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[PT12.5 (2011) 685-690] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317Xdoi:10.1558/poth.v12i5.685 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

The Waron Terror: Secularor Sacred?

William T. Cavanaugh1

Catholic Studies SAC570

DePaul University

2320 N. Kenmore Avenue

Chicago, IL 60614

USAwcavana1@depaul.edu

AbstrAct

This article argues that the war on terror is not fought between secularism

and religion, but between two skewed visions of social order that are both, in

different ways, sacred. The United States represents a type of expansionist

civil religion that is not simply religiously neutral.

Keywords: Islam; religion; secularism; violence.

Consider two facts: (1) 9/11 is widely seen in the United Statesandthe West more generallyas an example of religious violence. Therehas been a tremendous outpouring of articles and books on religion as asource of violence since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and many ofthem regard those attacks as exhibit A in the indictment of public reli-gion; (2) an August 2010 poll found that 56 percent of Americans regardGround Zero as sacred ground, and a slightly larger majority opposes

construction of a mosque nearby for this reason.2How are these two facts compatible? On the one hand, Americans tend

to believe that we live in a secular society, where the dangers of religionwielding direct public power have been minimized by the privatization ofreligion. In a secular society, people are free to worship one god or twenty,

1. William T. Cavanaugh is Senior Research Professor in the Center for World

Catholicism and Intercultural Theology and Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul Uni-

versity, Chicago. He is the author of ve books, includingThe Myth of Religious Violence

(Oxford University Press, 2009). His books have been translated into French, Spanish, and

Polish.

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provided the religious practice of another neither picks my pockets norbreaks my legs, as Thomas Jefferson put it. On the other hand, there issomething about American institutions that is much more than secular,

and the commemoration of 9/11 brings that something to the fore. A sacredaura surrounds the identity of the nation that was attacked on that day, andthe attacks concentrated that sacredness in a particular location and time.It is not necessary to go back to the more famously evangelical George W.Bush to make the link between piety and 9/11. In his speech at GroundZero last September 11th (2010), Barack Obama talked about gatheringat this sacred hour, on hallowed ground and talked about those who

were not only killed but sacriced in the attacks. God was invoked,of course, but it was a generic god who belonged to no particular faith,

because, as Obama made clear, the victims themselves were of many faiths.The god invoked was not the Christian God, and Obama made clear thatthe enemy is not Islam, but intolerance and extremism. And just as wecondemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so will we stay true to ourtraditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation. We champion therights of every American, including the right to worship as one chooses.3

What is the nature of the war that the United States has been ght-ing in the wake of 9/11? Is it a war for the secular or for the sacred? In anarticle entitled Bushs Secularist Triumph, Christopher Hitchens has

argued that the war on terror is fundamentally a war to keep religion outof public power. There may be some Christians who think that we areghting for Jesus, but the battle is being won in the name of secularism.George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but heand the US armedforceshave objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the

American agnostic community combined and doubled.4 While the leftmakes apologies for religious terrorists, the right supports their oblitera-tion to protect our secular state. Secularism is not just a smug attitude. Itis a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became think-

able after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold ofthe clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war andrevolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL.5

Although he would no doubt nd Hitchens disparagement of religionin general distasteful, George W. Bush would not necessarily disagree withthe idea that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraqand the greater global

3. Full Transcript and Video of President Obamas 9-11 Memorial Address, http://

www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/full-transcript-and-video-of-president-

obama-s-9-11-memorial-address

4. Christopher Hitchens, Bushs Secularist Triumph, Slate, November 9, 2004,

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Cavanaugh The War on Terror: Secular or Sacred? 687

war on terror launched after 9/11are being fought for secular reasons:freedom, democracy, free enterprise. Bush, like Obama after him, madegreat pains to make clear that the war is not against Islam. Despite his per-

sonal piety, Bush never invoked explicitly Christian principles in arguingfor the war. Bushs National Security Strategypublished to much fanfarein September 2002 in response to the changed situation after 9/11jus-ties the war on terror in terms of the necessity of spreading freedomthroughout the globe: These values of freedom are right and true forevery person, in every societyand the duty of protecting these valuesagainst their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving peopleacross the globe and across the ages.6

Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, takes a quite different view of the

global war on terror. Less than a month after the attacks of September11, 2001, Sullivan published an article in the New York Times Magazineentitled This is a Religious War. While lauding the spirit of those who,like President Bush, had gone to great lengths to assure the world thatthe war is not between Islam and the West, Sullivan claims that Thereligious dimension of this conict is central to its meaning.7 He citesthe theological language used by Osama bin Laden to justify Al Qaedasattacks, but makes clear that the problem is not restricted to Islam: Itseems almost as if there is something inherent in religious monotheism

that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation.8 We hesitate to deni-grate religion, so we deny that it is central to the conict, but to do so isto delude ourselves. The impulse to coerce those who believe differentlyis endemic to religion. The solution to the problem is a Lockean liber-alism that keeps religion carefully separated from public power. Theredoes not seem to be much difference between Hitchens and Sullivan inrecommending secularism as a solution. What the founders and Locke

were saying was that the ultimate claims of religion should simply not beallowed to interfere with political and religious freedom.9 But Sullivan

goes on to say, They did this to preserve peace above allbut also topreserve true religion itself.10

Hitchens would be loath to talk about true religion. Sullivan, however,sets up his religious war as a war between true religion and false religion.

What is true religion in Sullivans terms? He writes that this surely is a

6. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, http://

georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ (Introduction).

