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9/11 Exposed The Weakness Of A Post-Christian West

We didn’t just get the Muslim world wrong. We got America wrong too.

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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........

© The Federalist