The men who turned airplanes into weapons on the morning of September 11th, 2001 were not evil in any sense that distinguishes them from the rest of us. They were not monsters, not psychopaths, not the unique expression of a civilisation pathologically disposed toward violence. They were, by every account available to those who studied them carefully afterward, devout. They prayed. They fasted. They wept. They believed, with the specific and terrible sincerity that only faith produces, that what they were about to do was not only permitted but required — that the most moral act available to them in that moment was the deliberate killing of thousands of people who had done nothing to them personally, in the service of a God whose instructions they had received through the mediation of clerics, texts, and the long tradition of interpretation that transforms private conviction into communal obligation.
This is the fact that the twenty years of commentary following the attacks has been most determined to avoid. Not because it is hidden — it’s perfectly visible in the documentary record — but because acknowledging it fully requires a conclusion that the West, and specifically the Christian West, is structurally unwilling to draw about itself.
The conclusion is this: the mechanism that produced September 11th is not a feature of Islam. It’s a feature of faith — of the specific cognitive and moral architecture that faith of a certain intensity and a certain character constructs in the minds of those who inhabit it. And that architecture is, at this precise moment in history, operating with greater institutional power, greater military capacity, and greater civilisational consequence inside the government of the United States of America than it has operated anywhere on earth since the wars of religion emptied Europe of a third of its population in the seventeenth century.
The mechanism is not complicated, which is part of why it’s so difficult to discuss seriously. It has three elements that interlock with the precision of a theological proof.
The first is the suspension of ordinary moral reasoning in favour of ‘revealed obligation’. The hijackers did not conclude that killing thousands of civilians was acceptable by reasoning from first principles about harm, consent, or proportionality. They concluded it was obligatory because they had received, through a chain of authority they regarded as ultimately divine, the instruction to do it. The reasoning was not absent. It was elaborate, erudite, and internally consistent. What it was not was open — open to the evidence of the people in front of them, open to the suffering those people would experience, open to revision in the light of consequences. Revealed truth is not an hypothesis. It’s a foundation. And foundations are not tested. They are built upon.
The second element is the conversion of the victim into a category. The people in the towers were not, within the theological framework of the hijackers, individuals with unique lives, unique families, uniquely irreplaceable particulars. They were infidels — a category whose membership in the moral community protected by the obligation not to kill had been revoked by the same authority that issued the instruction. This categorical displacement of the individual by the theological abstraction is not unique to jihadist Islam. It’s the universal grammar of sacred violence. The Amalekites whom God commanded Saul to annihilate utterly — man, woman, child, infant, ox, sheep, camel, donkey — were not people in the moment of the command. They were a category. The categorical nature of the instruction was the point. Mercy was transgression because mercy required seeing the individual, and the individual had been replaced by the category, and the category had been consecrated to destruction.
The third element is the promise of exemption from consequence. The hijackers expected paradise. This expectation was not incidental to the act — it was constitutive of it. The normal human inhibition against mass killing is grounded, at its deepest level, in the recognition of reciprocal vulnerability: I can be killed as you can be killed, I can suffer as you can suffer, the web of consequence in which we both exist constrains what either of us may do to the other without that constraint returning to us in some form. The promise of paradise dissolves this web. It places the actor outside the order of consequence — in a theological space where the normal accounting doesn’t apply, where the killing produces reward rather than guilt, where the destruction of the living world is the entry point to a better one. This is not a corruption of faith. It is faith’s most extreme and most logical expression: the complete subordination of the living to the transcendent.
Now comes the turn that twenty years of Western commentary has refused to make.
The mechanism just described — the suspension of ordinary moral reasoning in favour of revealed obligation, the conversion of the victim into a theological category, the promise of exemption from the consequences of destruction — is not operating in a cave in Afghanistan or a madrassa in Pakistan. It’s operating in the Cabinet Room of the White House, in the Speaker’s chair of the House of Representatives, in the office of the Secretary of War, and in the governing coalition of the state that the United States has just fought a war to protect and expand.
