11 September 2025
I remember where I was… how I learned… the disbelief and shock and numbness I felt as things unfolded… Yesterday in 2001 is one of those incomparable tragedies that are seared into memory eternal — may God have mercy.
On that day of deepest tragedy, we saw this nation live into who it always promised it could be. We witnessed selfless heroes, saw compassion lived out as strangers sought others’ wellbeing, and experienced a unity (wherever we were!) that didn’t require melting into a pot of indefinable mush. Following this collective experience of vulnerability, we demonstrated an even greater national strength than I have ever seen — before or since.
And then we turned away from all of this as fear was stoked by a few for personal gain, and we turned on each other instead. Violent attacks against anyone even vaguely middle eastern escalated exponentially (and the number of Pakistanis and Indonesians and other Asians that were victimized only illustrates how emphatically violence was incited against the “other”). We initiated wars that were not “wars,” and yet soldiers and civilians died the same. Governments were toppled and new governments were formed and the rhetoric of threat and fear and violence only increased.
The “other” became not only the “Mohammedans,” as the recently shot and killed Charlie Kirk persistently insisted. The “other” became a far more expansive group of labels — of enemies — that likewise needed to be eradicated from the fabric of American society and the landscape of the nation. In an interview with Riley Gaines, Kirk called for transgender people to “get taken care of” by conservative men “like we did in the 50s and 60s.” Given his youth, one wonders what stories he has been told and from whom. What one does not need wonder at, is what he intended and what his fan base understood by these remarks.
While I do not want to make light of the bonafide harm done in his 31 years of life, I also see Kirk as a symptom. He was a month away from his eighth birthday on 9/11. If he had any awareness or lasting personal memory of that day it was likely of the adults in his life being upset. Maybe they told him what was happening. Maybe he watched the towers fall. But a seven-year-old does simply does not have the brain development to comprehend the significance of all of that. He likewise could not have realized what a remarkable thing this compassion and unity was, perhaps because in his Arlington Heights, two-parent, dual-income, upper-middle class household this did not seem noteworthy.
What shaped the man, unfortunately, was not this immediate response of compassion and unity but the fear and hate that followed. It led him famously to declare empathy a “made up new age term” that “does a lot of damage.” That perspective is one of the many reasons my head spins whenever I hear someone describe him as a “Christian apologist.” I just don’t think you get any kind of faith or spirituality or religion that looks anything like Jesus without empathy and compassion.
And that leads me back to 9/11. In the wake of that day, many vowed to “never forget.” Some seem to have meant that they — much like Lamech in Genesis 4 — will never forget the harm done to them and will enact disproportionate retribution until their heart is content and no one will ever dare hurt them again. My own meaning is somewhat different. I will never forget 9/11 as the day that this nation for a moment rose to its own promise, and we rose to our own possibility. And I will never quit believing and working towards the possibility that we can do so again.
Pastor Michael