Bill Tammeus on: Lincoln’s hope for ‘this split nation’s uncertain future’

July 2, 2023 by Bill Tammeus

Can you spot him? This is a rare photograph of Lincoln from Gettysburg.

By BILL TAMMEUS
Author of Love, Loss and Endurance

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln looked not just to the appalling carnage of the still-unwon Civil War but also to this split nation’s uncertain future.

Click this image from Bill’s cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

“It is,” he said, “for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work” of freedom for which Union soldiers fought.

Lincoln’s charge still is our charge. But freedom for and from what?

In many ways the answer continues to be freedom from evils America’s slaves experienced for so long—the terrorism and extremism of white supremacy, of injustice, of economic, educational and spiritual degradation.

In my book, Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety, I describe the murder of my nephew in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but I also explore the roots of radicalism and suggest a few ways we might try to unplug extremism.

Those suggestions also can help Americans complete what Lincoln called our “unfinished work.”

Bridging Our Divides—Together

Here’s a summary of the recommendations in my book:

1. Respect (and love) others. Simple, right? Well, in my Christian tradition, one of the most difficult tasks we are given is not just to treat others with respect but to love them, which means always having their best interests at heart. But on what basis do we do that? One answer is that Scripture tells us that all people are created in God’s image. One way Christians think about is to say that they’re obliged to see Christ in every human being, Christian or not. And, having recognized Christ in another, the last thing we should want to do is to insult, injure or murder that person.

2. Become more religiously literate because our country is becoming more religiously diverse. Our human tendency is to fear what we don’t know. To break that habit, it’s necessary to commit ourselves to learning about religious traditions and philosophical worldviews beyond our own. There are many ways to do that. One is simply to read some helpful books. I’d start with Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t, by Stephen Prothero. Then get outside your comfortable religious and worldview surroundings. The most obvious way is to travel. Each time you experience a religious tradition beyond your own you gain not only knowledge but also the idea that people very much like yourself have made other religious choices that don’t threaten the safety and peace of their neighbors. That means you don’t need to exterminate them or push them out of town.

3. Engage in interfaith dialogue and cooperation. Many communities have interfaith organizations that promote understanding. The idea isn’t to work for the mashing together of different religions into one broad syncretistic mess. Rather, it’s for people of different faith traditions to know and to be known. It’s to understand the many different approaches to religion that people of goodwill adopt, an understanding that should lead to a bit of humility about whether our own choices are also God’s direction for everyone else.

4. Teach your children and grandchildren well. Specific hatreds must be taught. And children will learn hatred from people around them if they’re not taught respect, love and compassion — and, sadly, sometimes even if they are. At the very least, they must learn tolerance, which is a terrifically low standard but at least is to be preferred to contempt.

5. Deepen your knowledge of both American and world history. A fair amount of global terrorism is tied to the shockwaves that have radiated across the nation and around the globe from historical events about which many Americans seem to know little or nothing. That’s particularly true about geopolitical and religious history in developing nations, including parts of the Middle East. The list of problematic, even if sometimes defensible, actions taken by the U.S. over its history is long indeed, and despite all the great work here and around the world that the U.S. has done, it has made many enemies. I’m not suggesting we forgive acts of terrorism or that we consider American foreign policy simply one disaster after another. That would be both wrong and unfair. But it’s important to know both American and world history to understand what sometimes motivates America’s declared enemies.

6. In this remarkably divisive time in our nation, become competent in civil discourse, which may be next to impossible using social media. The practice of civility can teach us how to listen carefully and to appreciate points of view not our own. That, in turn, can lead us away from any tendency to align ourselves with people who imagine that they know all the answers. For help with this, start with You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield.

7. Spend time with people who have experienced profound grief. It can open our eyes to the countless ways that death — particularly unexpected, violent death — can affect almost every aspect of the lives of survivors. You may not know anyone who lost family members on 9/11 or in other terrorist attacks, but there are lots of surviving family members of those who died in attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway, Charleston, Kansas City and on and on. If there’s an opportunity, meet some of them. Talk with them, if they’re willing to do that, but only if they’re willing. Let them tell you their story.

Now add your own ideas to this list and go be part of the solution.

Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and book reviews for The National Catholic Reporter and for The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at [email protected].

Care to Read More in our Fourth of July 2023 series on Lincoln?

