Power, Poetics and the Popular: American Reactions to 9/11 and the Discourse of Redemptionism

On September 11, 2001, a well-organized group of terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and managed to crash three of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Whatever this unprecedented attack will turn out to have effected in addition to the suffering of those who died in the rubble and those who were left behind, it was read first and foremost as an attack on the American way of life and on the position of the United States in an increasingly globalized world. Accordingly, the innocence and idealism or, as some would have it, the complacency of America's national identity have been severely affected by the highly symbolic destruction of two highly symbolic targets, a destruction which could be witnessed on innumerable TV screens all over the world. What is more, the Islamist affiliations and motivations of the terrorists made the prominent religious component of America's national identity stand out in even sharper relief, a component which seems at present to enjoy an astonishing resurgence that is, however, accompanied by symptoms of crisis. In what follows I will focus on this persistent but, as recent research has emphasized, at times rather disruptive dimension of the ongoing discursive Negotiations of America's National Identity. Taking my cue from the sociologist Will Herberg's observation in the 1950s that “American religiosity is that of a society in an acute stage of secularization” and from recent research into the “modernism of Puritan thought and its legacy”, I will analyze political, poetical and popular reactions to the events of September 11, 2001 against the backdrop of the mixture of religion and politics that has been the hallmark of the discursive construction of American national identity from the very beginning.