A 9/11 reflection

NOTE: The manhunt for the killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is continuing this morning. For my reflections on his death yesterday, see my Daily Article Special Edition, “Charlie Kirk fatally shot at speaking event in Utah.” Please join me in praying for his wife and young children and for our nation in this dark hour.

I hate this anniversary each year. I wake up knowing that I will see the horrific images in the news all over again. The brilliant blue morning sky against which the Twin Towers stood as the airplanes flew into them. The assault on the Pentagon, our national paragon of military might. The plane crash in Pennsylvania and the ensuing stories of passenger courage that thwarted their hijackers.

I remember where I was on that tragic morning. So do you. So will we always.

On this day twenty-four years ago, 2,976 Americans were killed and thousands more were injured in the deadliest terrorist attacks in our nation’s history.

But here’s another fact to remember: 7,085 Americans have died and more than fifty-three thousand have been wounded because of this day.

“A new and different war”

President George W. Bush stated a month after 9/11, “The world has come together to fight a new and different war . . . A war against all those who seek to export terror, and a war against those governments that support or shelter them.” Over the next twenty years, nearly three million Americans served in what has come to be known as the Global War on Terror, including those I numbered earlier who died or were injured in battle.

The victims of 9/11 woke up that Tuesday morning with no idea that it would be their last morning. None of them volunteered for what happened to them. Part of our shock and grief is that their cruel deaths were so unexpected and senseless.

By contrast, those who died in the War on Terror that ensued did volunteer for what happened to them. They chose to serve their fellow Americans in the full knowledge that their choice could cost them the “last full measure of devotion,” in Abraham Lincoln’s immortal words.

The families they left are paying the price of their courage still today. As a husband and the father of two sons, I cannot begin to imagine the suffering of those who lost wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. Every day that goes by is another day with an emptiness that will go unfilled. Every birthday of the loved one they lost, every holiday, every significant marker passes with a seat at the table still vacant.

They, no less than the brave soldiers they mourn, are our nation’s heroes today.

“Make this a nation worth dying for”

It falls to us to respond in two ways.

First, we must never forget what happened on this day and because of this day. 9/11 can never become a day like 9/10. Those who fought and died in the conflicts that followed that terrible morning, and those who suffer their pain still today, must never be forgotten or ignored. Partisan views of the war and the administrations that waged it must not obscure the sacrifice of those who served in it.

In The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, acclaimed historian David McCullough writes:

“Gone but not forgotten” is the old expression for departed heroes. But if not forgotten, they are not gone.

Second, we must strive to be a nation worthy of such sacrifice.

A significant military anniversary never passes without calling to mind for me a conversation I had some years ago with a veteran scarred by wounds received in battle. When I thanked him for his sacrificial service, he looked into my eyes and said, “Just make this a nation worth dying for.”

McCullough notes:

There’s a line in one of the letters written by John Adams where he’s telling his wife, Abigail, at home, “We can’t guarantee success [in this war] but we can do something better. We can deserve it.”

What JFK said we “cannot afford to be”

What can we do to “deserve” the sacrifice of so many who served our nation, protected our freedoms, and died that we might live?

In one sense, there is nothing we can do to deserve such gifts. Those who died in the War on Terror and in all the wars that preceded it obviously did not do so because of anything you and I can do today. Their deaths preceded our reflections this morning by years and even centuries. Their choice to serve was an act of grace, and grace can never be deserved, only received.

But in another sense, there is much we can do to be a nation worthy of such sacrifice. In biblical terms, we can seek to be a people God is able to bless (cf. Psalm 33:12). To this end, we can humble ourselves, pray, seek God’s face, and turn from our “wicked ways,” knowing that he will then hear us, forgive us, and “heal our land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

We can intercede for our leaders and nation (1 Timothy 2:1–2), praying and working each day to be the salt and light our decaying and darkened culture needs so desperately (Matthew 5:13–16). And we can seek to be the change we wish to see.

David McCullough was the keynote speaker for an event my wife and I attended in Dallas on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The historian shared with us some of the slain president’s most significant statements, among them his assertion:

“This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”

If you agree, consider Mr. Kennedy’s most famous words, spoken in his inaugural address more than forty years before 9/11 but just as relevant on that tragic day and today: “Ask not what your country will do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

What can you “do for your country” today?

Quote for the day: 

“To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.” —George Washington

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Denison Forum

The corruption of Hamas and Amy Coney Barrett on the power of the law

An Israeli air strike on Doha, Qatar, killed five members of Hamas and a member of Qatar’s Internal Security Force yesterday. The strike took place shortly after Hamas claimed responsibility for a shooting that killed six people at a bus stop in Jerusalem on Monday.