7. Andrew Sullivan, This is a Religious War,New York Times Magazine, October 7,

2001, http://nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07RELIGION.html?pagewanted=1

8. Ibid.

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religious warbut not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, itis a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace withfreedom and modernity.11 He acknowledges that false religion can come

in secular form; Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are such examplesof the fusion of politics and ultimate meaning.12 What makes the current

war religious on both sides, however, is that true religion also seems tocome in secular form. We ght with religious fervor for the liberal prin-ciples that undergird our social order.

What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difcult principle of

the separation of politics and religion. We are ghting not for our country

as such or for our ag. We are ghting for the universal principles of our

Constitutionand the possibility of free religious faith it guarantees. We

are ghting for religion against one of the deepest strains in religion there is.And not only our lives but our souls are at stake.13

This is a religious war because Islamic fundamentalism is at war with thereligion of secularism.

What I nd useful about Sullivans piece is that it partially lifts the veilfrom the kind of secularist discourse that presents secularism as a neutralpolitical mechanism that adjudicates equally amongst all religious systemsof belief. One of the most common forms of this discourse contrastsmoderate Muslims with extremist Muslims. We are not at war withIslam, the story goes; we are only at war with those extremist Muslims

who refuse to t Islam into a political system like ours that tolerates allreligions by denying any one of them direct access to political power. Thistype of discourse does not present secularism as an ism or belief system,but rather as a merely political arrangement that provides a way of makingpeace amongst belief systems, provided they do not irrationally try to mixpolitics with religion. This narrative of neutrality is not unrelated to thenarrative of innocence that often attends the telling of the events of 9/11:

we were just sitting here minding our own business when they attackedus out of a blue September sky. A fog of amnesia is conveniently cast onthe whole fraught history of relations between the West and the Muslim

World in the twentieth century and beyond.In much Western discourse since 9/11, moderate Muslims are those

who will agree that politics is the realm of some neutral form of publicreason independent of religious belief. The problem with this notion isthat such Muslims would hardly qualify as Muslims at all. The separationof secular reason from private religious belief is a Western invention, not

11. Ibid.

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Cavanaugh The War on Terror: Secular or Sacred? 689

part of Islam and not simply part of the way things are. As the pre-eminentscholar of Islam, John Esposito, has pointed out, to call Islam a religionis automatically to mark it as an abnormal religion, because it does not

conform to the Western denition of religion as a matter of private belief.The Western denition of religion assumes a sharp distinction betweenreligion and politics, a distinction not found in Islam. As a result, froma modern secular perspective (a form of secular fundamentalism), themixing of religion and politics is regarded as necessarily abnormal (depart-ing from the norm), irrational, dangerous, and extremist.14 The secularperspective is not so neutral after all, but distorts the analysis from thestart. If only those Muslims who abandon Muslim principles qualify asmoderate, then we have a recipe not for peace but for continued hostil-

ity. This is not to say that Muslims are fated to be theocrats, or that theycannot be part of a pluralistic society. It is only to say that a one-size-ts-all secularism that marginalizes Islam should not be the ideal imposed onMuslim societies. Muslims have a right to expect that secular reasonis not the only voice allowed in the public realm, without thereby beinglabeled radical or extremist.

Espositos mention of secular fundamentalism leads us back to theidea that Ground Zero is sacred ground. The war that we have beentold we are at since the attacks of September 11, 2001 is not nearly as

simple as a war between secularism and religion. The United States has itsown civil religion which, though relying on the support of Christians andundoubtedly borrowing much from Christian imagery, transcends meresectarian religion to unite all Americans on a higher ground. Indeed,this is what makes secularism compatible with civil religion: what RobertBellah calls traditional religion is privatized, while civic rituals revolvearound a generic god who underwrites Americas identity and purposein the world.15 In this sense, Andrew Sullivan is right: this is a religious

war. The war of which 9/11 was a signicant marker is not extremist and

expansionist religion against a peaceloving and neutral secular order. It israther the violent confrontation of Islamist terrorism with the civil religionof American expansionism, that is, the evangelical insistence that liberalsocial order is the only viable kind of social order. It is what Tariq Ali hascalled the clash of fundamentalisms.16 Alis book is a bit of a rant, not

14. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999), 258.

15. Robert N. Bellah, Civil Religion in America, in American Civil Religion, ed.

Donald E. Jones and Russell E. Richey (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press,

1990).

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always careful or scholarly or even entirely accurate. But his fundamentalinsightthat the imperial violence of the West is not of a completely dif-ferent nature than the anti-imperial violence that confronts itis true. To

recognize this is not to obliterate the differences among all kinds of vio-lence. It is, however, to say that anya priori distinction between religious

violence and secular violence that serves to deect attention from thelatter is to be questioned.

The path toward peace after 9/11 does not lead to the triumph of secu-larism. What is needed is to cast doubt on the bad political theologies onboth sides of the clash of fundamentalisms, and to construct political the-ologies that turn away from violence.

bibliogrAphy

Ali, T. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity. London: Verso, 2003.

Bellah, R. N. Civil Religion in America. InAmerican Civil Religion, ed. D. E. Jones and R.

E. Richey. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1990.

Esposito, J. L. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1999.

Hitchens, C. Bushs Secularist Triumph. Slate, November 6, 2004. http://www.slate.com/

?id=2109377

Sullivan, A. This is a Religious War. New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001. http://

nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07RELIGION.html?pagewanted=1

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