Did God use 9/11 to punish American infidels?

I am an infidel, but I wasn’t always one. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was 13, and my mother asked me to take my younger brother to the barbershop near our home in Amman, Jordan. When we walked in, the barber wasn't cutting hair. Everyone was staring at the television.

Al Jazeera was showing smoke pouring from one of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. Then we watched as the second plane hit. We cheered because we were told that God was punishing America.

Last week, I was at Ground Zero — the very site of the horrific act I celebrated as a young Muslim. Now, as a Christian, I'm participating in Infidel Awareness Month to honor the victims and help educate others about the dangerous ideologies I once adhered to.

I grew up in a society that was overwhelmingly Muslim. We weren't given much room to develop our own view of America or the West. The verdict had already been handed to us. America was the Great Satan. All non-Muslims, politician or plumber, soldier or mother, businessman or child, belonged to the same group: they were infidels. 

In 2007, I converted to Christianity, and I found that Christians divide the world into believers and nonbelievers too. On Sept. 11, 2015, a construction crane collapsed at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing Muslim pilgrims during the pilgrimage season. I was at church that day and heard my fellow Christians saying that God was punishing Muslims. After the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) rabbis and their followers explicitly interpreted the Holocaust as divine punishment for Jewish sins.

Fallen man continually tries to remake God into what we want Him to be — doctor, judge, parent, friend, enforcer, avenger and so on. It’s human nature to try to turn Him into a divine ally of our tribe, our politics and our resentments. We want a God who hates the people we hate, punishes our enemies, vindicates our side, and turns every disaster that befalls someone else into evidence that we were right all along. Self-righteousness can be a dangerous sin. 

In Luke 13, people told Jesus about Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. The question was what had these people done to deserve such a terrible death? Jesus answered by asking whether they imagined those Galileans were worse sinners than everyone else because they suffered this way. They were not. Then He raised another tragedy that everyone knew about. A tower at Siloam had collapsed and killed 18 people. Were those 18 more guilty than everyone else living in Jerusalem?

“No,” Jesus said.

From the perspective of the Gospel, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Buddhists, the good and the bad, all stand on the same ground: we are all born into sin, guilty by nature and unable to justify ourselves before God. 

Martin Luther said: “Our good works and our bad works are the same in the eyes of God: both are filthy rags.” 

God’s punishment doesn't come in the form of an accident, a disease or some earthly tragedy. It has only one final form: death. Christ on the cross absorbed the wrath of God, the punishment we deserve. He died the death we were supposed to die, and he lived the life we were supposed to live.

The Holocaust wasn't punishment for some special Jewish sin; it was the result of Nazi ideology, which saw Jews as an enemy to be annihilated. The crane collapse in Mecca wasn't punishment for some special Muslim sin; it was the result of the lack of excellence and quality control. And 9/11 wasn't punishment for sinful America; it was Islamic terrorism.

I'm a believer in the absolute sovereignty of God. But from our human perspective, we cannot let Christian theology exonerate Islamic theology. Within the Islamic religion, there are ideologies that wage war against the world in order to establish the rule of its false god. Sept. 11, just like Oct. 7, 2023, just like the more than 60,000 Islamic terrorist attacks of the past few decades, and just like the erasure of two-thirds of the old Christian world, was Islamic jihad. 

I know many Christians ignore this because they want to be kind to Muslims and win them to Christ. Kindness toward people whom we are evangelizing doesn't require lying to ourselves about what they believe. “The truth will set you free” — just like we don’t lie to a child about the risks of running into the street, of having too much sugar, or watching too much television.

In Ezekiel 3:18, God tells the prophet that if he fails to warn the wicked of the danger before them, he will be held accountable for his silence. 

Christians are not called to flatter fallen human beings in the hope that politeness will make the Gospel more attractive. We are called to love people enough to tell them the truth. 

Muslims must be loved and treated with dignity as human beings made in the image of God. But Islam must be confronted for what it is: a divisive belief that justifies violence and hatred toward all of God’s children, that creates a wrongheaded self-righteousness in its followers to be judge and executioner, and that is antithetical to the human flourishing that can occur when we walk in the peace of Jesus.

None of us are infidels; we are all children of the one true God and in need of His perfect Son.