We live in the Age of 911, the emergency call so fittingly memorializing a shocking day—9/11, 2001—when America was confronted by a challenge to examine who we are and what we believe in the face of a powerful force that seeks to destroy us. Twenty-five years later our response to the challenge remains as confused as it was then.
The attack that brought down New York’s Twin Towers prompted then U.S. President George Bush to declare a global “War on Terror”, leading to conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Looking back from our vantage point today there is cause to argue that the wars focused the wrong weapons on the wrong target. Our enemy then, as now, was not “Terror” but the ideology that motivated it—and still does. The men who died at the controls of the planes that destroyed the towers and 3,000 other souls with them did so as an act of worship to their god, the god of Islam; a powerful religious ideology that single-mindedly pursues indoctrination of the submissive and domination of those who resist.
Islamic ideology will never be defeated by guns and bullets, or good intentions, or feel-good inclusive thinking of the sort that ensured an Islamic mayor would celebrate the 25th anniversary of the day when Allah came to stamp an indelible imprint on New York City.
An ideology can only be defeated by a more powerful ideology. At the heart of everything American lies the irresistible idea of “freedom” deriving from the glorious truth that the Son of God sacrificed Himself to free each of us from our bondage to self and sin (John 8:36).
It not an ideology that feeds on the destruction or domination of others in our service to God, but a whole way of being that flows from voluntary submission to the love of God as the way to reconciliation with the purity and purpose of His eternal Life.