The New Religious War, same as the Old Religious War. Except that this time, we’ve lost.

Today, it’s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose’s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional.

But it was a delusion enabled and strengthened by a fundamentally secular worldview that refused to take the claims of religion seriously — claims that precede and give coherence to political claims and ideologies. It was a delusion, in other words, enabled by an Enlightenment philosophy that looked on religion as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The religious conflicts of earlier epochs had naturally given way to the ideological contests of the 20th century, and now those contests were settled. At the dawn of the 21st century, no one could possibly take religion seriously, or think that medieval religious disputes had any relevance in the post-Cold War world that was taking shape.

Then 9/11 happened. But instead of shattering this delusion, great efforts were made to shore it up. This proved difficult (but not impossible) because the leaders of al-Qaida were obviously motivated by religious beliefs, and said so repeatedly. In his November 2002 Letter to America, Osama bin Laden explained his motivations and aims in great detail. Organized as a series of questions and answers, the letter laid out al-Qaida’s reasons for attacking on 9/11 and also stated what al-Qaida wanted from us.

“The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam,” bin Laden wrote. It’s a striking admission. The terrorists’ first priority was not for the U.S. to leave Muslim lands, or halt support for Israel, or stop propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. All of those demands come after what bin Laden says is the first thing he wants for America, which is conversion to Islam: “The religion of the Unification of God … of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).”

Despite such an explicit statement from bin Laden, and others like it from jihadist Muslims around the world, almost no one in the West wanted to acknowledge this reality and its implications, because doing so would undermine the animating idea of the post-Cold War project. If sincere religious convictions could inspire Muslims in the 21st century to carry out attacks like 9/11, then it wasn’t really true that all religions are the same. And if that’s the case, then all peoples and cultures are also not the same, and neither is all labor, and suddenly the entire agenda of creating a borderless world of global free markets is called into question.

So almost immediately after 9/11 our political leaders and most major media outlets scrambled to declare that Islam had nothing to do with the attacks, that there was nothing to fear from Muslims, and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a bad American.

Less than a week after 9/11, as the rubble of the Twin Towers was still smoldering, President George W. Bush gave his now infamous “Islam is peace” speech after meeting with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” The terrorist attacks, he said, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”

It was an absurd thing for an American president to say (as if Bush knew the first thing about the fundamental tenets of Islam), but it was especially absurd, and indeed offensive, as a response to terrorist attacks that had just killed thousands of Americans. Adding to the insult and absurdity was the fact that Bush was surrounded by Muslim leaders who condemned the attacks on narrow grounds but shared the overall religious worldview of the hijackers and their al-Qaida handlers. But in Bush’s version of the world, those people were no different than any other Americans, and in fact “love America just as much as I do.”

In saying these things, the president was simply expressing the mainstream liberal view, shared by almost all our political and media elite, who were unable to recognize the religious and civilizational nature of the conflict that had erupted. It was inconceivable to them that authentic religious beliefs could ever motivate anyone to commit an act of mass violence like 9/11. After all, religions were all supposed to be fundamentally the same. They all teach the same things, more or less, and they all lead to peace. Evil and cynical people might try to twist religion and use it to justify their crimes or a political agenda, but such people are not — and cannot be — true representatives of religion.

We heard versions of this over and over again in the years after 9/11 — and especially in the lead-up to the Iraq War. All people, we were told, yearn for liberty, hence we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. All nations should be organized along the lines of liberal democracy, hence we should ensure that Afghan women are able to get degrees in women’s studies and Afghan girls are able to attend school. What’s more, we could import democracy to these places, and it would work because freedom and democracy are what everyone, everywhere, really wants. In his second inaugural address, President Bush stated explicitly that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Ending tyranny in the world might sound like a ridiculous thing for a White House administration to tackle, but they were serious about it. I remember a political science professor of mine from Hillsdale being dispatched to Iraq by the State Department in 2004, after we had toppled Saddam Hussein. He was part of a group of scholars the government had tasked with establishing a basis for Western-style rule of law and constitutionalism in the Koran and in Islamic tradition. That such a basis had not yet been established or discovered in the previous 1,400 years of Islam did not dissuade them. They really thought it was possible, and went to great lengths in the attempt, which of course failed.

It never occurred to them that not all religions and cultures are actually the same, and do not produce the same things. It never occurred to them that Christianity, not the act of voting, is why representative democracy created peace and stability in the West. Or that it might not be possible to establish a basis for constitutional democracy in a Muslim nation because of the nature of Islam. Or that not everyone, in fact, yearns for liberty. Some people yearn instead for justice. Some people would rather have vengeance than freedom and prosperity. If you introduce democracy to a place like Iraq, or Syria, or Gaza, the people might not vote for Western liberalism. They might vote for Hamas.

Even if these things did occur to our leadership class, as they might well have, it would have been unwelcome to bring them up at the time. And in fact almost no one said anything along these lines.

Instead, our leaders doubled down on Stephen Ambrose’s version of the world. The cultural mood of the West in the decade before 9/11 was one of breezy optimism and post-Cold War insouciance. After 9/11 this mood transformed into official policy. Not only did we think we could bring Western-style democracy to tribal Muslim peoples, we thought we could bring those peoples here and integrate them into American life.

The multicultural propaganda that had been fed to us in school throughout the 1990s took shape after 9/11, and we began importing Muslims from far-flung countries in record numbers — people from the same countries that had celebrated and danced in the streets when the towers fell. Pew Research estimates the number of Muslims in the U.S. grew from 2.4 million in 2007, the first time it performed such a tabulation, to 5.5 million today (likely a low estimate). The number of mosques has likewise increased during those years, from an estimated 1,200 to 2,800.

For the left, this was only fair. A legacy of colonialism and American meddling in the Middle East was after all to blame for the backwardness and economic depression of the Muslim world, they argued. We owed it to those countries to allow mass immigration to the West, and if Muslims in the Third World harbored resentment against America, they had good reason for it. This is now mainstream thinking among Democrats. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly defended calls to “globalize the intifada,” for example, and has campaigned with the likes of Hasan Piker, who said that the United States “deserved 9/11.”

For the right, it took the arrival of Donald Trump even to be able to talk about these things. And even now, if you have the temerity to notice that Muslims in America fail to assimilate because they have no interest in assimilating, or that they recreate versions of their home countries and cultures here in America, or that Islam is clearly incompatible with American society, half the country will call you a racist.

That is the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of a religious war that we lost because we refused to recognize the religious nature of it. We were committed instead to a secular account of the world in which religion makes no real claims on its adherents and imposes no real costs on unbelievers.

What we owe the victims of 9/11, all these years later, is to be done with all that nonsense, and to see the world, finally, as it really is.

Yeah, like THAT’S ever gonna happen. Sorry, but I’m afraid we Men of the West just don’t have it in us anymore to look the harsher realities straight in the face without flinching and/or dissembling, same as we can no longer call things by their right names. Our Lords and Masters simply don’t allow that, and we’re Americans: we do as we’re told.