On Tuesday, Sept. 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 in Washington D.C., my teaching plans for that day changed.
What we all saw in the evil of that day is how much worldviews matter. I remember well the chaos and confusion, realizing that our world had changed.
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For rising generations, 9/11 is distant history. Of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the assassination of JFK, and the moon landing were all history for my generation as well, but they weren’t as distant. That’s because, even as grumpy and grungy Gen X’ers, we shared an identity as Americans. We had a national memory.
That’s something that many in the emerging generation no longer have.
Absent a coherent civic education and an understanding of different worldviews, it’s not clear to them who attacked us on 9/11, why they attacked us, and who are even the good guys in this story.
Making history come to life
A resource developed to teach the younger generation about 9/11 is the Drive Thru History Special hosted by Dave Stotts. The Drive Thru History team has done a tremendous job making history come to life. With incredible video footage and narration, this special walks through the events of 9/11, highlighting the stories of both terrorism and heroism that made up the day and altered the history of the world.
And it did. I remember sitting in a history class as a college freshman, learning about the World Wars of the 20th century, and thinking, “I can’t imagine the world ever going to war like this again.” Less than 10 years later, I asked a group of college freshmen if they could ever imagine the world at peace again, as it was in late 90’s. They definitively answered, “No.”
Interpretive framework
But the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks have demonstrated how much what humans see and experience is through the lens of an interpretive framework, our vision of reality, and what we believe about issues of morality, meaning, and identity.
In other words, our worldview. And our worldview will determine what it is that we see in the world around us.
In the days and weeks after 9/11, America seemed to have a new moral clarity. Church attendance spiked, there was a palpable sense of national unity and a deep respect for firemen, police officers and first responders. We were all more gracious to strangers and flew 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 evil doers.
Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote, is God’s megaphone. For a moment, our collective pain allowed us to see more clearly. Sadly, it was only for a moment.
A few months after 9/11, I heard a well-known Christian author, philosopher and apologist confidently announce the end of postmodernism. After witnessing the evil of that day, he believed, no one could embrace a worldview that denied absolute truth or absolute morality. He was wrong.
Eventually, a culture that had been fully infected by postmodernism made sense of 9/11 by retreating again to its postmodernism.
Rather than conclude that the evil of 9/11 required that moral absolutes must exist, the narrative became that the evil of 9/11 was caused by those who embrace moral absolutes. Once the obvious contradiction in this way of thinking is suppressed, it’s a short step to a different kind of absolutism, in which evil is called good and good is called evil. And that’s what has happened.
Postmodernism offspring
Today, our culture has been overwhelmed by an offspring of postmodernism.
The critical theory mood sees the world in categories of the oppressed and the oppressors. Seen through the lens of that worldview, conspiracy theories about 9/11 thrive, and the city most affected by it now has a Muslim mayor.
Worldview matters.
That’s why the collective spirit and national identity that emerged in the pain-filled days following 9/11 went the way of any moral clarity we gained at that time. They are all long gone.
To be clear, reality is not gone. Only our ability to see it is.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by John Stonestreet and originally published by the Colson Center’s Breakpoint.