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War of the United States, carries on the back of his neck the Jerusalem cross — the symbol of the Crusader Kingdom, the emblem of the armies that marched into the Holy Land in the name of the same God with the same logic and left behind them the same arithmetic of consecrated slaughter. He has described his military service in explicitly crusading terms. The frame is not metaphorical. It is operational.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest constitutional officer of the United States, has stated publicly that his governing philosophy is derived from biblical prophecy, that the events of the Middle East are the fulfilment of divine scripture, and that his role as a political leader is to act in accordance with what God requires of him in this prophetically significant moment. This is not the private faith of a man who attends church on Sundays. It’s the declared epistemological framework of the person who presides over the legislative branch of the most powerful government on earth.
Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing his troops two days after the Hamas attacks of October 2023, cited the Book of Samuel and the commandment regarding Amalek — the divine instruction to annihilate utterly, to spare nothing, to regard mercy as transgression. He was not speaking metaphorically. The theological tradition he was activating has a specific and unambiguous content, and the people he was addressing understood it with the precision that the text demands. The Defence Minister had already described the population of Gaza as human animals. The Finance Minister had called for erasure. These are not the excesses of wartime rhetoric. They are the activation of the herem — the sacred ban, the consecration of a civilian population to destruction — in the language of the oldest conquest narratives available to the Western theological tradition.
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation — an organisation whose signatories hold or have held positions of governmental influence in the administrations this analysis describes — has published declarations asserting that climate change concerns reflect a false religion that substitutes nature for God, and that policies designed to limit carbon emissions constitute an immoral interference with the divine order of creation. The planet is warming. The window for response is closing. And the governing coalition of the state most responsible for both the warming and the failure to respond holds, as a matter of theological conviction, that the closing of the window is divinely mandated — that the destruction of the planetary systems that sustain all life is not a catastrophe to be prevented but a prophecy to be fulfilled.
The mechanism is identical. The revealed obligation supersedes ordinary moral reasoning. The victims are categories — infidels, Amalekites, enemies of Christian civilisation, the collateral of eschatological necessity. The actors are exempt from consequence because consequence, in the framework they inhabit, belongs to a lesser order of reality than the divine plan they are serving.
The difference between the hijackers and the coalition described above is not theological. It is institutional. The hijackers had box cutters and a willingness to die. The coalition has nuclear weapons, the largest military budget in human history, and the institutional architecture of a state that has spent eighty years constructing the frameworks of international order that it is now, from theological conviction, dismantling.
There’s a term for the deepest common feature of both expressions of this mechanism, and the word is not religious. It is the word that names what both the jihadist and the Christian nationalist share beneath the specific content of their theologies: the conviction of exemption.
Exemption from the web of consequence. Exemption from the reciprocal vulnerability that grounds the most basic moral inhibitions. Exemption from the obligation to the living — to the specific, irreplaceable, ecologically embedded lives that the web of consequence connects and sustains. The hijackers were exempt because paradise awaited. The coalition is exempt because the End Times are coming and the destruction of the living world is the precondition of the redemption that transcends it.
But exemption is an impossibility. There is no outside. There is no transcendent space in which the consequences of destroying the living world do not return to those who destroyed it and to everyone connected to them in the web of shared biological, ecological, and atmospheric existence. The fantasy of exemption is not a theological error. It’s a civilisational pathology — the most extreme expression of the same pathology that has been consuming the conditions of human life in the service of the fantasy of independence from them for three hundred years of industrial civilisation.
The hijackers believed they were exempt from the consequences of killing three thousand people. The coalition believes it is exempt from the consequences of killing tens of thousands of Iranians, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and — through the systematic destruction of the institutional capacity for climate response at the precise moment that capacity was most needed — potentially billions of people whose names they will never know and whose deaths they will never be required to acknowledge.
The God is the same. The logic is the same. The arithmetic is the same. The scale is not. The September 11th hijackers are twenty-five years in the past. The coalition described above launched a war eleven weeks ago and is deciding, at this moment, whether to end it or to end it with a weapon the world has not used since 1945.
The comfortable version of this argument places the mechanism safely in the past, or safely in the other — in the Islamic world, in the medieval church, in the history of religious violence that Western secular liberalism has supposedly transcended. The honest version places it here, now, in the offices of the people directing the most consequential decisions on earth, operating from a theological framework that is structurally identical to the one that produced the falling towers, and incomparably more dangerous in its institutional expression.
The men who flew the planes believed they were doing God’s work. So do the men who launch the missiles. The difference is that we arrested the first kind and elected the second. That distinction tells us everything we need to know about how seriously we have taken the lesson.