Hamas leaders were gathered in Qatar to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza. However, the New York Times also reports that the attack “targeted a residential headquarters where a number of senior Hamas politicians lived.”

Here’s a question worth considering: Why were Hamas leaders living in a residence more than a thousand miles from the Gaza Strip they presumably serve?

And here’s what many people don’t know: Many of Hamas’s leaders living abroad are billionaires. According to the Telegraph, those living in Qatar do so in “five-star luxury.” This while, according to the United Nations, 65 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza live below the poverty line.

This disparity exists because Hamas is a dictatorship. After it came to power in Gaza in 2007, there have been no more elections.

Its terrorist leaders could therefore stage a horrific invasion of Israel on Oct. 7 with no accountability to the people of Gaza. They can profit personally while impoverishing the population. They can hide themselves and their soldiers and weapons behind civilian shields because they view the people as a means to their ends.

In fact, they want Israeli soldiers to harm Gazan civilians in order to turn public opinion against Israel and advance Hamas.

“A government of laws, not of men”

By contrast, as John Adams noted, the United States is “a government of laws, not of men.”

Americans elect the president by national vote, the Senate by statewide vote, and the House of Representatives by district vote. These leaders then enact laws intended to serve the common good. If we disagree, we can elect leaders who will revise or rescind such laws, as has been done often in our history.

But what about holding our leaders accountable to the laws of the land? James Madison noted: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

To enable such control, the Founders devised another layer of accountability, creating an unelected Supreme Court whose sole job is to interpret the Constitution and other laws as written and hold leaders and their actions accountable to them.

Amy Coney Barrett’s new book

These reflections have been on my mind in light of yesterday’s publication of Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution by Supreme Court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. Her book is both readable and deeply fascinating, with behind-the-scenes descriptions of the actual work of the Court as well as her explanation of its function.

She states that the Court’s story cannot be separated from the US Constitution, “which is both its birth certificate and life’s work.” Accordingly, she writes:

We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process. We exercise authority that the people have given us and resolve disputes according to the ground rules that the people have prescribed. . . .

In our system, a judge must abide by the rules set by the American people, both in the Constitution and legislation. . . . The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice.

Justice Barrett cites the death penalty as a personal example. A number of years ago, she co-authored an academic article “expressing a moral objection to capital punishment.” Then, soon after her appointment, the Court considered a death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. She joined the Court’s holding that Tsarnaev’s death sentence was valid. As she notes,

That was not the only course open to me. Given my view of capital punishment, I could have looked for ways to slant the law in favor of defendants facing the death penalty. There were, after all, plausible arguments going Tsarnaev’s way—the court of appeals agreed with him, as did three of my colleagues in dissent. Had I voted in favor of Tsarnaev, no one would have known that I did it because I objected to the death penalty rather than because I concluded that Tsarnaev had the better of the argument.

But that would have been a dereliction of duty. . . . My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views. Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be.

As she explains, judges are “referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.”

“The hallmark of a life of holiness”

As Justice Barrett’s book and the corruption of Hamas officials both illustrate, a government of laws rather than of men is enormously preferrable to the reverse. However, such laws are of course created and enforced by people. And people, including the Founders, are obviously fallen and flawed. (Consider that the large majority of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that “all men are created equal,” were slaveowners at the time.)

This is why fallen people need wisdom beyond our own. It is why we need the laws of God and the power of God by which to obey them. The good news is that, as I noted yesterday, the same Holy Spirit who inspired the word of God now guides us to interpret it and empowers us to obey it.

The key is wanting such guidance and power. It is wanting to live by a higher standard than anything humans can produce. It is seeking the holiness only a holy God can manifest in us, measuring ourselves by the “fruit” of his Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22–23) and paying any price to settle for nothing less.

Br. Lucas Hall of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston notes:

We might not be able to see over the horizon, but the pitched battle between good and evil that happens within the very mundane, day-to-day aspects of our lives is one we can take up again and again. The call to continue that work is the hallmark of a life of holiness. It may cost us everything: our lives, our understanding, our sense of clarity; and that offering is holy enough.

Will you seek such a “life of holiness” today?

Quote for the day:

“When you open your Bible, God opens his mouth.” —Mark Batterson

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More than twenty people were killed in a Russian attack on a village in eastern Ukraine this morning. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X: “A brutally savage Russian airstrike with an aerial bomb on the rural settlement of Yarova in the Donetsk region. Directly on people. Ordinary civilians. At the very moment when pensions were being disbursed.” His post showed horrific footage of bodies strewn across the ground.

When I saw the news, I admit that it felt like “more of the same.” This terrible war has been going on for more than three years. I have never been to Ukraine and don’t know that I know anyone directly affected by this tragic news.

