Column: How 9/11 changed religion in America

I was wrong.

After the twin towers fell, hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs (and people who could be confused for either) jumped more than fourfold from 2000 through 2001, according to FBI reports. Bullets smashed windows at a mosque in Irving, Texas. A Muslim student at Harvard was harassed by four men who tried to take off her hijab while reportedly saying, "What are you doing here? Go home to your own country." And Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turbaned Sikh man mistaken for a Muslim, was shot and killed at a gas station in Mesa, Ariz.

Such incidents, however, were the isolated activities of individual bigots. As a group, Americans largely followed the able lead of President Bush, who insisted repeatedly in the days and weeks after the 9/11 attacks that Americans were at war not with Muslims but with terrorists. "Islam is peace," he said. "It's a faith based upon love, not hate."

Initially, 9/11 made many Americans more open to Islam and more accepting of Muslims. Sales of Qurans skyrocketed, as did enrollments in college courses on Islam. No worship service was truly interfaith unless an imam stood to offer up a prayer. For a while, it seemed as though America's three great faiths were no longer Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism but Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

This love bombing was short lived, however. According to CBS News polling, the portion of Americans who have an unfavorable view of Islam rose from 33% in 2002 to 45% in 2006. In a January 2010 Gallup poll, that figure hit 53%.

Ongoing terror in the name of Allah obviously helped to turn Americans against Islam. But domestic politics played a part, too. By 2001, the culture wars over bedroom issues were already cooling down. So Republican leaders such as the former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Rep. Peter King of New York put out a call to arms for a new culture war, this time against Islam.

Two views of America

Americans have always been of two minds when it comes to non-Christian religions. There is, on the one hand, a centripetal tradition, rooted in the First Amendment and Thomas Jefferson's metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state, that sees the United States as a multireligious country. Americans in this tradition boast not that their land is safeguarded by God, but that it safeguards religious freedom. One recent expression of this perspective is President Obama's characterization, in his inaugural address, of the United States as "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers."

On the other hand, there is a centrifugal tradition that sees the United States as a Christian nation and Americans as a chosen people in covenant with the biblical God. This tradition, born in the Puritanism of colonial New England, has become more inclusive over time, its sacred center expanding with the population from a Protestant core in the early republic to include both Catholics and Jews after World War II. It has continued to insist, however, that the United States is, at a minimum, a Judeo-Christian nation.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Americans of both parties labored alongside President Bush to integrate Islam into this centrifugal tradition, by re-imagining America as a Judeo-Christian-Islamic country. This effort failed. America's line of religious exclusion continues to be drawn on the near side of the nation's Muslims.

Today, explicitly Christian language is resurgent in American politics, and not only among Republicans. The front-runner for the Republican nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is an evangelical Protestant who last month led a prayer meeting in Houston where he spoke of the "living Christ" and led 30,000 or so admirers in prayer to his "Lord." But President Obama does not shy away from Jesus-talk either. At this year's National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, he spoke of coming to knowJesus Christ as "my Lord and Savior."

During the Cold War, what distinguished Americans from the "godless communism" of the Russians was God. After 9/11, God is not enough. Our enemy today — Islamic extremism — is by no means godless. What distinguishes us from those who kill in the name of Allah is, among other things, Jesus. We're one nation, under Christ.

So what is the religious legacy of 9/11? First and most obviously, widespread fear and mistrust of Muslims and Islam. Despite the efforts of President Bush and others to combat the demonization of Islam, too many Americans have come to see the face of terror as a Muslim face. Efforts by scholars of Islam to distinguish between the hijacked Islam of extremists and the historical Islam of true believers have largely fallen on deaf ears. At least for the moment, suicide bombers and fear-mongers are drowning out the voices of mainstream Muslims.

Another legacy of 9/11 is the rise of explicitly Christian language in American political rhetoric and ritual. In the short term, at least, the shock of 9/11 has pushed Americans away from the multireligious tradition of Jefferson and toward the "Christian nation" tradition of the Puritans.

In Protestant-Catholic-Jew, a sociological classic published in 1955, Will Herberg wrote, "Unless one is either a Protestant, or a Catholic, or a Jew, one is a 'nothing'" in America. This judgment seemed quaint at best at the end of the 20th century, when then-Gov. Bush's pledge of allegiance to Christ the philosopher in a 1999 Republican debate seemed parochial to many. Today, that pious pledge is as mandatory for presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans alike — as the Pledge of Allegiance.

A 'take heart' moment

In short, things are not looking good for Americans like myself who see religious liberty as one of the great achievements of the American experiment. Today, not only Muslims but also Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists and humanists are on the outside of American public culture looking in. But as Jesus once said, "Take heart."

The United States has survived a series of culture wars in which Catholics, Mormons and members of other religious minorities were anathematized as un-American. In each case, Americans as a group have eventually decided to live not by fear but by first principles, not least the constitutional protection of liberty afforded in the First Amendment to Americans of all creeds.

Sept. 11, 2001, was, of course, a national trauma. Americans responded to that trauma, however, with a show of unity that crossed lines of race, region and religion. Such unity is easier to find in wartime, of course, or when one of our cities is strewn by hate with cremated remains. But it is always there in our cultural DNA — in Jefferson's insistence in his first inaugural address that "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," and in the words of Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural: "We are not enemies, but friends."

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 has of course included images of jets crashing into steel and glass. But let's not forget the footage taken at the memorial service held on Sept. 14, 2001, at Washington National Cathedral. At that service, President Bush stood alongside his father, George H.W. Bush, and former presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Quoting Franklin Roosevelt, Bush spoke of "the warm courage of national unity" — a unity further exemplified by a pastor, an imam, an archbishop, a priest and a rabbi who shared the pulpit with the president.

This image of political and religious leaders standing together is my enduring image of 9/11, and my hope for the days to come.

Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter.