
Christopher Craig Brittain will be part of a panel discussion about the 9/11 attacks on the BBC Radio Wales programme 'All Things Considered'. We'll post more infomation closer to the air date.
'It is at times like these that I really hate religious people.' This is what one of my Professors said to me, as we sat in shock in his university office, moments after his secretary had interrupted our meeting to inform us that a passenger plane had just been flown into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. This outburst startled me, but it was the next conversation I had that morning, that really left an impact on me.
After leaving the university office, I met a theology student outside, a kind and gentle man training to be a minister. He was fuming with anger. He had just heard the news from New York, and burst out:
'For too many years we have been naïve, and our bleeding hearts have let people take advantage of us. We have tried to be liberal and tolerant, but now we've had to learn the hard way. Maybe now we won't be afraid to punish terrorism and Iraq. Maybe now we can finally bomb those bastards back into the dark ages!'
I was shocked to hear this man – who up to now I had found to be a calm and compassionate Christian – say such things. I attempted to calm him down, but also couldn't resist commenting on his desire for revenge. When I expressed the concern that the kind of military action he wanted might kill innocent people – including women and children – he quickly interrupted: 'I don't care! Let's bomb them all. I don't care how many we need to kill! I'm tired of all this wishy-washy open-mindedness. The Muslims don't like us and never will! It's time that we faced reality.'
Experiences such as these are the origin of the thoughts that led to my book Religion at Ground Zero (Continuum, 2011). For beyond the question of how it is possible for men to fly airplanes into office towers, I now had another troubling question confronting me: How can ordinary and gentle Christians like this man so quickly and utterly be transformed into a ball of rage demanding violent attacks on defenceless children? How do events like September 11, 2001 cause average people to transform into a hateful desire for violent revenge? This, along with the angry statement by my Professor, led me to ask some difficult questions about my own religious faith: How can a religious tradition that teaches peace and respect be do easily deployed to justify murder? Why is it that people of religious faith seem no less prone to panic and desire for revenge? If religion is capable of causing such violence, can it even hope to be part of the solution to such tragedies?
The most common theological response to disasters and tragedies in human history is to ask why a loving God would allow such terrible things to happen. People raise this question in a number of ways: 'Where was God when I needed him?' 'What did I do to deserve this?' Trying to find answers to these questions – an exercise known as 'theodicy' – has been the concern of philosophers and theologians for generations. But as I thought about the events of 9/11, and then stepped back to examine how people have responded to other shocking events in history – the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the First World War, the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina – two things in particular struck me. The first observation is that many (if not most) people who are caught up in a disaster tend not to find the answers provided by theodicy to be very helpful. Second, the temptation to engage in the sort of calculus modelled by theodicy appears to remain very powerful, even among people who have no overt religious beliefs. In the wake of the shock of a terrible tragedy, many of those caught up in it lament that 'The world will never be the same!' This is quickly followed by a drive to identify who is to blame for causing the tragedy, and to articulate the 'meaning' of what is being experienced.
My interest in this dynamic, which is explored in my book, has only been deepened since I finished writing it, for very recent events have continued to exhibit this general pattern of human behaviour.
Many of the survivors, as well as the family and friends of the victims of the recent massacre in Norway, are currently wrestling with these feelings as they seek to make sense of attacks, while asking the terrible question, 'Why?' The same painful thoughts were no doubt experienced by mourners commemorating the first anniversary of the Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg, Germany. In the wake of such terrible events, many people find themselves struggling to achieve some sense of the meaning of their experiences.
As the victims and their friends wrestle with these painful issues, the media and the general public engage in a similar process, but in a way that is frequently saturated with political controversy. The aftermath of the Love Parade disaster became a spectacle of public officials passing the blame on to others. The events in Norway have been followed by a variety of politically motivated declarations: some assuming the attacks were by Muslim extremists, while an American radio commentator compared the young Labour Party victims to the Nazi Youth. Not long after the terrible earthquakes and tsunamis that shook Japan in March, the mayor of Tokyo publically stated that, because 'Japanese politics is tainted with egoism', a tsunami was needed 'to wipe out egoism'. He thus described the disaster as 'divine punishment.' Examples such as this demonstrate how, in the wake of a disaster, many people use the intensity of the situation as an opportunity to advance their agendas and interests.
For those who are members of religious traditions, this dynamic is disturbing and humbling. Religion at Ground Zero explores the tension that exists between religion's capacity to both cause and enhance the suffering and destruction surrounding historical tragedies, but also its potential to serve as a resource for responding to such disasters. Thus, while my book challenges simplistic accusations that suggest that religion is inherently violent and dangerous, I also argue that theology needs to operate with greater humility and honesty about its own limitations.
As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I'll be carefully watching how individuals and communities commemorate and tell the stories of their experiences of that terrible experience. Most particularly, however, I'll be interested in analysing what sort of meaning people are making about the attacks ten years after the fact. What theodicies continue to subtly be constructed and retold? Does the impact of 9/11 continue to influence how people think about the place of religion in society, or in their personal lives?
There will be a great deal of editorials, official commemorations, television retrospectives, and even academic debates, surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11. As I witness this media spectacle (and admittedly participate in it), I will be wondering whether, for all this talking, we have yet achieved any deeper understanding of this event? Or will the media overage amount to a repetition of problematic patterns found in versions of Christian theodicy, only in more secular forms? How we commemorate this anniversary will tell us a great deal about how much we have, or have not, learned over the last ten years.