(ABP) — This column appears on the sixth anniversary of the unthinkable 9/11 attacks on the United States. The attacks themselves were the most heinous terrorist acts ever visited on this country. We will be grieving our losses for a long time to come — especially the families who lost loved ones. All of us should rightly bow our heads today in sorrow and in solidarity with those who grieve the most.
But we have another reason to bow our heads today. For it now appears clear that our national reaction to those attacks has done more harm than good. We must be able to talk rationally about this — despite our grief, and our continuing anger, and our fear. My critical commentary is not directed solely against the Bush administration. Other branches of government have failed. Our nation as a whole has failed. The problem is cultural, not just a matter of policies or of politics. Christians and church leaders have much to answer for.
Six years after 9/11, our nation is less secure, less powerful, less free, less respected, less democratic, less constitutional, and less fiscally sound than we were on that bright, clear, terrible morning.
Our nation is less secure in part because our military is bogged down in an Iraqi quagmire that should never have been started and to date has cost the lives of over 3,700 soldiers and $450 billion. Our troops are exhausted from multiple and extended tours of duty in hostile terrain, our equipment is worn out, and our military is largely unavailable for purposes outside of the Middle East.
Financial and human resources that could and should have been spent on finding Osama bin Laden and seriously securing the United States against further attacks like 9/11 (not to mention domestic priorities) have instead been squandered in Iraq.
Our nation is less powerful because of the weakening of our military, the decline of our economic position, and the loss of international respect for us. In many parts of the world we are seen as a greater threat to peace than Osama himself. Our decision to go to war in Iraq without adequate basis and in the teeth of international public opinion wounded our standing globally. Then when we botched the war, with tragic consequences not only for our troops but especially for the Iraqis, the problem only worsened. We blundered into somebody else's country and tore its social order apart, at a cost of at least 70,000 Iraqi lives so far. We have never apologized for doing this, or for doing it so poorly.
Our resort to torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere deeply damaged our moral standing, especially in the Arab world. Far from being the product of a few bad apples, it is now clearly documented that what happened at places like Abu Ghraib largely resulted from government policy decisions that worked their way down the chain of command.
Many of these have been officially or unofficially repudiated since their exposure, but the CIA remains authorized to conduct “enhanced interrogations” beyond oversight, and there has never been a full accounting of the reach of these illicit interrogations over the past six years.
Government surveillance and searches of our citizenry and on our soil have grown in ways that are yet poorly understood. Both electronic surveillance and direct searches have expanded by statute and by executive decision. Efforts to even understand what is happening, let alone to debate what the laws and practices should be, are blocked by the constant resort to secrecy by the executive branch.
Guantanamo Bay holds hundreds of foreign nationals indefinitely and without charge. Congress last year, with the Military Commissions Act, rejected any habeas corpus rights for those held there. In essence, our government is free to seize people anywhere in the world and lock them up indefinitely in the law-free zone called Guantanamo. The legal provisions invented for actually trying such people, when and if that time should come, fall well short of the basic legal protections that exist under the Constitution.
The legislative branch on the whole has failed to check the executive's worst excesses. The judiciary has done somewhat better, but the wheels of justice grind exceeding slowly. Public opinion has proven deeply susceptible to deception and demagoguery and alarmingly weak in its commitment to constitutional democracy. We have taken our freedoms for granted and are thus in the process of losing them.
And the church? In general, the American churches have lacked the political independence, the discernment, and the courage even to understand and name what has gone wrong, let alone to resist it. A domesticated church has been employable as a servant of the state, even to the point of defending torture.
It seems to me that 9/11 in a way unhinged our nation and sent us hurtling down the wrong path. But the American church bears considerable responsibility for its inability to stand fast on the solid rock of Jesus Christ in the midst of this unhinging — yet one more reason to bow our heads in sorrow on 9/11.
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— David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.