Faith-Based War

On 20 September 2001 President George W. Bush addressed a nation still reeling from the atrocity nine days before. ‘Each of us will remember what happened that day,’ he said. ‘We'll remember the moment the news came—where we were and what we were doing.’ It was a day of religious vision, Bush explained, when Americans were propelled into a world that lies behind the veil of ordinary experience, where permanent realities become visible. ‘Americans have known wars,’ President Bush declared, but these were ‘wars on foreign soil.’ When terrorists killed thousands at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, ‘night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.’ On the transcendant landscape opened up by the agony and shock of the moment, the President discerned a compelling drama, an eternal warfare of good and evil in which America plays a leading role. Attacking American soil was an attack on freedom itself, and while the nation had been staggered by the attack, it had also come home to its enduring mission. ‘Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time—now depends on us.’ If the nation will now keep faith with the role God had assigned, that of freedom's home and champion, the war can only end in victory.