Religion, Secularism and the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks – John Daniel Davidson, 9/10/26 (2532)

0:00This is Molly Hemingway, encouraging you to listen to my favorite podcast, Issues, etc. Every day you get in-depth interviews with host Todd Wilkin asking expert guests, substantive thought-provoking questions on all of the important news and issues of our day. The expert guests are in culture, law, ethics, philosophy, theology, and apologetics. Expert guests, expansive topics, always ex-staling Christ, issues, etc. These acts and violence against innocence violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand them. The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.

1:03That's President George W. Bush speaking days after the September 11 terrorist attacks at the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. Famously, Islam is peace. That was not true then, and it's not true now. Welcome back to Issues, etc. I'm Todd Wilkin. Joining us to talk about religion, secularism, and the September 11 terrorist attacks, John Daniel Davidson, he's senior editor of the Federalist. He's author of the book, Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, and at recent column four of the Federalist, titled 9-11 was the beginning of a religious war that we lost. John, welcome back. Thanks for having me. In 2016, Lake comedian, Norm MacDonald tweeted, and I quote, what terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims, what did MacDonald understand that so few others don't?

2:04Yeah, he was tapping into really our absurd reaction to 9-11, I think, that the idea that you would, there would be any backlash against Muslims or that anybody might think bad things about Muslim faith after 9-11, was the worst thing that could happen. It was the worst reaction that we could have as an American, that would betray our American principles and identity to look a scant at Islam, after a bunch of Muslim terrorists murdered thousands of Americans. He was poking fun at that, and I think he was right to poke fun at that, because it defined our reaction to 9-11, this obsession with studiously avoiding the obvious motivations for the 9-11 attacks, which were religious and cultural, obviously so. But we weren't allowed to say that, or talk about it after 9-11. We had to pretend like it was something else. You say that 9-11 was the beginning of a religious war that we lost, what do you mean by that?

3:09Well, for the people who perpetrated the attack, the hijackers, Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the network of jihadist terrorist groups across the world that celebrated and then emulated the attacks, it very much was at the beginning of a religious war, a religious conflict, one that was motivated by certain theological claims about the world, about American society, about the West. They were very clear about what they wanted. In fact, I cited a letter that Osama bin Laden wrote in 2002 saying that the first thing that Al-Qaeda wanted from the United States was Islam. They wanted to convert the United States to Islam and to bring Islam to the West. That's what they wanted. We had to pretend like that, not really what they wanted, because we weren't prepared to grapple with the implications of that. We wanted it to be material causes, because we had bived secular western sort of enlightenment-informed materialism that says the only real differences between people are material differences,

4:18and that religion and culture are superficial. It can't be that. It has to be economic inequality or lack of opportunity or American foreign policy. If we address those things, then the terrorists will go away. They'll have no complaint against us. That was just totally false and totally wrong, and our leaders set it for years and years and years. In that vein, tell us about historian Stephen Ambrose's pre-9-11 predictions for the 21st century. What did he see on the horizon? I write about this in my piece. I was a student at Hillsdale College at the time of 9-11, and we had just started a conference about World War II, and the historian Stephen Ambrose opened the conference with a speech on Sunday night. That was September 9th, and his speech was all about how the 20th century was this civil war within the West about competing ideologies, communism, capitalism, and fascism. World War I and World War II and even the Cold War were all part of this internal conflict within the West.

5:21But now, the good news for us was that all of those conflicts had been settled, and the 21st century was stretching out before us as an era of optimism and peace and progress. Instead of spending our time fighting wars and trying to destroy one another, we were going to be exploring the oceans and exploring space. It was all sunshine and roses ahead, and two days later, the planes hit the towers, and his comments were revealed to be absolutely naive and delusional. You say that the secular worldview refuses to take the claim of religion seriously, so what do you mean by that? Well, the kind of secular liberalism that we have inherited from enlightenment philosophy sort of dismisses the role of religion in the formation of civilizations and cultures, and it flattens religions in a way that maybe, you know,

6:24posits that they're all fundamentally the same, to the extent that they help people psychologically, you know, they're fine, but they don't really inform how societies are organized or how people live or what cultural practices become the norm. And instead, you know, of religion informing how societies are made, you know, secular liberalism says, you know, as I mentioned earlier, there's only material considerations, inform those things. And so confronted by something like 9-11, we didn't have the vocabulary or the mental categories to grapple with what was really behind the attacks. And so we put these other things on it that were familiar to us, that seemed manageable because we didn't want to confront the reality that maybe there was something about Islam itself that was incompatible with the West. Maybe there was something not just about the terrorists, but about their religion and their culture that made their behavior make sense in the context of their own religious tradition.

