25 Years After 9-11

0:00Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was ironing a shirt, preparing to teach a class of college freshmen on the topic of Christian worldview. Obviously, once I learned of the planes hitting the towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon and Washington, DC, my teaching plans for that day changed. What we all saw in the evil of that day is just how much worldviews matter. I remember well the chaos and confusion in realizing that our world had changed. For rising generations, however, 9-11 is now distant history. Of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the assassination of JFK, the moon landing, these were all history for my generation, but not as distant. And that's because even as grumpy and grungy as GeneXors were, we still shared an identity as Americans. We still had a kind of national memory. And that's something that many in the emerging generations no longer have.

1:02Absent a coherent civic education and an understanding of different worldviews, it's not clear to them who exactly attacked us on 9-11 or why they attacked us. And for some, who are even the good guys in the story. One resource that was developed to teach the younger generations about 9-11 is the Drive Through History Special hosted by Dave Stotz. The Drive Through History team always does a tremendous job making history come to life. And with incredible video footage, narration, this special walks through the events of 9-11, highlighting stories of both terrorism and heroism. The stories that made up this day and altered the history of the world. And it did alter the history of the world. I remember sitting in a history class of my own as a college freshman, learning about the world wars of the early 20th century and thinking, I can't imagine the world ever going to war like this again. But I remember, less than 10 years later, asking a group of college freshmen if they could ever imagine the world being at peace again like it had been in the late 90s.

2:02The definitive answer was no. In a very real sense, the 25 years since the 9-11 attacks have demonstrated to us all, just how sticky worldviews can be, how much they matter. What human see and experience is always interpreted through an interpretive framework, a vision of reality, what we really believe about fundamental issues like morality, meaning, and identity. Our ideas about these things determine what it is that we see when we look at the world around us. In the days and weeks after 9-11, America seemed to have gained new moral clarity. Church attendant spike, there was a palpable sense of national unity, deep respect for firemen, police officers, and other first responders. We were all a little more gracious to each other and to strangers. We flew a lot more American flags. Even in Congress, at least for a short time, political divisions seemed less important than our shared national identity and our shared outrage at the evil doers. And that's because pain, a CS Lewis wrote, is God's megaphone. For a moment, our collective pain allowed us to see more clearly.

3:05But sadly, it was only for a moment. I remember a few months after 9-11, hearing a well-known Christian author, philosopher, and apologist, confidently announced that postmodernism had come to an end. After witnessing the evil of that day, he believed no one could any longer embrace a worldview that denied absolute truth or absolute morality. Of course, he was wrong. Eventually, a culture that had been fully infected by postmodernism ended up making sense of 9-11 by retreating to that postmodernism. Instead of concluding that the evil of 9-11 required moral absolutes to exist, the narrative instead became that the evil of 9-11 was caused by the kind of people who believe in moral absolutes. And once the obvious self-contradiction in that way of thinking is sufficiently suppressed like Romans 1 describes, it's a short step to a different kind of absolutism, the kind in which evil was called good and good is called evil. And that's exactly what's happened.

4:07Today, our culture has been pretty thoroughly overwhelmed by an offspring of postmodernism. The critical theory mood sees the world in categories of the oppressed and the oppressors. And seen through the lens of that worldview, conspiracy theories about 9-11 now thrive. And the city most affected by it has a Muslim mayor. World views matter. That's why the collective spirit and national identity that emerged in the Painfield days following 9-11 ended up going the way of any moral clarity that we gained at that time. They're all long gone. But to be clear, reality is not. Only our ability to see reality is long gone. One voice of moral clarity in the days and weeks that followed 9-11 was Chuck Colson. Not only did he help explain the Islamic worldview that drove the terrorists to plan and perpetrate the evil, he explained the existence of evil within a Christian worldview and the inadequacies of explanations that fall short of the truth. He also brought clarity to just war theories, especially as it applied in the weeks and months

5:09that followed. In this 25th anniversary of 9-11, the Colson Center team has compiled the commentaries of Chuck Colson in the days and weeks that followed the attacks into a special 9-11 bonus episode of the Breakpoint podcast. To listen, look for Breakpoint wherever you download podcast. God willing will never again see another day like 9-11. God willing, it won't take us another day like that for us to recapture and awareness of what is true and what is good. And that's why we pray God help us. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.