c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Recently I answered a series of written questions from a high schooler about the Sept. 11 attacks, the Sept. 11 commission and terrorism in general. The questions were remarkable for the research that produced them and for their sheer volume; the kid had a lot of questions. Most striking, however, was the sense of urgency in her final questions. “Where does it end?” she wrote of the war on terror that her generation is destined to fight. “How do you defeat an idea?”

The easy answer to that question is that you defeat an idea _ in this case the idea of worldwide Islamist jihad _ with a better idea: the idea of individual freedom. As I’ve thought about that answer, however, it doesn’t seem so easy. First of all, it isn’t clear to much of the Islamic world that individual freedom is in fact a “better idea.” Equally important, it isn’t clear to many in the West _ particularly in America _ exactly what that “better idea” of individual freedom means.

Though the number of potential Islamist terrorists is relatively small, sympathy for their underlying rejection of Western _ and particularly American _ culture is widespread, having won, according to the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission, “thousands of followers and some degree of approval from millions more.”

Michael Scheuer, then known as “Anonymous,” put it succinctly in his book “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes”: “(Osama) Bin Laden has spoken to a broadening spectrum of Muslim society for which U.S. foreign policy, secularism, materialism and unchecked individualism are anathema.”

In Bruce Fieler’s book “Abraham,” Muslim cleric Massoud el Fassed expresses this view: “Look at the Muslim nation, look around the whole world. We worship God around the clock, five times a day, then do extra prayers. … God gives you the opportunity to submit yourselves to him, and follow the rule of God. But you ignore Him because you have become strong. You can deliver your message around the world, you can switch the mind of the people. You do the opposite of what God wants. You open banks, sexual places, gambling. Evil things. … And look at what happened. … He sent people very strong, who killed themselves, in order to kill you. This is something unbelievable what happened in America, but it came from God.”

Recognition of this cultural dimension to the struggle against terrorism is one of the 9/11 Commission Final Report’s strengths; the absence of any comprehensive recommendation to address the cultural divide it identifies, however, is perhaps its most telling omission. The report does state, “Just as we did in the Cold War, we need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously.” But it glosses over _ necessarily, perhaps _ the fact that in order to defend our ideals abroad we need to define them at home. And we’re doing a poor job of that.

What exactly do we in the West, and in America in particular, mean by individual freedom?

If our exported popular culture (our television shows, movies and music) is any indication, individual freedom is precisely the “secularism, materialism and unchecked individualism” that Muslim leaders decry. Nor are Muslim leaders alone. Religious leaders of virtually every faith would object to our popular culture, because it is a culture designed to foment what almost every religious tradition in the world was founded to curb: boundless desire.

Ours is a culture of unrestrained appetites. For cars, clothes, food, drink, violence, sex, gambling, drugs, rap, rock ‘n’ roll, anything new and improved. It is a culture fueled by advertising, which has grown from an annoyance to an all-pervading presence in our lives. Advertising sells by celebrating extremes, bombarding with half-truths, crowding out reasoned discussion with shouted slogans. It is everywhere _ popping up during Internet searches, appearing in song lyrics, interrupting movie plots, infecting political discussions. It has assumed a central and defining place in our public discourse.

Its message _ that individual freedom means the freedom of individuals to acquire and consume without limits or conscience _ has transformed the face of our culture.

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Decades ago, the poet T.S. Eliot anticipated this onslaught, asking: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” I don’t know. But I do know you won’t find it in the latest episodes of “Atlantic City Hookers,” “Pimp My Ride” or “Desperate Housewives,” or in the “Baywatch” reruns that are broadcast worldwide. Nor, unfortunately, will you find it in the public pronouncements of some of our most distinguished cultural figures, for whom the absence of restraint has come to represent the very essence of individual freedom.

In a recent book titled “XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits,” cultural luminaries such as Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie, John Malkovich and Francine du Plessix Gray discuss pornography as an important and mainstream form of freedom of expression. In repressive Muslim countries, Rushdie writes, pornography serves as “a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even civilization.”

Frank Rich, in a recent column in the arts pages of the New York Times, cites comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s telling of a dirty joke a month after 9/11 as emblematic of the individual freedom that sets us apart from much of the world.

It’s a measure of how our culture has devalued freedom that distinguished cultural critics like Rushdie and Rich defend freedom by celebrating its exercise at the margins. If the best case we can make for individual freedom is that free people can look at dirty pictures and tell dirty jokes, I doubt that we’ll win many converts.

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On the other hand, it’s unclear that some of the most vocal defenders of “American values” against the Islamist critique _ so-called Christian right organizations _ understand individual freedom at all. Christian right organizations are correct to assail the excesses of secular culture and the banishment of religious discussion from our public discourse, but they share with secular culture a seemingly limitless appetite for worldly (in their case “otherworldly”) gain.

Turn on your TV; watch the Rev. Peter Popoff selling his “Miracle Spring Water,” which many testimonials promise will make you “rich beyond your wildest dreams.” Televangelists are not so much critics of the culture of greed as products of it. Their eagerness, moreover, to make the government an agent of their theology is repugnant to individual freedom under any gloss.

The disturbing question, then, is this: How can we persuade the world that individual freedom is the right ideal if we cannot ourselves agree what it means?

We _ the excluded middle in America _ can start by joining this discussion. We need to recover from the radical secularists and radical theocrats a sense of what individual freedom means. For our ideal of individual freedom is not founded on the rampant, degenerate materialism that has come to represent it. And it certainly does not rest on the scriptural literalism that seeks to hijack it.

The United States is founded instead on a profound spiritual insight that became a political ideal. Born of our Judeo-Christian heritage, that insight was refined by centuries of religious wars to a wisdom that transcends those origins. Our Hebrew inheritance, enshrined in the Ten Commandments, expressed by the prophets, is a belief in the value and dignity of the individual moral conscience; our Christian inheritance, expressed in Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and embodied in his suffering and death on the cross, is a commitment to the value and dignity of the individual human life.

Centuries of warfare, persecution and atrocities committed in the name of that inheritance led to the realization that the answers to questions of ultimate truth cannot be dictated, that the individual conscience should not be coerced. Individuals should be left free to pursue their own spiritual quest.

We expressed this ideal as a nation in our first formal dealing with the Islamic world. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by the administration of George Washington, ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed by President John Adams, states that because “the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” “it is declared … that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

Properly understood, our ideal of individual freedom does not disavow ultimate truths, nor does it embrace them. It is an ideal that stands humbly before ultimate questions, and frees individuals to ask and answer those questions for themselves.

Rushdie, in an excellent essay written after 9/11 titled “Not About Islam?”, disputed the mantra of President Bush and others that the war on terrorism is “not about Islam.” “Of course,” he wrote, “this is `about Islam.’ … (T)he restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization,” he argued, “is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern.”

But if this is about Islam, it is also, in the long term, about us. The “restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization,” must also occur here, if we are to recover the true sense of our ideal of individual freedom. Our ability to do that _ to define what we mean by individual freedom and make the case that it is a better idea _ may well determine, for the next generation, the outcome of the struggle against terrorism.

MO/RB/LF END FARMER

(John Farmer Jr. wrote this article for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)