Whatever you choose to read next, you will find the following links to the other 2023 columns at the bottom of each page:

Lincoln scholar Duncan Newcomer’s introduction to this series includes a salute to Braver Angels, a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to de-polarizing American politics that is gathering from across the country for a major conference at Gettysburg this week.

Duncan also writes about: What were Lincoln’s hopes for our nation?

And, he explores: What were Lincoln’s core values?

Then, journalist and author Bill Tammeus writes about how Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address still calls us to reach out to one another.

Journalist and author Martin Davis asks: Are our battle-scarred American roads capable of carrying us toward unity?

Author and leadership coach Larry Buxton writes about: Growing up and growing wise with Abraham Lincoln

Columnist and editor Judith Pratt recalls: Hearing our Civil War stories shared generation to generation.

Attorney and community activist Mark Jacobs writes about: How Lincoln’s astonishing resilience and perseverance inspires me today

Want the book?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions.

Violence is not the answer, if we hope to ‘unplug extremism,’ Bill Tammeus writes

November 6, 2021 by Bill Tammeus

A detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under military escort between facilities. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

News of American torture prompts fresh opposition

EDITOR’s NOTE: Since our publishing house was founded in 2007, many of our authors and columnists have written about their commitments toward world peace. The first author we published is international peace trainer Daniel Buttry, whose books include Blessed Are the Peacemakers. As a community of writers, we have pursued these themes for 14 years. Flash forward to 2021, and we have just published David Edwards’ What Belongs to God: Reflections on Peacemaking by a Conscientious Objector and Bill Tammeus’ Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. For many years, Bill also has been one of the leading American journalists covering religion, and writing commentaries about the complex interrelationship between faith and culture. When news broke in the case of detainee Majid Kahn this week, Bill reported the following column for our readers.

Beyond Moral Outrage, Torture Is Counterproductive

By BILL TAMMEUS
Contributing Columnist

It’s not as if we Americans are just discovering that some agencies of our government have tortured people physically, mentally and emotionally.

After all, we read about it in sickening detail when it happened at the Abu Ghraib prison at the start of the war in Iraq. And we’ve heard about torture (euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”) used on captured planners of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and others. (Here’s a recent report from Human Rights Watch.) There’s a description of all that in a 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The full report runs more than 6,700 pages with enough sordid details to make you vomit.

That report said that its “major lesson” was “that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards. It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and external review. Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”

Click on this link to learn more about the religious organizations that have become members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

All of this and more is why such organizations as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture exist. Somebody, after all, has to say no to these outrages.

Despite knowing all that and more, I still found the recent testimony given—finally—by a Guantanamo Bay prisoner (who has confessed to his crimes and expressed remorse) appalling in its detailed account of suffering. As the Associated Press reported, “Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, told jurors considering his sentence for war crimes how he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA facilities known as ‘black sites,’ as interrogators pressed him for information.”

Click this headline-link to read a New York Times story, this week, about the case.

Khan’s summary of his experience: “I thought I was going to die.”

The AP described the man’s testimony this way: “Khan spoke of being suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning, only to have water poured into his nose and mouth when the interrogators let him up. He was beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted and starved in overseas prisons whose locations were not disclosed.”

Click on this headline-link to see the Associated Press report as published by NPR.

What all of this proved again is what we already should have known—countering extremism with extremism not only doesn’t work, it also morally compromises the people who use ugly, brutal force to get answers. Such people dehumanize themselves.

More than that, torture gives live ammunition to people who seek evidence that justifies their loathing of the United States.

Click on this visual-link to see the two-page, handwritten Majid Khan clemency letter as reproduced in the New York Times.

Seven of the eight jurors who heard Khan’s testimony almost immediately signed a handwritten letter demanding clemency for him because of the abominable treatment he received.

They wrote this: “Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history. This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests. Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”

I am not naïve. I know there are bad actors who wish to do me and others harm.

Click on the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Some of them did exactly that to me and my family on 9/11 when they murdered my nephew, Karleton Fyfe, a passenger on the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center.

But I also know that the way to unplug extremism is not by using more of it. We must find other means, whether we’re talking about individuals, groups, political parties or governments. Sometimes, indeed, it’s individuals who can teach governments how to behave morally.

