Andrew Brown hasn’t been on the radar screen lately, which is all well and good, but he’s now popped up with a Guardian piece, “Why 9/11 was good for religion,” which is dreadful even by his abysmal standards.
Why was 9/11 good for religion? It’s almost completely unclear from his piece. His subtitle suggests that the good part about 9/11 was that it revived debate about religion, “challeng[ing] the notion that theism is doomed,” and he’s big on the interfaith dialogue inspired by 9/ll, Brown also says these things in the body of his piece:
- At the same time, the heretical understanding of jihad as the sixth pillar of Islam, which originated in Egyptian circles in the 1980s, spread across south-east Asia. Children in the disputed areas of Pakistan are taught by the Taliban that jihad can compensate for other flaws in a Muslim’s life.
- The mass killer [in Norway] was clearly influenced by a post-9/11 theology that sees Christian Europe under attack from Muslim immigration. Variants of this idea animate political parties in many European countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Italy. For them, Europe’s Christian identity has become a sacred value.
- The same polarised reactions can be seen in secular ideologies. The new atheist movement was started by a group of writers who perceived Islam as an existential threat. “We are at war with Islam,” argued one of its leaders, Sam Harris, who also called for the waterboarding of al-Qaida members. Meanwhile The God Delusion author, Richard Dawkins, refers to Islam as the most evil religion in the world. The publication of anti-Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and the furore surrounding it, demonstrated the deliberate use of blasphemy as a weapon in cultural wars.
That’s all bad stuff. Counterbalancing it is this questionable assertion, coupled with a garbled sentence by a Notre Dame professor:
At the same time, secular governments across Europe have made increasing efforts to understand and accommodate religious sensibilities. As welfare states come to seem increasingly expensive, many have turned more and more towards religion to deliver social services. Whatever happens, it appears the idea that religion is doomed and disappearing was buried in the rubble of the twin towers.
“9/11 was good for business” says Scott Appleby, professor of history at Notre Dame University. “For many people, we told people that religion is really important and that the secularisation theory, which had been very fashionable, was wrong.”
And this is supposed to be good?
Many serious students of politics question what role theology could play in the modern world. After all, neither “religion” nor “faith” appears in the index of Henry Kissinger’s acclaimed memoirs. Yet the wars of the past 10 years cannot be understood without their theological component. People are not just fighting for freedom or for oil. Some are fighting to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth, or caliphate of perfect justice, or the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, and these aims cannot be satisfied by money or power.
Fundamentalism, says Appleby, is not a primitive phenomenon, it is a modern one, and every bit as much a reaction to modernity as liberalism or secular optimism. These ideologies provide ways of dealing with the abundance of choices that modern societies offer and traditional societies cannot imagine.
Maybe Brown is just bad at expressing himself (no surprise there), but his discussion of 9/11, which surely helped bring about New Atheism, doesn’t show at all that the World Trade Center bombings were good for faith. His confusion is evident in his last paragraph:
Religion in traditional societies is part of its fabric. In the modern world, it is a conscious choice. Some people discard it; others make it more deliberate and sharp-edged. The same has been true of the secular and enlightenment values that, before 9/11, seemed self-evident to much of the western world.
What the bloody hell does that mean? Doesn’t Brown have an editor?
I think it means, “Some people are religious and some people are secular.” If it has a deeper meaning than that, it’s beyond my powers of understanding.
If 9-11 was good for religion, does that mean the 3,000 deaths on 9-11 were also good for religion? As far as I’m concerned, anything that causes the misery and suffering of people benefits NO ONE!
Do not forget the tens of thousands that followed in Iraq & Afghanistan etc… all a ‘good’ thing…
Having had a few exchanges on CIF with Andrew Brown, it’s plain he will not budge from his pro-religion, anti-atheist schtick. I try to ignore him, and I’m glad I do now reading this! I presume the Guardian love the commentstorm he generates.
Give him the Pulitzer Prize for trolling.
9/11 was good for religion in a twisted sense.
It rent some curtains that hid a feeble prestidigitator behind the controls over the gullible, and thus partly revealed faith for what it is: a vicious & venomous soporific for the gullible masses.
Sectarian Soma.
Even the devoutly brainless may have been jolted into the perception that perhaps not all religious expression is positive.
It is “good” for the parasite that is religion, that it either evolves to be more benign.
I think Brown is the editor, as far as religious content is concerned. It would certainly explain why everything is so uniformly awful.
Maybe Brown needs to read a liitle bit of neuroscience to realize there is no such thing as conscious decision making, least of all religion. Whether something convinces you or not doesn’t depend on your volition.
‘Yet the wars of the past 10 years cannot be understood without their theological component. ‘
Wait a minute. Aren’t New Atheists continually being lambasted by people explaining that wars have zero to do with religon, but are politically or culturally motivated instead?
That’s exactly what we are told every day along with some “and anyway these people (those who act badly) are not true religious people”.
I posted a study (and actual study, not just the musings of a writer) over at Eric MacDonald’s blog post on the same subject. I think it might be of interest here as well for those who might have missed it: How 9/11 grief affected the religious convictions of the victim’s families.
I would put that in the “we are winning” category. If you need religious terrorism and exposure of religion as cause for war and misery to prevent religion from seen as unimportant to common citizens and forgotten, you are pretty desperate.
Oh, and also pretty “Brown”-id [sounds like stup-id when read aloud].
What I find utterly mystifying is the common reaction of people to resort to prayer and other forms of religious reactions when tragedy strikes! The 9/11 events killed so many people randomly (or undescipherably) representing individuals with all manner of assumptions about religion, all manner of piety, race, education, chastity, debauchery, … So why pray to an all-powerful god whose grand plan included so much hideous tragedy?
The whole concept of praying, given the assumptions made about the nature of the deity to whom prayer is directed, is beyond INSANE!
It gets worse.
Jesus went out of his way to sculpt some of the wreckage into the likeness of the torture device used for his own execution, but he couldn’t be arsed to give the hijackers a serious case of Montezuma’s Revenge as they were standing in line to go through the metal detectors at the gates.
Fantastic set of priorities that Jesus has.
Cheers,
b&
He’s taking the saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” to heart.
On Sunday, I heard part of a news report on BBC radio. Some church leader was denying that faith was not responsible for the events of 9/11, but that the events had helped many people find their faith.
If that’s your view, if all you care about is “bums on pews”, then, yes, 9/11 was good for religion.
I think it’s certainly harder now to remain indifferent about religion. And easier to be critical of it: Would the Iriah Government have been openly critical of the Catholoc Church before 9/11?
/@
*Irish
Good grief! What a spectacularly incomprehensible article.
September 11 was good for religion the way a polio epidemic is good for the makers of iron lungs.
“Good for business”. Truer words about religion have never been spoken.
Jeez, how many own goals did Brown make here? I lost count.
Stay tuned for more brilliant iconoclastic insights:
Why the crusades were good for religion
Why the inquisition was good for religion
Why child rape is good for religion
Why jihad is good for religion
…why more atheists and fewer religious people is good for religion….
b&
Wait – more atheists and fewer religious people is good for religion … in the same sense that we say that penicillin is good for the clap.