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James Walters

September 10th, 2021

A World Come of Age: Personal Reflections on 9/11

0 comments | 6 shares

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

James Walters

September 10th, 2021

A World Come of Age: Personal Reflections on 9/11

0 comments | 6 shares

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

September 11th, 2021 marks the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers, Pentagon and Flight 93. A harrowing moment for people around the world, the shockwaves of those attacks continue to reverberate today. To mark this anniversary, Revd Dr James Walters provides a personal reflection on the impact of 9/11 as it concerns our understand of global religion, Western worldviews and interfaith dialogue.

Lower Manhattan, New York, New York | Photo: Jesse Mills, Unsplash

Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying, “To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” For those of us around the age of 40, 11th September 2001 defined the adult world in which we were seeking to find ourselves and make our mark. Perhaps for me in particular, the day when religious fundamentalists flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has defined my thinking and set my priorities. Looking back twenty years on, the events of 9/11 seemed to mark a decisive turning point in four significant ways.

Religion returned to the public sphere

Religion had never gone away, but Western norms had led us to categorise it as belonging to the private sphere. European secularisation is better understood as a reduction in religion’s sphere of operation than as a loss of faith altogether. In societies increasingly defined by consumer capitalism, religion had become a spiritual leisure activity, a benign enhancement to wellbeing. Even with my churchgoing childhood, I had studied Theology and Religious Studies at university with little expectation that what I had learnt would be of direct relevance to global affairs. There is no doubt similar assumptions led American strategists to underestimate the power and the danger of the Islamists they backed in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. When it came back to bite them on 9/11 it overturned decades of downplaying religion as an agent in the global system. Today we see this political potency across the world and across faith groups: Hindu Nationalism in India, aggressive Buddhism in Myanmar, and Christian Zionism influencing the politics of the Middle East. Religion has proved to be a resilient narrative in the post-Cold War era, one that can be fused with political ideologies and used to unite or divide vast populations within and across national boundaries.

The universality of the Western worldview was shown to be a myth

As the shock of the attacks abated the immediate question, “Why do they hate us?” morphed into the deeper question of, “Why do they see things differently?” Many believed that the Cold War had been won through the appeal of the Western lifestyle and its values. This fuelled great hubris about the universality of Western ideals and their adoption throughout the world. In his inaugural address in 1989 President George HW Bush proclaimed that “a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn… The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.” A whole set of ideas about democracy, human rights, free markets – and bound up with them, secularism – were taken to be the only terminus of human progress. The “End of History” was proclaimed.

In fact, different regions of the world have developed in their own manner. The model of capitalist economic growth may dominate but it has rarely gone hand in hand with liberal democratic values. Cultural traditions and religious narratives have shaped particular understandings of progress, much in the way that Samuel Huntington described in his controversial treaties The Clash of Civilisations. How much clearer does that message seem now as the Taliban reasserts its leadership over Afghanistan twenty years after their removal was considered an inevitable consequence of American retaliation for the attacks?

We entered a new age of spectacle

The evil genius of the attack was the symbolic power of the violence: the clear morning, the devastating impact of the second plane into the South Tower while the world’s media was focused on the burning North Tower. The terror spoke to us in the myriad personal tragedies of suffering and death, but also in the immense spectacle of the collapse of an icon of Western financial power and economic liberalism, viewed by millions around the world. It heralded a new dissemination of terror through mass communications and visual media, mastered in recent years by ISIS. But more broadly it pointed to the visual arena as the forum in which many of today’s contestations of the political, the cultural and even the religious would be played out. Popular debates about religion have focused on the discussions of visual symbols (the wearing of headscarves or crucifixes, the building of mosques) rather than theological discourse. Politics has been reduced to gestures and announcements (slogans on buses, distant targets heralded for net zero emissions instead of decisive action in the here and now). To affect change in today’s world is to cut through the ubiquity of image and information, working with this culture in meaningful symbolic events or by finding ways to subvert it.

Interfaith dialogue was no longer just a hobby for enthusiasts

One such subversion is the patient work to build understanding and relationship across the powerful religious and non-religious divides that 9/11 laid bare. Until this event, my impression of interfaith dialogue had been of something very marginal to serious political or even theological life. It was a pastime for liberal believers, overanxious to affirm commonalities and gloss over disagreements. We now live in a world where the building of religious literacy across divides and fostering meaningful dialogue about how profoundly divergent belief systems can coexist is at the heart of global stability.

In the days after 9/11 it was common and understandable to hear such mantras as “violence is the only language they understand” and “you can’t negotiate with terrorists”. But violent religious ideologies take root in sectarian cultures that develop a resistance over time to the encounter of difference. With the rise of populism and its accompanying religious tribalism, too many communities are closing off to engagement with the other. To advance that kind of culture, however, we in the West will have to recognise our own need to acknowledge the radical otherness of those who we were inclined to think were simply waiting to embrace our lifestyles and our values. We need to acknowledge the profound fragmentation of our world from the global to the community level, recognise religion as woven through these tensions, and take up the task of interfaith dialogue with conviction and humility. That, more than anything, is the shared endeavour I feel 9/11 laid upon me.

Note: This piece gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Religion and Global Society blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

About the author

James Walters

James Walters is director of the LSE Faith Centre and the Religion and Global Society Research Unit. He is the author of Loving Your Neighbour in an Age of Religious Conflict and Religious Imaginations: How Narratives of Faith are Shaping Today’s World.

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