SOUL FOOD:

Was religion the cause of the unspeakable events that knocked the breath, if not the spirit, out of this country on Sept. 11, 2001? Or can religion thwart such events for the future?

Six days after that indelible day five years ago, these were the questions Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. pondered. No wonder.

The plaintive questions “Where was God?” and “Why did God allow this to happen?” rose from the horror and our disbelief to shadow our collective mourning. Attendance at churches and mosques and synagogues swelled as our nation sought answers and solace.

Yet, in the minds of some, religion became the manifest villain in our national tragedy rather than a criminal group of hijackers and killers who acted in the name of Islam.

Commentators and columnists railed not only against jihadist Islam for the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocents. They railed against traditional Christianity.

Salon News Editor Joan Walsh wrote vaguely of the “invidious agenda of the Christian right,” seen by her as one and the same with the agendas of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who she characterized as “America’s counterpart to the Taliban.”

The media have been slow to comprehend how marginal the views of Falwell and Robertson have become in Christian America, I know. But did Walsh, does Walsh, really think that Bible-believing Christians are scheming to seize a group of jet planes to crash into highly populated landmarks in order to convey their world view to others?

Writing for the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman didn’t limit his rant to Islam or Christianity. He leveled his sights on all traditional religious adherents. The world is not facing a clash of civilizations, a clash between a Muslim world and a Judeo-Christian or even a Hindu or a Buddhist one, he wrote. Civilization is facing, in Friedman’s mind, a fight between “those Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews with a modern and progressive outlook and those with a medieval one.” If you hold to what your faith tradition has taught for 1,500 years, 2,000 years, 4,000 years, or longer, a pox — not peace — be upon you.

Such unmitigated faith, unchanged by time or social trends, is (depending on which sage you read or hear) either the mother or the progeny of hate and fear.

Such faith, as these wise ones see it, excludes benevolent or even benign expression. One cannot, in their view, embrace a traditional faith and also possess a sound mind and compassionate heart.

Like Walsh, John Balzar (in a commentary that appeared in the Los Angeles Times shortly after Sept. 11, 2001) also likened Falwell and Robertson to the leaders of militant Islam. The comparison functioned as the springboard from which he broad-jumped to his own fear- mongering generalization: “The same hate-fear that drives fundamentalists in Afghanistan also works on the hearts of Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.”

To be fair, I should note Balzar later provided a caveat or two for his remarks, hoping to keep readers from working “themselves into fits” writing letters to the editor.

“I am not equating U.S. Christian fundamentalists with Islamic terrorists. Neither am I equating Islamic fundamen- talists, or for that matter Jewish fundamentalists, with terrorists. Terrorism arises not from fund- amentalism but from extreme fundamentalists,” he wrote.

Following the presidential election in 2004 and the fracas over the influence of conser- vative Christians on its outcome, Andy Rooney attributed Christian fundamentalism to “a lack of education” and insufficient exposure “to what the world has to offer.”

Rooney, like so many others in our post-modern world, cannot wrap his mind around the idea that an intelligent human can believe in a God who has revealed himself and his laws to the creatures he made with an expectation of gratitude and obedience.

I’m acquainted with a good number of traditional Christians, Jews and Muslims — people Walsh, Friedman, Balzar and Rooney might call fundamentalists. The one thing they share in common is a deep conviction about the indispensable tenets of their faith, not a desire to spread that conviction by intimidation or bloodshed.

Last week, as the anniversary of Sept. 11 approached, the Kansas City Star published a column by Bill Tammeus that flung a cynical pall over what he cast as a widespread, ruinous “arrogant religious certitude.”

Tammeus finds it “a mystery” that such “know-it-all-ism” sometimes stops short of violence while he also contends it “almost inevitably lead[s] to social disharmony, to prejudice, [and] to a sense that some people are more worthy in the eyes of God than others.”

For all his certitude, he doesn’t seem to offer all that much evidence: one anecdotal e-mail from a reader who doesn’t take a shine to ecumenicalism; references Ku Klux Klansmen, Al Qaeda terrorists, abortion clinic bombers, “attackers of gay men in public parks,” all of whom are thankfully in the minority of adherents, even among so-called fundamental believers.

Arrogant certitude pours from the mouths of “radio and TV preachers who know exactly how the world will end and from representatives of the misshapen version of Islam that countenances suicide bombers.” But, writes Tammeus, you hear it as well, “from people whose theological education ended in third-grade Sunday school.”

Many seek this year to redeem the carnage of 9/11 by urging others to learn its moral lessons. In Tammeus’ mind, that lesson is humility. “A deep sense of repentant humility” is what he believes “we owe to the 9/11 victims.”

To that end, he says, we need not abandon “our faith, our beliefs, [or] our convictions.” We need only renounce our “arrogant religious certitude,” which “devalue[s] our common humanity.”

He appeals to the words of Oliver Cromwell to convince us: “By the bowels of Christ, bethink ye that ye may be mistaken.”

Irony is, these words were a manner of political inquisition. They offered the Scots a way out of war if they would only come to their senses and side with Cromwell and the Parliamentarians instead of with Charles II and the Royalists.

Cromwell had little, if any, doubt he was right. When the Scots disagreed, Cromwell’s armies attacked and drove them to defeat. I suspect he believed God was on his side.