7:34So why did even something as massive as the terrorist attacks of 9-11 failed to shatter that secular delusion? Because in order to shatter that secular delusion, we wouldn't just have to risk being called racist, right? You know, nobody wanted to be called a racist, nobody wanted to be called a bigot against Islam. You would have had to discard a whole corpus of thoughts stretching back centuries and centuries to enlighten in Europe that rejected the role of religion and that rejected the idea that nations are actually founded on theological claims above all about God and man and how man should organize society and light of those truths. And so instead, you know, you had George W. Bush out there six days after 9-11 proclaiming that Islam is peace and that the terrorists don't represent the fundamental tenets of Islam as they actually knew anything about that.

8:38Just these absurd statements and it just repeated itself for years and years our leaders said similar things and we embarked upon these insane foreign adventures of like trying to bring democracy to a place like Iraq or Afghanistan as though the form of government sort of will create the people rather than the other way around that the people themselves only a certain kind of people will ever choose western style. And so it's not a lot of people, they will not choose that and it was considered rude and hateful to say that after 9-11 because of this warped idea that people had about the west and about what America was. That America was supposed to be this neutral place where everybody was the same and multiculturalism was the rule of the day. Well, you would have to repudiate all of that in the face of 9-11 and our leaders just couldn't do it. How different would our foreign policy just to stay on foreign policy have been had our president the time a state department just said look these were religiously motivated attacks we need to deal seriously with the actual claims of Islam as both a religious and political and cultural force and act accordingly.

10:00How would it be different? Well, I think that we wouldn't have embarked upon these military misadventures to sort of bring democracy to Iraq and be we were told that we would be greeted as liberators and that all people, you know, including the people of Iraq yearn for freedom and democracy. I think there would have been a more adult and mature and realistic assessment that we're not going to be greeted as liberators if we go into these places. So let's not go in. Let's not take it upon ourselves to bring democracy to peoples and cultures and nations that have not chosen democracy for themselves and who have not managed to sort of gain a foothold for democracy. So I think on the foreign policy front that that would have been one change we wouldn't have tried to transform these societies from the outside which is a doomed endeavor. But on the other big public policy front would have been immigration we would have recognized we can't bring these Muslim people into the United States we need to shut down immigration from Muslim majority countries.

11:08And instead, of course, we did just the opposite in the years in the quarter century since 9-11 we've seen more Muslim immigration into this country than ever before record numbers. But the population of Muslims in America of immigrants has more than doubled since 9-11 and that was done on purpose to sort of prove to ourselves that we weren't bigots. And again, that goes back to my point earlier we just could not recognize that this was a religious and civilizational struggle. It had to be something else. And we had to prove that it was something else by bringing in people from the various societies that had produced the terrorists. John Daniel Davidson is our guest. We're talking about religion, secularism, and the September 11th terrorist attacks. Is Islam compatible with Western values and ideals? This is Molly Hemingway. Encouraging you to listen to my favorite podcast, issues, etc.

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14:17Welcome back issues etc. I'm Todd Rukin. John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist Desire Gas. We're talking about religion secularism in the September 11th terrorist attacks. John is Islam compatible with Western values and ideals. Absolutely not. And obviously so, by its own account it's not. All you have to do is read what Muslims themselves say and what Muslim scholars and teachers have said over the centuries. They're very clear about it. It's very hard to mistake them and the Muslim sources when you read them. You can just look at history as well. The history of medieval Europe largely was one of trying to keep Islam at bay and re-conquer lands that Muslim armies had taken by force.