And yet, far more people died in this morning’s airstrike than were killed in an attack on a bus depot in Jerusalem yesterday, a tragedy that I used to lead the Daily Article and have continued to grieve. My response comes from the fact that I have many friends in Israel, having led dozens of study tours there, and love the land and its people deeply.

Here’s my guess: many in our culture likely viewed the latter as I viewed the former, seeing another attack on Jews in Israel as irrelevant to their lives. Or even worse, they saw the victims of the Palestinian attackers as the villains and the attackers as the victims.

 “One of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack”

One-sided media narratives against the Jewish state have been regularly debunked, but they persist, drowning out reporting that disagrees. As a result, 60 percent of young adults told a recent survey that they favor Hamas (which has been designated a terrorist organization by at least eight nations and the European Union) over Israel.

In addition, recent moves by various governments to recognize a Palestinian state have strengthened Hamas, whose leaders are calling them “one of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack.”

The rise of antisemitism is tragically on display in America as well. According to the American Jewish Committee, attacks on Jews in our country “have reached shocking levels, affecting American Jewish behavior and sense of security like we haven’t witnessed before.” As just one example, a man speaking Hebrew was assaulted recently at the Santa Monica Pier, part of what officials are calling a “deplorable escalation of antisemitism across southern California.”

What explains this escalation?

The “Marvelization of reality”

Paul Miller is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he served as a member of the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In a recent article for The Dispatch, he explains “the problem with framing the Israel-Hamas conflict as one between the powerful and the powerless.”

Dr. Miller perceptively describes the process through which the left came to view Israel as:

• A powerful overlord, with the Palestinians as the heroic resistance.
• A “settler-colonial” state, with the Palestinians as indigenous rebels.
• And “white,” with the Palestinians as their “nonwhite” victims.

As he shows, all three claims are spurious.

• Israel became powerful by defending itself from nations seeking its annihilation. This does not make it an “overlord” or evil by definition.
• It is not a settler-colonial state: it began resettling the land under the Ottoman and British empires and did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine. In fact, the Arab population of historic Palestine grew from 1.4 million in 1948 to 7.4 million today.
• Israel isn’t white or European; an equal number of Israeli citizens are descendants of immigrants from Asia and Africa as from Europe; 20 percent of its population is Arab.

However, as Dr. Miller explains, none of this matters to Israel’s critics. In what he calls the “Marvelization of reality” whereby “we expect reality to conform to the story arcs of fiction,” there’s the protagonist (the Palestinians), the goal (statehood and liberation), and the villain (Israel).

In a complex world, we crave simplicity, with white hats for the good guys and black hats for the bad guys. And to much of America these days, Israel wears the black hat.

From active participants to passive consumers

This “Marvelization of reality” is relevant beyond Israel in ways that speak to our national future.

As author and educator Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the television age turned us from active participants in society into passive consumers of entertaining sound bites. Digital technology exacerbates this trajectory, since we can now watch whatever we want for as long as it entertains us.

Since there is far too much content available for us to consume, we filter it by preconceived biases. And since we don’t produce the content we consume, we are at the mercy of those who do.

This is massively significant for our post-Christian society, which has no objective filter by which to discern truth from falsehood and, in fact, rejects the existence of objective truth itself. But it is just as significant for Christians in such a society.

We can be as secular as our secular friends. According to research by George Barna, about half of those who attend evangelical churches say there is no absolute moral truth and believe people can earn salvation through good works. Only four in ten believe humans are born into sin and need salvation in Christ. We can be swayed by entertainment that normalizes extramarital and same-sex sexual relations. We can evaluate political news through our partisan biases. We can measure success by cultural popularity rather than biblical obedience.

“He will guide you into all the truth”

I can claim that the answer is to view secular culture through the prism of the Bible, but skeptics will assert that this is just as biased as viewing the Bible through the prism of secular culture. After all, the Bible is a book like any other book, subjectively written by flawed people using words that must be subjectively interpreted by flawed people, or so they will say.

Here’s the difference: The Spirit who inspired these words can give us the discernment we need to understand and obey them.

Jesus promised that, in ways no secular person can understand, the Holy Spirit “will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Accordingly, “his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie” (1 John 2:27).

Because he literally lives in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), the Spirit can speak to your mind and influence your spirit in ways no one else can. If you “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25), “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). As the book of Acts and a plethora of spiritual awakenings across history show, he can empower and direct God’s people to impact their broken culture in transformative ways.

But he can guide only those who will follow. Would the Spirit say you are “in step” with him right now?

If not, why not?

Quote for the day:

“When we have the Holy Spirit, we have all that is needed to be all that God desires us to be.” —A. W. Tozer

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Denison Forum