One of comedian Nate Bargatze’s most famous bits recalls his days as a water-meter reader for Wilson County, Tennessee, outside Nashville. After the 9/11 attacks, his employer asked him and the other meter readers to guard the city’s water tanks. Apparently, town officials feared some kind of terrorist effort to poison the city’s water supply.
“We figured they just went to New York. Obvious next stop, Mount Juliet, Tennessee,” he tells audiences to hysterical laughter as they imagine the young Bargatze armed with nothing but a lantern. “I stood in a dark field, alone, waiting for the Taliban to show up.”
The bit works because almost all of us alive 25 years ago today remember some kind of overreaction to the collapse of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. No one had ever seen this kind of terrorist attack; we’d only read about it in the 1994 Tom Clancy novel Debt of Honor.
We still didn’t really believe someone could hijack a passenger jet, then turn it around and fly it into one of the most iconic buildings in the world. Let alone do it twice. Let alone cause the towers to fall. Let alone also hit the Pentagon on the same day in the same manner. If terrorists could pull off this horrific feat, what else couldn’t they do? They might even poison the water in suburban Tennessee. (In case you’re wondering, just this week Fox News ran an opinion piece by a U.S. House committee chairman from Texas about the vulnerability of the nation’s water supply to AI hacks by terrorist organizations and enemy states.)
We laugh at Bargatze because of what didn’t happen in 2001. Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania instead of the Capitol building or White House. Osama bin Laden’s terror network never pulled off any other attack close to the same scale as 9/11. Nearly 10 years later, he was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. The attacks’ so-called mastermind remains in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. economy rebounded from the shock of the towers’ collapse. Manhattan didn’t empty of employees and residents worried about becoming targets. Twenty-five years later, 9/11 is a gruesome fact of history more than an ever-present threat.
America’s water is safe. For now.
‘Religion Poisons Everything’
The September 11 attacks may belong to history, but we still live in the world they unleashed. Earlier this year when I looked back on the top theology stories since 2000, I put 9/11 at #1. Why? The New Atheists of the 2000s gained traction by citing the attacks as evidence for how “religion poisons everything,” in the words of Christopher Hitchens in his 2007 book God Is Not Great. Not just Islam, the New Atheists argued, but all religion threatens the peace and prosperity of the world.
Twenty-five years later, 9/11 is a gruesome fact of history more than an ever-present threat.
Look no further than the evangelicals running the White House, we read in the 2000s from books such as American Theocracy by former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips. I reviewed his jeremiad in the September 2006 issue of Christianity Today where my “Young, Restless, Reformed” cover story also appeared. That same month, a Books & Culture editor reviewed a similar book by Randall Balmer with the subtitle “How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America.” I took Balmer’s deconstructive course on American evangelicalism at Northwestern University, offered about six months after 9/11.
The combination of terrorists motivated by Islam, and evangelicals in the White House, unleashed a spate of left-wing criticism toward all “fundamentalist” religion and Christianity in particular. Their arguments landed with a generation that couldn’t understand how God allowed such a horrible thing to happen. Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and the perception of the Bush administration’s indifferent and incompetent relief efforts, supported both narratives: that God either doesn’t exist or can’t be good, and that “fundamentalists” shouldn’t be allowed to wield power.
Underneath the critique from Christianity’s cultured despisers rests an assumption about God’s providence: If God allows any evil, then he must not be good. What more evidence could we need than men in business suits dropping dozens of stories with a gruesome thump, rather than endure incineration in what had been their ordinary offices just minutes earlier? Surely a good God would never create or sustain a world with such pain and suffering.
Imagined Terrors
Christianity offers no obvious answer to this objection. Scripture affirms that evil is real. Death is inevitable. God is in charge of everything. And God is always good. We don’t always understand—maybe we even rarely understand—how all these things could be true at the same time. I’ve been journaling lately through Job, where God famously refuses to explain himself. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding,” God asks in Job 38:4.
And that’s the problem with our reading of God’s providence. We look at what God allows, judge his decisions on the sense of right and wrong we only could have learned from him, and fault him for not having reasons we can fathom. Meanwhile, we don’t even consider the infinite possibilities of his providential inhibitions. What evil has God prevented? What would happen if God suddenly withdrew his grace from our world? What if he no longer upheld the universe by the “word of his power” (Heb. 1:3)?
Every day that you and your loved one climb into a car, you’re one reckless or drunk driver away from your worst nightmare. Yet we need not live in fear of such imagined terrors. Because we know God is good. And with just an ounce of imagination and faith, we realize that we only walk by the gravity of his gracious providence.
Evil is real. Death is inevitable. God is in charge of everything. And God is always good.
Yes, the 9/11 attacks were evil. No, we don’t understand why God would allow them. No, we don’t know why in the aftermath various enemies of God seemed to prosper from their blasphemy. We wonder why spiritual revival wasn’t the widespread, enduring response to such trauma. Even now, we pray every day that he would prevent such suffering from happening ever again. And we work to undermine evil, investing untold billions in security that would make it as hard as possible to hijack a plane or unleash AI to contaminate water supplies.
Only the Lord knows how many other attacks have been thwarted. We can only imagine what might have been. Thousands more working in the towers could have died, as we feared at the time. Manhattan could have emptied. Terrorist copycats could have proliferated even more. The economy could have never recovered from the shock to our system. Churches might have fallen into complete oblivion, buried by best-selling criticism.
On this 25th anniversary, I’m thankful for the prayers God has answered to spare us so far from any repeat of 9/11. No thanks to Nate Bargatze and his infamous defense lantern, God even saved us from something as silly as an attack on the water tanks of Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
This article is adapted from Collin Hansen’s weekly newsletter, Unseen Things. Subscribe now to get his weekly reflections on church and culture, delivered to your email inbox.
