The first thing that always comes up when talking about September 11, 2001, is: Where were you when you heard the news?
It was a weird day for me. A 16-year-old sophomore, I was out of school that morning. Having suffered massive injuries from a snow skiing accident in April of 2001, I was driving to Springfield, Illinois, on Interstate 72 to visit a surgeon for a follow-up appointment with my mother.
The morning really was as beautiful as everyone describes — an uncannily early-fall day with crisp temperatures and not a cloud in the sky. That everyone remarks on the beauty of the day in retelling the events of 9/11, I think, is a subliminal way that the human mind interprets beauty against the carnage of brutality and sadness. We find categories of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, as backgrounds for making sense of our moral memories. That day, odd as it may be, we used the weather to help frame the mind’s memory of 9/11. These moral timestamps have a quiet, imperceptible way of searing images into our brains, and the beauty of that day’s beginning is offset by the ugliness of carnage and ashes that would mark the day’s end.
I’ll never forget the breaking news alert from our local radio station, WLDS, announcing that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Like everyone else, I believed it was just a one-off mistake. Who, after all, would do such a thing purposefully? Between arriving at the doctor’s office and the appointment, we got news that another plane had struck the other tower. I’ll never forget, paradoxically, the felt, audible silence that fell over the waiting room as everyone was processing that the invincible fortress that is, and was, the United States, was under attack.
After we got back to school late that morning, televisions were set up in a common area where students and faculty alike watched the carnage and disbelief in real time. Against all odds, and something that never happened before or after that day, at lunchtime, our principal began to yell for everyone to exit the cafeteria and flee to the parking lot. At the moment, what immediately came to mind was that the terrorism of New York was going nationwide, so widespread that students in central Illinois, of all places, were now potential victims. It turned out that an electric breaker caught fire, triggering a fire alarm and the fire department’s arrival. You can imagine the sense of anxiety that fell on us as we had no idea what was happening at the time.
They canceled school for the rest of the day, and my then-girlfriend (and now wife) and I went to my house to watch the news. I’ll never forget returning her home later that afternoon. The thoughts that swept over me were visceral — I genuinely felt that at age 16, we had had my generation’s Pearl Harbor moment. It was as though the world had changed (and it had) and that my generation, emerging millennials, would be called to action around the world (and they were). Several of my friends from high school would serve in the War on Terror, in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would not come back the same. What immediately came to mind was a call to arms. It dawned on me with real sadness that, had America declared war, my injuries would have kept me from serving. It now makes sense to me, reading the stories of young men in World War II who could not serve because of medical disability and who felt shame the rest of their lives for not doing their part. In retrospect, what seems bizarre is how compartmentalized the war became — especially for those of us who did not fight (or could not fight, as in my case). The war could be kept out of mind and out of sight if you let it, but all the while, we knew there were young men fighting and dying in far-away lands. I say this with embarrassment. As a patriotic American, what feels like shirking responsibility and letting someone else carry the burdens of protecting the nation is a mental frame not to be forgotten. It was as if American culture went on while a generation of men spilled blood in a war that Americans grew accustomed to, given its length and protracted nature.
But this essay is not about me. Even if this psychological retelling helps historians understand what my generation processed that day, it gains renewed importance as I now teach students who were either too young to remember 9/11 or who were not yet born.
9/11 was many things. It was a display of humanity at its worst and at its best. It was a display of Islamist barbarians drunk on the power of false religion, and fueled by evil, retribution, and hate — a hate that would pour down destruction in the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans. It was a display of American altruism at its best, too—the firefighters who selflessly stormed upward in burning towers to save trapped victims, only to become victims themselves. The story of 9/11 is about Americans who formed long lines outside hospitals and blood banks waiting to donate to their fellow Americans. It was the raucous patriotism of Americans who pled for justice. It was George W. Bush standing on rubble, declaring to a watching world that the terrorists would pay — and they did. The killing of Osama bin Laden at the hands of Navy SEALS in 2011 was an epic, unforgettable coda to a decade of tumult. Biblical justice rained down on bin Laden (Rom. 13:1-7), a man whose infamy ended with his corpse sunk to the ocean depths. It was like a World Series game: the President, in a deafening crowd of applauding spectators (many of whom probably did not vote for him as New Yorkers), throwing a pitch down the middle of the plate, creating a memory that signaled—in a mysterious way that only America’s love affair with baseball could do—resolve and solidarity.
But today, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, as a theologian and ethicist, I now look back at that day as a test of the regnant secularism that our society was gambling its existence on. I evaluate that day by what the moral plates underneath American society revealed. In the early 2000s, America was more Christian than it is today, at least statistically. But the secularization thesis scholars heralded was well underway by then. But amid all of our progress, our enlightenment, and our belief that secularism affords us the moral categories to make sense of moral tragedy, 9/11 proved the impotence of secularism. When the Twin Towers fell, no one went looking to an atheist manifesto to understand what had just happened. No one pulled Nietzsche from their shelves — they chose Psalm 23 instead. Scholars may make academic and transgressive arguments about moral relativism, but on 9/11, rest assured, no one wondered what the neighborhood atheist thought. The famed atheist Christopher Hitchens’ worldview could not satisfy the longings for justice, but Billy Graham’s could. Secularism was exposed as fleeting and intellectual, divorced from the needs of objectivity, affection, and explanation. Moral realism — the idea that morality is real, objective, and felt within the inner recesses of our souls — was the currency of grief-stricken Americans that fateful day. Americans did not soothe their fears with strip clubs, Wiccan manifestos, or sports stadiums to quench their existential wonderings. Out of 9/11, we think of the Americans who returned to churches in dramatic numbers in the weeks that followed. We think of the answers sought against the horizons of loss, longing, and assuagement.
Like all tragedies that befall human civilization, we go back to the moral categories we’re told that secularism moved us on from. From the Nuremberg Trials that sought justice for the atrocity of the Holocaust to the palpable angst of the 1960s that oversaw a cultural revolution, moral convulsions have a way of jarring us awake from our moral slumbers. When events unfold with such heinous evil on open display, the ambient moral assumptions we’ve grown up on while living in a secular country become questionable. Moral events of such magnitude leave us crying out for a form of justice that no human court of law can finally deliver upon. Can political justice really rectify the wrongs of that day? It can, in the temporal sense. But in a final sense, a guilty verdict cannot bring back a deceased son or daughter, but the Lord Jesus, who calls himself “the resurrection and life,” most certainly can if we repent of our sins and follow Him (John 11:25-26). September 11, 2001 reminds us that “law written on the heart” (Rom. 2:15) is a law etched on it from its Creator, and that we must reach for a Higher Court, a divine court, to assuage the anguish of human grief—to believe that in the divine ledger of eternity, evil will truly be answered for with perfect justice.
I am now 41. As a proud American, I measure my early adolescence and early middle age against the realities of what happened twenty-five years ago. I was 16 when America was attacked, and until 2021, when then-President Joe Biden unceremoniously (though not unjustifiably) withdrew our forces from Afghanistan, the largest chunk of my life has been lived in the afterglow of what I hear soldiers refer to as “GWOT”—the Global War on Terror, a war sparked by what occurred on that beautiful-and-macabre September day. What occurred on 9/11 is a testament to the reality of evil, the valor of fallen heroes, and the promise that no matter how secular the modern West may think itself to be, God has placed not only eternity on our hearts, but the cry for justice, too.
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Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is a Fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker.
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