9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian West
A quarter-century removed from the terrorist attacks of 9/11, several things are now obvious that were not at all obvious to American elites in 2001 (although they should have been). Perhaps the most obvious, as I wrote earlier this week, is that the attacks inaugurated a religious war that we have lost, or at least are in the process of losing. The West failed to recognize the religious nature of the conflict because it was committed to a secular liberal account of the world that dismissed the role of religion and religious claims in shaping cultures and societies.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali said something similar in an excellent piece on 9/11 for Tablet: “When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.”
Specifically, it indulged the delusion that the difference between the Muslim world and the West could be chalked up to material causes like lack of economic opportunity, U.S. support for Israel, and so on. Instead of grappling with the very real differences between the Muslim world and the West, our leaders acted as if those differences were superficial, and their response to 9/11 was the opposite of what it should have been.
Instead of simply punishing regimes that gave succor to groups like Al-Qaida, they launched regime change wars followed by long and ultimately failed occupations with the impossible goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Instead of shutting down immigration from Muslim-majority countries, they increased Muslim immigration to prove that America wasn’t racist and was multicultural. Instead of recognizing that not all cultures and religions are compatible with American society, they doubled down on multiculturalism and a conception of America as an idea, rather than a people with a shared culture, shaped by Christian civilization moral norms.
At the heart of all this was a belief on the part of our leaders that America was nothing more than a set of propositions about how society should be governed. It was free markets, rule of law, and individual freedom, nothing more. No wonder President George W. Bush thought we could transplant American democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. In his view, there was nothing special or unique about the American people as such. They were interchangeable with Iraqis and Afghans. So long as they were allowed to vote, and women were allowed to go to school, and we helped them economically, all would be well.
But this ignored the realities not just of the Muslim world but also of the West. We got Islam wrong after 9/11, yes. But even more we got the Christian West wrong. We thought the West was nothing more than process neutralism, that what defined us was being neutral about religion. That was a mistake. The tolerance and neutrality we took for granted, it turned out, was a unique feature of the Christianity that created western civilization. It simply didn’t exist in the Islamic world.
Our leaders thought that by importing huge numbers of Muslims to the West, and exporting Western forms of governance to the Muslim world, they could prove their claims about secular liberalism and multiculturalism. Twenty-five years later, they have proven the opposite. It doesn’t work to import Muslims to the West. They do not assimilate. It doesn’t work to export Western political institutions to the Muslim world. They do not work there.
If the quarter-century since 9/11 should teach us anything, it should be that the multiculturalism we have embraced in the West for the past 40 years has been a grave mistake, perhaps even a fatal one. We have to go back to understanding America not as a blank slate, not as an mish-mash of all the world’s cultures and religions, but as a specifically Christian nation that orders itself around Christian moral claims — not Islamic ones, not Hindu ones, but Christian ones.
It’s unclear if Americans are ready to admit this, because it would mean repudiating a secular liberal ideology that has been ascendant in our country for a long time. The Muslim world, it turns out, is not the way it is because of material inequalities or U.S. foreign policy. It is the way it is because of culture and religion. That’s true of the West too. And we need to start acting like it.