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The Boston Globe also notes that church attendance is back to normal, but says attendance at church educational programs is still surging. "A crash course on the basics of Christianity is booming at Grace Chapel in Lexington; Bible study is up at Armenian Memorial Church in Watertown; and a support group, ostensibly for people dealing with the loss of a spouse, has become more popular at Wellesley Hills Congregational Church. … Gordon-Conwell Theological School has seen high interest in online theology courses."

The Globe interviews Bruce W. B. Jenneker, associate rector at Boston's Trinity Church, to explain the phenomenon. "Many of these people have never been in church before," he says. "What drew them here initially was our community's commitment to finding meaning in the midst of insanity, but once they got here it was ritual and story and symbol and myth, things that point beyond ourselves and put us in touch with the transcendent, that made them stay."

Ah yes, nothing like ritual and story and symbol and myth to help you sleep at night. Nothing like "the transcendent" to comfort our fears about being blown up and poisoned. Heaven forbid that a church might actually point visitors to the Prince of Peace, the Balm of Gilead, our rock and fortress.

If there is a religious trend after 9/11, it's a stepping up of the battle against exclusivism. In publications and in meetings around the world, the high-minded proclaim that the problem of terrorism isn't a problem with Islam—it's a problem with any religion that claims to be the only true religion.

Debris was still falling in Manhattan when anti-exclusivists started their publicity engines. Richard Dawkins, who has made a career out of religion-bashing, wrote an article for the September 15 edition of London's The Guardian explaining that the attacks "came from religion." "To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns," he wrote. "Do not be surprised if they are used."

A few weeks later, The New York Times Magazine published a similar argument as its cover story. "This surely is a religious war—but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism," wrote Andrew Sullivan.

Rather, it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. This war even has far gentler echoes in America's own religious conflicts—between newer, more virulent strands of Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism. These conflicts have ancient roots, but they seem to be gaining new force as modernity spreads and deepens. They are our new wars of religion—and their victims are in all likelihood going to mount with each passing year.

At 4,281 words, Sullivan's article is too long to discuss in depth, but he really does believe that those who believe homosexual behavior and abortion are sinful are no different from the followers of Osama bin Laden:

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October (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45