When Anna graduated from Grove City College in May 2001, she immediately went to work at Feminists for Life in Washington, D.C., an anti-abortion organization unlike any I knew. Run by women, they weren’t mired in shutting down clinics and challenging laws like the organizations with which I had been involved. Instead, they were focused on the practical realities of helping mothers cope with unexpected pregnancies. They rejected the one-size-fits-all approach espoused by the predominantly male leaders on my end of the movement, and provided resources, support, and guidance appropriate to a woman’s age and life stage. To avoid the long drive to and from our Manassas home, Anna moved into one of the overnight rooms in our Capitol Hill row house in mid-August.
A month later, I was in our organization’s Virginia administrative offices near our Manassas home, when my secretary rushed in to tell me she had just heard about a plane crashing into a New York skyscraper. We turned on the small television in the front office and huddled around watching as a second plane hit in New York, another slammed into the Pentagon, and still another hijacked flight was unaccounted-for. If it was still in the air, officials were speculating its likely target was the U.S. Capitol. My daughter was a block away.
I rushed back to my desk and called Anna’s cell phone. She answered sleepily and I told her to get out of the building and drive east to leave the city. My anxiety and the urgency must have made me sound crazy, but this was a matter of life and death—her death. If the plane missed the Capitol by just a few degrees, it would destroy the building where my daughter was just waking up. The specter of loss, of her violent death, was terrifying in its imminence. Anna kept trying to interrupt me and I became more vehement. Finally, she managed to break through and ask what direction was east. Under other circumstances, I would have laughed, but the best I could do was take a deep breath, try to sound slightly less frantic, and give her directions. She crossed the border into Maryland as police closed roads behind her. Capitol Hill was completely cordoned off for weeks. With Anna safely ensconced in a hotel, and Matthew accounted for at school, in Philadelphia Cheryl and I spent the rest of the day as most of America and the world did: watching countless reruns of buildings crumbling; hellish scenes in New York, in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon; victims and family members incoherently asking about wives or husbands, and others pleading for missing parents or children.
My community was generally predisposed to the apocalyptic narrative of the End Times, so it had its own way of assimilating what had happened. There was some talk about God’s punishment, about this being the prelude to far greater catastrophes for a sinful world. Jerry Falwell uttered what some of us, including me, believed back then when he told Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, “The abortionists have got to bear some of the burden for this because God will not be mocked.” Pat nodded approvingly. “And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad,” he continued. “I believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, the ACLU, and the people for the American Way, all of them have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped make this happen.’” I cringed as I listened, but I couldn’t disagree.
Could this be the price for our immorality? Had Bill Clinton invited God’s wrath upon us by appointing gay public officials? I knew enough not to express these thoughts out loud, but they were all part of the conversation out of the public eye. Eventually, Falwell apologized, and I understood why. Rather than join the public battle over rhetoric, I turned my attention to figuring out how to cope with this changed world. Roadways were closed, we could not access our facility on Capitol Hill, there would be no mail delivery—which cut us off from our main revenue supply—and most forms of public transportation were either not functioning or had greatly reduced service.
President Bush had designated Friday, September 14, as a National Day of Prayer, so Paul and I organized a group of pastors from several denominations to join us in leading a service outside the Pentagon, opposite the crash site. We positioned ourselves along a ridge that overlooked the collapsed south wall. I had visited the building many times for my work, so I had clear memories of what the devastated site had looked like before an American Airlines Boeing 757 with sixty-four passengers and crew aboard slammed into it. The building was still smoking three days after the attack.
Our procession of Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, and Protestant priests and ministers walked down a knoll onto grounds where helicopters were landing and taking off and where streetlamps were strewn after being sheared off by the plane’s underbelly. Dressed in our respective vestments—robes and stoles of various colors, dark suits and ties, clerical collars—we stood there, the smell of acrid smoke lingering. Weary emergency workers were still searching for the bodies of Pentagon employees in the charred debris. We knelt, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and laid two hundred flowers in remembrance of the victims. Passersby, reporters, and military personnel stopped to join us. A journalist who was among them later told me, choking back tears, that he hadn’t said a prayer since he was a child.
President Bush, in his address to Congress on September 15, provided the context for the catastrophe, explaining that al Qaeda, which practiced “a fringe form of Islamic extremism,” had attacked us because they hated the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution, the very essence of our identity as Americans. He employed potent and familiar language in his public remarks referring repeatedly to “evil.” This was a morally unambiguous term, part of the theological nomenclature; it resonated in my community. We understood evil in a broader context: Abortion was evil. Homosexuality was evil. Communism was evil. And now, we believed, Muslims were evil, too.