So as a first step toward that end, I devoted the last chapter of my new book, Love, Loss and Endurance, to offering suggestions for how to counter radicalism, whether it’s rooted in religion, geopolitics, white supremacy or something else.

My list is not the final word on this. Rather, it’s simply one person’s hopeful start at the task of defusing fanatical rhetoric and actions. My guess is that each of you could add more ideas to help, and I hope you will.

Of the eight ideas included in my book, I will highlight just three here:

Engage in interfaith dialogue and cooperation. The idea isn’t to work for the mashing together of different religions into one broad syncretistic mess of a religion. Rather, the idea is for people of different faith traditions to know and to be known. It’s to understand the many different approaches to religion that people of goodwill adopt, an understanding that should lead to a bit of humility about whether our own choices are also God’s direction for everyone else.
Deepen your knowledge of both American and world history. A fair amount of global terrorism is tied to the shockwaves that have radiated across the nation and around the globe from historical events about which many people, especially Americans, seem to know little or nothing. That’s particularly true about geopolitical and religious history in developing nations, including parts of the Middle East.
Spend time with people who have experienced profound grief. This is the emotional equivalent of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. It can open our eyes to the countless ways that death — particularly unexpected, violent death — can affect almost every aspect of the lives of survivors. You may not know personally anyone who has lost family members on 9/11 or in terrorist attacks on other dates around the globe, but there are lots of surviving family members of those who died in attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway, Charleston, Kansas City and on and on. If there’s an opportunity, meet some of them. Talk with them, if they’re willing to do that, but only if they’re willing. Let them tell you their story.

American officials have violated a long list of moral standards in their treatment of people rounded up after 9/11. By doing that, they created more excuses for people to want to harm our nation and its citizens.

We must say clearly and loudly that what those officials did was wrong and that their actions don’t represent core American values. Sometimes the most patriotic thing we citizens can do is to criticize our own country.

Care to Read More?

IN JANUARY, Bill also wrote the following for USA Today:

Bill Tammeus, a former award-winning columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and formerly for The National Catholic Reporter. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at [email protected].

‘Land Acknowledgment’ is a first step toward justice for our Native American neighbors

October 24, 2021 by Bill Tammeus

JOY AND HEARTBREAK—This 1585 watercolor painting of a traditional dance among the Roanac (spelled Roanoke by settlers) is both joyous and heartbreaking, because it is one of very few images we have of this Algonquian-speaking people who once lived in present-day Dare County on the far eastern coast of North Carolina. English visitor John White, an explorer, cartographer and artist made a series of watercolor illustrations in 1585 to accurately educate the British about Roanac culture. Today, his watercolors, including this one in London’s British Museum, are among the few traces left in the world of this once-vibrant community. (NOTE: This image is in the public domain and can be shared along with this story.)

Learning from Our Native American Neighbors, today

EDITOR’S NOTE: This year, our magazine is highlighting emerging stories about our relationships with our Native American neighbors. We have been reporting on both the tragic challenges and the multi-faceted opportunities, right now, in establishing such cooperative relationships. As residents of North America, today, we have an enormous amount of work ahead of us, including coming to terms with centuries of trauma in North American Indian boarding schools, which we have reported on earlier. This week, we asked journalist and author Bill Tammeus to report on an important nationwide effort to open up these relationships with a small first step: land acknowledgments.

Learning to take the small first step of ‘Land Acknowledgment’

By BILL TAMMEUS
Contributing Columnist

In the midst of racial unrest around the nation last year, my Kansas City congregation, which began at the end of the Civil War as an anti-slavery church, started a renewed anti-racism effort.

As part of this, I was especially drawn to explore how to educate ourselves about—and respond to the needs of—Indigenous people in our area. The gaps in my knowledge about American Indian history and culture were and remain legion. (Most of what I knew about “Indians” came from living for two years as a boy in India, but that wasn’t much use for this.)

EARLY NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE GROUPS: This U.S. government map is in the public domain. Remember that this is just one visual representation of lands that once were home to native peoples. Many smaller tribes were not included in this map. This map is also a snapshot from one era. Over many centuries, groups of people moved across the continent and these rough boundaries changed. As Bill Tammeus reports, the way to authentically explore land acknowledgment in your own part of North America begins with contacting Indian leaders in your region. (NOTE: Clicking on this map will display a much larger and more readable version. You also can right click on this map and save a copy on your phone or computer.)