15:17So no, there's nothing compatible about Islam in the West. They are and always will be diametrically opposed. And that's because Islam and Islamic cultures take, they have certain religious commitments. And certain religious imperatives that are never going to change whether they're in the West or whether they're in Muslim countries in the Muslim world. And so the idea that we could import millions and millions of Muslims here and they will sort of become Americans. It not only misunderstands the nature of Islam but it totally mangles and garbles the definition of what America is and what an American is. Given our current contacts, given the fact that now infamously New York City has elected a Muslim mayor and this seems to be at least something of a trend at least at the state level,

16:17what are your concerns about this ongoing naivete, about the religious nature of our world struggles? Well, my concern is that we're going to be headed in the same direction. And I think we are headed in the same direction as countries like Britain and France and other places in Western Europe that are further down this road than we are. If you look at a city like Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Birmingham is about 30% Muslim. So it's not a majority but it doesn't need to be a majority because when you have a large portion of the population is Muslim, they create their own sort of Muslim society, their own Muslim communities that are insular, they're not assimilated into the national mainstream. And then they begin to recreate versions of their own Muslim homelands there in whatever Western city or community that they're in.

17:17And this is happening all over Britain, it's happening all over Europe. And we see it to some extent at an earlier stage happening here in the United States, if you look at places like Dearborn, Michigan or Hamtramik that have large Muslim populations and now have almost all Muslims on the city council, they act in the same way because Islam is not just a private religion, it's not Protestant in that sense. There's no aspect to it where you can just kind of be a private Muslim in your home and then kind of leave Islam at the door and then go out into the public square. Islam is an all-encompassing religious and political system. And so inevitably when you get enough Muslims together in one place, they will begin to impose that system by degrees until they can impose it completely. How do we regain the ability to see Islam for what it is and always has been? I think we have to rediscover the importance of religion in American public life first.

18:17So in other words, we're only going to be able to see Islam clearly if we can see Christianity and its role in American life seriously as well and kind of rediscover that role. For most of American history, it was understood that America was a Christian nation and our leaders spoke in those terms and we understood ourselves as a people in those terms. And since the end of World War II, we've really lost that, especially the last 60 years or so. And this other idea that America is really kind of this blank slate is just sort of a place to make money if you're willing to follow the rules has come in to replace this older idea of American identity as being tied to Christianity and Christian moral virtue. And so we're not going to be able to speak clearly or think clearly about Islam until we can speak clearly and think clearly about our own Christian tradition. And so that's where we have to begin.

19:17Do you think that at least some of the secularists would be willing to now given 25 years, be willing to entertain the possibility that they've been wrong about religion in general and about Islam in particular? No, I don't think so because the secularists have been ascended over the last 25 years. They've made gains. They have taken over, you mentioned mom Donnie, but he's just part of a whole generation of young sort of socialists that are taking over the Democrat party and who are winning office at the municipal level at the state level even in Congress. And they're ascended and so they haven't been stopped and part of the reason they haven't been stopped is because too many people on the right were afraid of being called a racist or a bigot or a xenophob or a Christian nationalist or a white supremacist. So we didn't say the true things that needed to be said and we didn't sort of take a stand for American identity and for Christian civilization.

20:24Until we do and kind of impose some costs and actually start winning, there's no reason for the secularists to change what they're doing. They're doing quite well so far because they haven't met any significant resistance from the right. With about 30 seconds here is the secularism that we've been discussing here truly secular is is it in a sense a religion of its own? Yeah, that's a fair point. I think in some senses it is sometimes unconsciously so on the part of people who call themselves secular or call themselves atheists or none that have no religious affiliation. All human beings it's in it's part of our human nature. We are religious creatures and we will worship something and we will make religious commitments to something or someone. And secularism I think is sort of a segue. It's a transitional phase and we're still in it but I think it's pretty clear that a lot of these secular humanists they do have religious beliefs and religious motivations but they don't put them in those terms.

21:30John Daniel Davidson is senior editor at the Federalist author of the book Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. And a recent column for the Federalist titled 9-11 Woods the Beginning of a Religious War that we lost. You'll find a link to this column and to Pagan America on the podcast page for this episode at issuesetc.org. John thanks. Hey thanks for having me. Terry Mattingley joins us on the other side of the break. We're going to talk about media coverage of alleged miracles. Looking for high quality church music settings? Look no further than Concordia Publishing House. We have award winning settings for Handbell, organ, piano and choral groups featuring a wide variety of options for the entire church year.

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