A consensus quickly formed among evangelicals: our Judeo-Christian nation was defending itself against a global Islamic jihad, and Muslims had declared death to both America—especially Americans of the Cross—and Israel, God’s land and chosen people. Many in my community believed that all Muslims hated Christians and were out to subjugate if not slaughter us, after which they would impose Sharia law on America by way of a satanic and tyrannical worldwide caliphate. It was a dire scenario that soon became an article of faith. As with much of what was asserted during those dire days, I struggled to find some approach that felt authentic to who I was and what I truly believed, but the shock of the event, and the rhetorical excesses, made it difficult.
Many of my colleagues spoke about 9/11 marking the beginning of the End Times. It was only the most recent iteration of a recurring theme of fear fueled by a combination of apocalyptic narratives and xenophobia that preoccupied most American evangelicals throughout the twentieth century. First it was the Bolsheviks who would be the army of the Antichrist and engage in battle with the forces of good to bring a cataclysmic end to civilization. Then it was Hitler and the Nazis. After their defeat, the Soviet Union took their place, and after that, China. The Bible told us that hostile armies would always come from the East. Al Qaeda fit the bill perfectly.
My colleagues and I reminded our people that Jesus said to his disciples, just as they looked to the sky to see what the weather would be, they should also look at the signs around them for the imminence of the End. This constant state of hypervigilance, which in certain times and places looks and behaves more like fear than faith, has always informed the emotional temperature of evangelicals, but it was heightened after 9/11. And it would stay that way. The timeless words of Matthew seemed especially relevant: “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.” Though I was conflicted about overwrought interpretations of such passages, I couldn’t argue with them.
I had outgrown my preoccupation with Last Days, but nonetheless, they constituted the centerpiece of evangelical teaching for generations. Could the swarm of locusts in the book of Revelation, which are released to torment the people of the earth, really refer to the Muslim masses? I was in turmoil about all this speculation, but my universe was filled with people who took them as gospel truth. I had known followers of Islam who were peaceful, loving, decent people, but I couldn’t dismiss what had just been perpetrated in the name of Allah.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks and Bush’s response dramatically shifted my Christian ethical orientation. For most of my life, I was either anti-war or highly suspicious of the moral justification for war. I admired military men and women and was proud to bear the name of one who gave his life while in service to our country, but I was skeptical of those in power and their use of military might to impose their will on the world. That doubt was only confirmed in the book of James, “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not.” In my early Christian years, war was nothing more than the macro manifestation of man’s micro inner sinfulness. It may be a necessary evil, but it lacked moral justification. Or so I had believed. I held that position through the Reagan years and even when we embarked on the Gulf Wars. But all that had changed after 9/11.
I would often remember and find solace in Bush’s address to the nation the night of the attacks. He asked for our prayers, then quoted Psalm 23:4: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.” Too often I may have considered George Bush to be wishy-washy, but he wasn’t now. And if I had any questions about the rightness or wrongness of military action, I didn’t have any after his brief message to the American people. He gave voice to the surging emotions inside me. I wasn’t just indignant about what had been done to thousands of innocent Americans, I was becoming enraged about it. For the first time I desired the death of a human being, Osama bin Laden. Not only did I cheer Bush’s resolve and our military’s bravery, I buttressed it with moral and theological support.
In many ways I had begun to see George Bush as a kind of divine oracle. Given the way the election had unfolded, our president had become not just another elected official but evidence that God had heard our prayers. The sanctioning of his election by the Supreme Court was personal; it affirmed me, my community, and the Christian worldview. Bush’s ascendancy was typological of Christian ascendancy.
No one knew or appreciated just how much I was shaken by 9/11. I was haunted by the images, the tragedy, the vulnerability of us all. But mostly I could not stop thinking about my daughter sleeping peacefully in our office building when only the grace of God diverted that murderous airplane headed in her direction. When she was still in harm’s way, I had vividly imagined her death: what it would have been like to try to recover her body, the unfathomable loss, the inability to make up for the mistakes I had made. As much as I suffered in thinking of this scenario, I was also grateful that, unlike so many others, we were spared. We had another chance. I resolved to be a better father to both my children. A better husband to Cheryl. A better Christian.