So I began reading such books as An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Rosanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, by Simon Winchester; How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power of the Frontier, by Stuart Banner, Diné: A History of the Navajos, by Peter Iverson, and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Learning and Listening

Along the way we invited Native Americans to teach us about food sovereignty as well as land acknowledgements and other matters that were mostly unfamiliar to many of us. (Note: This link to “land acknowledgements” will take you to the Smithsonian’s informative website; a second “land acknowledgments” link below will take you to the Native Governance Center’s website.)

In that journey, we found that it was important to let the Indigenous people we were contacting know that we were there to learn—and not to assume we knew what they needed and wanted.

So, when we learned of the Kansas City Indian Center’s practice of providing food and other necessities to people in need, we asked if we could help. The result was a collection of more than 250 pandemic-era items, such as wipes and hand sanitizers. Then, when we learned of the organization’s hopes to build a new commercial kitchen to process Native-grown crops, we asked again if we could help. The result was that our members donated more than $15,000 toward the kitchen’s construction.

Let me repeat this point, because it is important: We don’t go to Indigenous people to tell them what they need and what we’ll do about it. We go to learn and listen. And, where appropriate, to walk with them.

So when I learned about land acknowledgements, the idea especially intrigued me. This practice provides a chance for the current (usually white) owners of particular parcels of land to recognize in public ways that the land they own—or the land on which, say, their church building sits—is considered ancestral tribal land by Indigenous people from whom it may have been stolen or taken via broken treaties.

‘A Very Small Gesture’

Click on the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

I used a land acknowledgement statement in September when I preached and led a discussion of my new book, Love, Loss and Endurance, at a church in Chicagoland. I told people that such acknowledgements are a very small gesture—but they’re not nothing.

And by “very small gesture,” I mean exactly that.

As Ed Smith, a staff member of the Kansas City Indian Center told me about land acknowledgements: “I don’t think much of them. If all they do is acknowledge that you’re on stolen land but aren’t going to do anything else after that, it wouldn’t be much different than me driving by after my grandpa stole your grandpa’s car—admitting that my grandpa stole it years ago and leaving with it anyway.”

Well, what “car” are we talking about?

The quick answer: The land that makes up the U.S. today.

As Banner writes in How the Indians Lost Their Land, “Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth century, almost all the land in the present-day United States was transferred from American Indians to non-Indians.”

True, but it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, his verb “transferred” makes it sound like it was a simple sale of land from Indians to whites. As Banner notes, however, “Indians had different conceptions of property than European settlers had. . .so they couldn’t have understood what the settlers (“settlers” refers mostly to European invaders) meant by a sale. The Indians were really conquered by force.”

But he acknowledges that even that’s an over-simplified version.

Banner again: “At most times, and in most places, the Indians were not exactly conquered, but they did not exactly choose to sell their land either. The truth was somewhere in the middle. . .Whites always acquired Indian land within a legal framework of their own construction. Law was always present, but so was power. The more powerful whites became relative to Indians, the more they were able to mold the legal system to produce outcomes in their favor—more sales, of larger tracts, at lower prices than would have existed had power relationships been more equal.”

That’s a lot to say in a simple land acknowledgement statement!

‘Architects of Removal’

And yet there’s more. As Winchester notes in his 2021 book, Land, “(W)estward was. . .the direction to which white men moved to fulfill their promised destiny. Westward to the ever-shifting frontier, with the Indians moved ahead and into the unknown, beyond their own Pales of Settlement, and to places where, in the white men’s eyes, they could do no harm except to their savage and miserable selves. There were many architects of the removal plan.”

Among those architects he mentions Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, “(b)ut then, and most notoriously, came the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, a Democrat who would have no further truck with an evidently recalcitrant aggregation of Indian feeling in the fertile settler country of the American southeast. He wanted all to go—particularly those acknowledged to be advanced, settled and self-governing, and condescendingly known as the Five Civilized Tribes. They were told. . .go head out. . .”

In a phone interview, Winchester described himself as uninspired by land acknowledgements, though he thought they had some small value. He called such acknowledgements “outwardly pointless but they get people thinking,” noting that acknowledgements began years ago in Australia and New Zealand.

