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Christian History Corner: Learning From the Other 9/11

"It's getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers," wrote the Christian scholar, novelist, and lay theologian Dorothy L. Sayers in her novel Gaudy Night. "And the first thing a principle does—if it really is a principle—is to kill somebody."

I write this as midnight approaches and the calendar flips to the new Day of Infamy. I am thinking, as are many others, of where I was and what I felt on September 11, 2001, when I first heard that airplanes had struck the World Trade Center's towers.

I was in the basement of the Duke Divinity School's library, attending to my duties as copy editor of Church History, the journal of the American Society for Church History. Adam Zele, the book review editor, hung up the telephone, his face pale. Someone had just called to tell him: Two planes had hit the towers. Another was headed for the Pentagon.

At first I did not believe Adam's news. Surely his informant was wrong—or pulling a sick prank.

But soon I was sitting wordlessly in a darkened film theater at Duke's Bryan student center, with hundreds of other stunned students. In a matter of minutes, we found ourselves bonded into a single disbelieving community of horror.

We watched the footage replayed again and again. We heard the confused reports. Gradually these moved to a consensus: This was the work of terrorists. And terrorists who were not political radicals only, but Holy Warriors. These were men whose hatred of America had boiled up into a blind conviction that God willed their heinous acts.

In those first hours of shock, when all of my insides felt like they had sunk irretrievably to the bottom of my gut, the event seemed a freak—a deed with no parallel.

In the weeks and months after, journalists, professors, and other would-be authorities poured out a flood of words—trying to understand what had happened, grappling with motives, searching for logic, peering into the mind of Islamic fundamentalism's lunatic fringe.

Even in all of that flood, and even in the two years of analysis that ensued, it was not until this week that I heard of another event on American soil, nearly a century and half old, that shared not only the date of this tragedy, but its potent mix of political and religious motivation.

On September 11, 1857, 120 "gentiles" were slaughtered by Mormon malcontents in an impoverished, remote section of Utah. The Mountain Meadows massacre has been called "one of the worst mass murders in American history."

Though details of the event are vague and no eyewitness wholly trustworthy, the consensus of recent historical study and dramatic treatment supports the outline of the story as Mark Twain told it in his Roughing It:

A large party of Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of their wagons, and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five days!…At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They retired to the upper end of the "Meadows," resumed civilized apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with cheer after cheer. …

. . . and were promptly slaughtered en masse, excepting only a few of the many children—those under the age of seven, deemed too young to "tell tales."

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47