For twenty-five years we said we would never forget. We cut the names of the dead into bronze around two voids where the towers stood. We raised a taller tower beside them, 1,776 feet to the tip of its spire, and a president wrote on one of its last beams, “We remember. We rebuild. We come back stronger!” “Never forget” was the closest thing our generation had to a sacred vow.
Then, on the second day of this year, New York’s governor proclaimed Muslim American Heritage Month and lit One World Trade Center in green, the color of Islam, above the ground where nearly three thousand people were murdered by men who died with that faith on their lips. Almost no one asked how we had traveled from one to the other.
I have some history with that question. The first thing I ever learned about Islam came from a television screen in November 1979, when I was nine and sixty-six Americans had been dragged out of our embassy in Tehran. I could not have found Iran on a map. Nineteen years later, in a pre-deployment briefing, I heard the name Osama bin Laden for the first time and filed it away the way a man files a thing that has not yet reached him.
On September 11, 2001, I was serving in the Air National Guard, and I knew what every airman knew that morning: the country might soon ask me to go find the men who did this. Six days later, the president stood in the Islamic Center of Washington and said, “Islam is peace.” I took him at his word. There was no prejudice in me waiting to be confirmed. But I am a man who likes to see a thing for himself, so I bought the Quran and the Hadith and read them from the front, slowly, the way I would want a man to read my scriptures before telling me what I believe.
What I read told me what we were facing. It has taken most of the years since to see that the harder question was what we ourselves had stopped believing.
What We Remembered
We remembered the dead, and we did it well. Every name is read aloud at the site each September by the families, and a nation that forgets most things quickly kept faith with those 2,977 for a quarter century. For a season we also remembered that the country was worth defending. Recruiting offices had lines, and so did churches.
What We Forgot
We forgot who had struck us because we were told not to ask. The men who flew the planes acted on a religious claim, and bin Laden had declared that claim in writing years before. We were told instead that this was a war on terror so we hunted terror, one name at a time, from Zarqawi to Zawahiri, and when the list ran short we called it peace. A single word did the rest. “Islamophobia” turned every honest question about a body of belief into a symptom, and a church unwilling to bear that label has handed the men who wield it the power to decide what the church may say.
We also forgot our own confession, and this is the worse loss. The 2022 State of Theology survey from Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research reports that 68 percent of American evangelicals agree that Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. Most who agree would say it as praise. But if Jesus was created, he is a creature, however exalted, and a creature cannot stand between God and man as a mediator. Bow to him and you have bowed to something made. This is why the church at Nicaea in 325 confessed that the Son is “begotten, not made,” of one substance with the Father, and it condemned by name anyone who said the Son of God was created. Take that away and the cross becomes the death of a very good man.
The Quran honors Jesus as a prophet born of a virgin and credits him with miracles. It also declares that he was created, as Adam was, from dust. It insists that God is far above having a son, warns that anyone who calls the Messiah God has disbelieved, and denies that Jesus was crucified at all. On the one question that decides whether the cross can save, three in four evangelicals are closer to the mosque than to Nicaea. Only one in nine adults attending evangelical Protestant churches holds what researchers define as a biblical worldview, down from one in five in 2020.
Islam denies the Trinity, and that single denial rules out the incarnation and with it, the only Mediator. A church that cannot say who Jesus is has nothing to say to a Muslim neighbor about why the Quran is wrong about him.
The Child Who Was Not There
If you are reading this, you likely remember where you stood that morning. Your son does not. If he is nineteen, he was not born. If he is twenty-five, he was in a crib. September 11 is to him what Pearl Harbor was to you, a date on a test, and there is no shame in that. A memory cannot be handed down, but a formation can be.
So the question is, What did you hand him in place of the memory? Somewhere in a high school hallway he sat next to a Muslim classmate who had already prayed twice that morning and who could recite his text before he learned to read it. Your son had a youth group where the games were good and the talks were short. That classmate was formed; your son was amused. When the two of them reach the same lecture hall and the professor explains that every religion is a path up the same mountain, one of them will have an answer.
The State of the Union
On January 1, 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street under an Islamic State flag and killed fourteen people, having pledged himself to that cause in videos recorded hours before. On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani took the oath of office as mayor of the nation’s largest city with his hand on the Quran, and within hours he revoked a slate of his predecessor’s orders, among them the one that had committed city agencies to the international working definition of antisemitism. Asked about it the next day, he defended the revocation. The green tower came that night. No one arranged that symmetry.
Be careful here, because the church has stumbled at this point for fifty years. Political Islam is not the family down the street that fasts through Ramadan and wants its children raised devoutly. It is Islam understood as a total political order, a claim on law and public life advanced wherever the faithful can advance it. And it is consistent. It presses where it is a minority, and it closes where it is a majority, and there is no contradiction in that. The contradiction is ours. The freedom to fly any faith’s banner over the common life of a nation is not a law of nature. It is a Christian inheritance, paid for by the conviction that conscience must not be coerced and that Christ’s kingdom advances by a word and not a sword. Political Islam understands the worth of that inheritance. Its heirs are the ones who have stopped guarding it.
What to Take Up Again
Nothing we surrendered was taken from us. We laid it down, and what a people lay down a people can take up again.
- Lead family worship tomorrow. Read a chapter and pray. Moses did not offer Deuteronomy 6:7 as a devotional tip; he was laying the foundation of a people.
- Ask your pastor to preach the exclusive Christ by name from Acts 4 and Colossians 1, until the congregation knows what it believes and why.
- Inspect the curriculum, not the chapel. If your child’s Christian school hires teachers trained in the same pedagogy as the public school next door, the cross in the hallway is a decoration.
Then learn your Muslim neighbor’s name and tell him the Name. The exclusive confession is the only ground on which he can be loved at all.
We made a vow twenty-five years ago, and I am not asking anyone to break it. I am asking us to remember the right thing. The only question this anniversary is really asking is whether there will still be a church in America that believes its confession enough to pass it on.