Still, he said, “a lot of Native Americans are quite right to scoff at it. But in its defense, I think it means that some people are starting to consider the problem, which they’ve long glossed over and decided not to pay any attention to. I am hopeful that it will prompt a few people to consider what we’ve done to Native Americans.”

Indigenous People Still Live Among Us

So I plan to continue using land acknowledgement statements at appropriate times and my church will be using them to recognize the bloody history that has brought us to today and to acknowledge that Indigenous people are still here and have a future.

But if we don’t do more than that by, say, trying to respond in helpful ways to the needs of Indigenous people, such acknowledgements will barely be worth the paper on which they’re written.

Care to learn more?

One way to determine which Indigenous peoples once occupied any particular area of the U.S., the Native Lands app is useful. Native Land Digital, which produces this app, is a Canadian not-for-profit organization, incorporated in December 2018. Native Land Digital is Indigenous-led, with an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization. Numerous non-Indigenous people also contribute as members of the nonprofit’s Advisory Council.

Bill Tammeus, a former award-winning columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and formerly for The National Catholic Reporter. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at [email protected].

Bill Tammeus Preaches Inclusion

September 25, 2021 by Bill Tammeus

An Inspiring Video You Can Share

Bill Tammeus, author of Love, Loss and Endurance, continued his months-long nationwide effort to encourage Americans to “unplug extremism” with a Sunday-morning sermon, addressed directly to Christians in light of the New Testament.

We have an easily share-able YouTube video of that sermon, which is a prophetic call to Christians to confront efforts to subvert the Bible for hateful purposes. He was preaching at First Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest, Illinois, a congregation attended by his sister Mary. In the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, both Bill and Mary lost a beloved family member in one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center—so this is a deeply personal message.

Here is a YouTube video of Bill’s sermon, which is “set” to begin when Bill steps into the pulpit. If you wish to see more of the service, you can easily start the video at another point.

Care to share this with friends?

This is a video you may want to share with friends or perhaps a small group within your congregation. (Bill welcomes invitations to meet with groups nationally.)

Here’s a small sample of what Bill says in his sermon:

As we learn in the book of James, faith is not worth much if it does not produce love, mercy and compassion. …

The 9/11 terrorist attacks—and examples of extremism before and after that—have sometimes tried to disguise themselves as rooted in religious thinking. But, do you know how to tell if such so-called religious teaching is not just false but also is a destructive sham? Any time those so-called religious teachings lead people to view others as less than fully human—or lead people to oppress others in some way, you can be sure it’s not the product of healthy religion and that whoever is preaching such things has it wrong. …

I want to be clear that all of our faith traditions can sometimes be subverted and distorted in this way. Yes, the twisted version of Islam that the terrorists bought into on 9/11 certainly was an example of this, but so was the kind of Christianity that slaveholders in the U.S. before the civil war used to justify their evil. And in our time, so is the kind of Christianity that encourages people to try to retain the White supremacy that was built into our nation’s founding documents—or to advocate for Christian nationalism—or to insist that our LGBTQ brothers and sisters have no place in the life of the church. To take those positions requires a distortion and subversion of scripture.

Care to learn more?

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Bill Tammeus, served for many years as the award-winning columnist for The Kansas City Star until his retirement from the newsroom. Now, he writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and columns for The Presbyterian Outlook. Email him at [email protected].

Get his book: Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. is available from Amazon and other online retailers.

To see the rising tide of terrorism, Bill recommends this summary from TRAC, the research center based at Syracuse University.

For more on the rise in extremism among military personnel and police, Bill points to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) article, headlined: The Military, Police, and the Rise of Terrorism in the United States

Bill also recommends: Other helpful resources for understanding domestic terrorism better include these books: American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism, by Arie Perliger, and White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland, by Dick Lehr. In addition, here’s an online resource you may find helpful from CSIS: “The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States.”

Bill Tammeus: Three ways we can become healers at the 20th anniversary of 9/11

September 5, 2021 by Bill Tammeus

Echoing a Universal Call to Heal the World

By BILL TAMMEUS
Contributing Columnist

Twenty years after al-Qaida terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., including my own nephew, it should be embarrassingly clear to American leaders that military force won’t stop violent extremism.

