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| Federalist - 9/11 Was The Beginning Of A Religious War That We Lost |
| 2026-09-12 |
| [Federalist] Twenty-five years ago this week I listened to the late historian Stephen Ambrose deliver the opening remarks for a conference about World War Two at Hillsdale College. He had good news for us. The 21st century, Ambrose declared, would be an era of peace and progress. He said the major conflicts of the 20th century, the two world wars and the Cold War that followed, were fundamentally disputes within the West over competing visions for our civilization. The whole century had in a sense been a long civil war, and now the war was over. Instead of blood and treasure being sunk into massive wars, the coming century would instead see our efforts spent in research and exploration of the oceans and space. The notion that the post-Cold War era would be a clash of civilizations, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in his 1996 book, was totally wrong, according to Ambrose. There was no coming clash because no one could compete with the West, and the West was now at peace with itself. We could rest easy, our future was bright. Two days later the planes hit the towers. Today, it’s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose’s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional. But it was a delusion enabled and strengthened by a fundamentally secular worldview that refused to take the claims of religion seriously — claims that precede and give coherence to political claims and ideologies. It was a delusion, in other words, enabled by an Enlightenment philosophy that looked on religion as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The religious conflicts of earlier epochs had naturally given way to the ideological contests of the 20th century, and now those contests were settled. At the dawn of the 21st century, no one could possibly take religion seriously, or think that medieval religious disputes had any relevance in the post-Cold War world that was taking shape. |
| Posted by:NoMoreBS |