “real” face of religion.

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