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Now that the last American troops have limped out of Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists trained, that anguished country is being turned back over to the Taliban—the same religious fanatics who allowed al-Qaida a safe haven in the first place. So now we must find a different approach to opposing terrorism—both the international and the domestic varieties.

In fact, while our government has been lavishing blood and treasure on reacting to foreign-based extremism, domestic terrorism has been growing and now constitutes a major threat to our American republic and to our ability to live in peace.

What’s even more distressing is that active-duty military personnel and reservists are participating in an increasing number of terrorist actions and plots.

So while we need to continue watching for terrorists from abroad trying to slip into the U.S., we might make more progress by focusing on why some Americans get sucked into extremism and what we can do to counter that disastrous trend.

In my new book, Love, Loss and Endurance, I devote the final chapters to exploring exactly those two matters. Prior to those chapters, I describe the multiple traumas my extended family experienced because my nephew, Karleton Fyfe, died as a passenger on the first plane to smash into the World Trade Center on 9/11. The ideas I offer for responding to violent extremism also can be applied against domestic terrorism, such as the Trump-inspired insurrection at the nation’s Capitol last Jan. 6.

3 Ways to Help Unplug Extremism

Here are three of those ideas, along with brief commentary on them:

Become more religiously literate. Our human tendency is to fear what we don’t know or understand. To break that habit, it’s necessary to commit ourselves to learning about religious traditions and philosophical world-views beyond our own. There are many ways to do that. One is simply to read some helpful books. I’d start with Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, by Stephen Prothero.

Deepen your knowledge of both American and world history. A fair amount of global terrorism is tied to the shock waves that have radiated across the nation and around the globe from historical events about which many people, especially Americans, seem to know little or nothing. That’s particularly true about geopolitical and religious history in developing nations, including parts of the Middle East. In addition, the public’s knowledge of American history seems to have lots of gaps in it, which is why it surprised many people finally to learn of the domestic terrorism that happened 100 years ago in the Tulsa Race Massacre of Black residents there.

Spend time with people who have experienced profound grief. This is the emotional equivalent of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. It can open our eyes to the countless ways that death—particularly unexpected, violent death—can affect almost every aspect of the lives of survivors. At the very least, go to funerals of people whose families you know, even of people who died of old age or of some illness late in life. Be present. Hear their stories.

People of faith should be leaders in this effort to unplug terrorism, whether foreign or domestic, given the overwhelming messages about love and acceptance from the world’s great religions. But sometimes religion is a source of extremism. When we see anything like that tendency in our own faith communities, we must call it out and help others understand why it’s unacceptable. That can take courage—and it can’t be fire-hosed onto people in a way that sounds like extremism battling extremism. Rather, it must be rooted in both love and facts.

I wish I were more optimistic that radicalism can be expunged from the weary and wounded world. But I’ve read history, so I know better. Nonetheless, that doesn’t absolve me—or you—from continuing to do what we can to oppose monochromatic, strait-jacketed thinking that leads to violence. Let’s keep at it.

Care to learn more?

Get his book: Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. is available from Amazon and other online retailers.

Want to learn more about Afghanistan? Bill recommends Afghanistan: A History from 1260 the Present, by Jonathan L. Lee, which is available from Amazon.

To see the rising tide of terrorism, Bill recommends this summary from TRAC, the research center based at Syracuse University.

Care to learn more about scholar Stephen Prothero’s work promoting “religious literacy”? ReadTheSpirit magazine has featured a number of interviews with Prothero through the years. Here is a ReadTheSpirit interview with him about his first book on “religious literacy.” Then, a couple of years after that, here is another interview with Prothero about his companion book, God Is Not One.

Why 9/11 Matters in Our Troubled World: Shining a light on the dangers of extremist thinking

August 30, 2020 by Bill Tammeus

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE ‘TRIBUTE IN LIGHT‘—This photo of New York City 9/11 memorial lights that visually represent the Twin Towers also includes many of the professionals making it happen. Can you see them standing there, tending these lights? This year, the state of New York is sending special resources to make sure the 9/11 tradition continues safely even in the COVID pandemic. Remembering 9/11 is that important—especially now.

By BILL TAMMEUS
Contributing columnist and author

Each Sept. 11 has tortured my extended family since the terrorist attacks on that date in 2001. This year’s anniversary will be a little different for me, but no less agonizing.

That’s because I’ve spent the last year writing a book about how the murder of my nephew, Karleton Douglas Beye Fyfe, a passenger on the first plane to smash into the World Trade Center, caused various kinds of trauma in my family and how terrorism rooted in mutilated theology has ravaged not just us but the whole world.

The book—Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety—will be published early next year with a section devoted to how people can counter the kind of strait-jacketed, monochromatic thinking that can (and often does) lead to violence.

The writing process required me to go through page after page of saved, printed-out e-mails from family members—along with various other notes and clips of columns and blog posts I’ve written about all of this. Much of it was for The Kansas City Star, where I was an editorial page columnist at the time the hijacked planes crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Each note, column, blog, letter and photo has stabbed my shrapnelled heart with memories of Karleton—or KDBF, as we often called him. At the time of his murder, he was 31 years old with a wife and a toddler son.

Just days before he boarded American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston, where he was a bond analyst for John Hancock, his wife Haven told him she was pregnant again. Parker was born in May 2002. That was just a month before my own first grandchild was born—but because of 9/11, I didn’t see her until she was 10 days old. At her birth, I was on a reporting trip to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uzbekistan to help my readers understand Islam, the ancient, honorable religious tradition that the hijackers slimed by acting in ways that showed they didn’t understand the first thing about it.

So day after day this past year I’ve been reliving the first miserable year without KDBF, with whom I was very close. And then the second year and the third and on and on.

From that experience, the idea of absence speaks to me most profoundly. In these 19 years, Karleton has missed not just the birth of a son but also family birthday parties and family weddings, including that of his first cousin about two weeks after 9/11. He’s missed being part of the lives of his parents, his two sisters and their remarkable children. And he’s missed an inevitable move up a career ladder that had pegged him as a future financial world superstar—though one, I quickly add, who knew that money should be no idol but, rather, a way to free people to live generously, energetically, productively.

Multiply my family’s wretched experience by nearly 3,000 to account for the other people slaughtered on 9/11—and then by tens of thousands more to get some sense of the kind of dreadful results from a long list of domestic and international terrorist attacks, from Paris to Bali, Pittsburgh to El Paso to Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.

The world’s great religions all teach love, compassion, mercy and the infinite value of each human being, no matter what. And you can find inspiring examples of people living out those values in many places.

But there also are followers of those same faith traditions who are so certain they know all the answers before they even hear the questions that they imagine God has deputized them to bring discipline and punishment to people who don’t agree with them.

Beyond that, in recent years the U.S. political system has encouraged binary thinking—yes or no, black or white, blue or red in a world that desperately needs people to appreciate paradox, mystery, myth and allegory, people who understand what I was talking about when I titled my last book The Value of Doubt.

Complications: Some members of Karleton’s family didn’t want me to write this new book, while Karleton’s mother, my sister, told me she’s been waiting for a long time for me to write it. It won’t tell our family’s whole story, just my view of that. And it won’t give final answers to how to stop the blinkered thinking that leads to uncompromising dogmatism because those answers only now are beginning to emerge.

But for the 19^th anniversary of 9/11 this year, I hope you’ll join my search for ways to stop one-track theology that’s marinated in false certitude. That would honor not just Karleton but everyone who has perished at the hands of extremists as well as the families who have had to find a way forward in their absence.

Bill Tammeus, a Presbyterian elder and former award-winning Faith columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and formerly for The National Catholic Reporter. His latest book is The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith. Email him at [email protected].

Bill Tammeus: Holocaust remembrance takes each of us

July 25, 2014 by Bill Tammeus

FROM ReadTheSpirit Editor DAVID CRUMM—We must not forget. We must act to prevent future genocide. We are, right now, the people called to these goals.

More than 50 years ago, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial opened in Israel and Raul Hilberg published his 1,400-page history, The Destruction of the European Jews. But, decades passed before Holocaust education became a standard part of history lessons in American public school and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993 in Washington D.C. Meanwhile, witnesses were vanishing by the thousands, which is why Claude Lanzmann spent a decade creating his vast documentary, Shoah, and Steven Spielberg followed with his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Many historians, journalists and other researchers also have contributed to this effort. Award-winning journalist Bill Tammeus and his co-author Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, a descendant of Polish rabbis, both call Kansas City, Missouri, their hometown. They decided to contribute to this important body of documentation with their book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.

As these co-authors continue to share these stories across the U.S., ReadTheSpirit online magazine invited Bill Tammeus to write about their travels and their ongoing work.

By BILL TAMMEUS

In 2004, when Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn and I began work on, They Were Just People, we knew that in some ways the book would be timeless.

It proved to be exactly that from the time the University of Missouri Press published it in late 2009. Why? Because unlike books about—say, theological trends or how Pope Francis is affecting the Catholic Church—our book contains stories of what individuals went through to survive the Holocaust, and what each person went through is by now as complete a story as any can be.

The book, in essence, shines a light on a small part of the whole bitter Holocaust experience and, in doing that, seeks to honor both those who survived and those who helped them avoid Hitler’s machinery of murder.

So Jacques and I continue to give talks about the book, and we suspect we will do that for years to come.

One of our talks will happen the evening of Tuesday, August 5, 2014, at the Holocaust Memorial Center in suburban Detroit. And we will dedicate that evening to Zygie Allweiss and his family. Zygie is a Detroit-area resident who survived with his brother Sol, now deceased, thanks to help from the Dudzik family, who provided places for the boys to hide on their Polish farm.

Eventually Zygie and Sol came to Detroit and ran service stations there for years.

We are at or near the final years of life for the last of the Holocaust survivors, even many of those who were just children at the time. Indeed, Zygie has had several health issues since I last visited him in 2011, when I came to Detroit for a conference. And several of the 20-some survivors whose stories we tell in our book have died since the book was published. So it was important that we started when we did to spend several years on research, interviewing (in the U.S. and in Poland) and writing. Had we waited much longer some of the stories would have been lost.

It is both an honor and a burden to have become in some ways the voice of the Holocaust survivors in our book—and others as the people in our book in turn represent many other survivors who made it through—because of people whom Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, names as “Righteous Among the Nations” or more informally: righteous gentiles.

If the post-Holocaust phrase “never again” is to have meaning, we must not forget the reality of the German regime’s plan to destroy Europe’s 9 million Jews (more than three million of whom lived in Poland at the outbreak of World War II). Hitler’s “Final Solution” resulted in 6 million Jewish deaths, many of them in the six extermination camps that the Germans built in Poland.

And so it falls to people like Jacques and me, who are by trade simply story tellers—me as a journalist, Jacques as a rabbi who tells sacred stories—to make sure the world remembers.

And this is not simply an act of nostalgia. As Alvin H. Rosenfeld, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, notes in his 2013 book, Resurgent Antisemitism, hatred of Jews around the globe is dangerously rising again for many reasons. Anti-Judaism (a theological position) and modern antisemitism (more a racial stance full of character stereotyping) have deep roots in world history. In fact, David Nirenberg, in his 2013 book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, traces this bigotry back to ancient Egypt.

In our book, we tell stories of people who for many reasons—a few of them seemingly irrational—stood against that deep tradition of antisemitism and anti-Judaism and risked their lives to save Jews in Poland.

There is, of course, no silver lining to the Holocaust, which at base is a story of death and death and death. But here and there people who found themselves in the midst of it spoke life and life and life into the face of that death. And part of Jacques’ and my responsibility today is to tell the story of such brave people and of the difference they made in the lives not just of individual Jews but also the history of flawed (but sometimes glorious) humanity.

ALSO NEW TODAY—If you appreciated this column, you’ll also want to read a new, in-depth interview with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s biographer Charles Marsh about how Bonhoeffer so clearly saw the dangers of the Nazi regime before other European Christian leaders.

CARE TO READ MORE?

Order a copy of his book, They Were Just People, now through Amazon.

Bill Tammeus spent most of his career as a columnist for The Kansas City Star and he continues to write columns in his own website, now, called “Faith Matters.” To learn more about his long career in journalism, starting with his boyhood and spanning his career with The Star from 1970 to 2008, you will enjoy his new book-length memoir, Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans.

Bill also writes columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and The National Catholic Reporter. Contact him at [email protected].

Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, author of Accessible Judaism: A Concise Guide, is the spiritual leader of Temple Israel of Greater Kansas City and founder of Brit Braja Worldwide Jewish Outreach, the world’s first virtual synagogue in Spanish. Contact him at [email protected].

This column is jointly published by Faith Matters and readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.