I was asleep when it started.
I was beginning my senior year of college, hundreds of miles from Manhattan, when the first plane hit. I was still in bed. A roommate pounded on my door to wake me up. He said I needed to see something. I walked out into the common room to see my other roommates staring at the TV, watching the news.
Smoke was billowing from one of the Twin Towers. As we watched, the second plane hit the other tower. My mind couldn’t process what my eyes were seeing. None of us could. I picked up the phone to call my parents who lived in New York City, but I couldn’t get through. Everyone was frantically dialing everyone else at that moment.
So I sat and watched like so many others.
Months later, I went home to visit. The smell of burnt ash was still in the air. I had been watching from afar for months and knew many people whose lives would never be the same, but I hadn’t experienced the aroma of smoke and ash.
I had lived in Manhattan for years, but when my city experienced the worst event that I could imagine, I learned about it the way most of the country did: through a screen, at a safe distance.
Now, I’m a pastor in Manhattan, ministering in the town where I grew up and where my father pastored Redeemer Presbyterian Church through 9/11. The longer I live here, the more convinced I am that those towers were not just buildings. They were cathedrals.
Our Modern Religion
Every culture builds its tallest structure to honor what it actually worships. Egypt raised tombs for god-kings. Monuments, palaces, and government buildings dominated skylines for a time. Then, in the early 1900s, the ziggurats of capitalism, known as office buildings, went up to honor the gods of commerce. The only thing that keeps us from raising them higher is physics.
If the Twin Towers were cathedrals, the religion surrounding them was not secularism. It was, and continues to be, faith in meritocracy. The idea that you are what you earn. You get to be what you deserve.
How is this a faith? It has all the features of religion.
It holds a belief: Work hard, be excellent, and you will rise; if you slack, you will fall. It has practices: Build your resume, update your LinkedIn profile, achieve letters to place behind your name that show your worth, get your kids into the right schools, and ensure they become good people. It has a community: Fellow networkers and people who share your same achievement goals.
All of it preaches the same mantra: I belong because I earned it.
In other eras, culture told you who you were from the outside. If your father was a blacksmith, then you were destined to be a blacksmith. Your identity was given to you. Today, it is reversed; we are told to look inside to discover who we are. Whatever you discover within, you must perform it out in the world because you are what you make of yourself.
Many of our modern stories are built on the idea that if we just work hard enough and climb high enough, we can construct a self that is worth something.
The instinct to work hard, build, and make something of your life is not a sin; it is part of being made in the image of a God who also builds and creates. We should all want a world that rewards effort in proper proportion. My own great-grandfather left a village in Italy to come to America because in his premodern world, he could only be what his father had been: a potter. It is easy for us to spot the deficiencies in cultures with deterministic societal identities, but our new faith in meritocracy fails too, and events like 9/11 revealed it.
Lolita’s Story
A woman in my congregation, Lolita Jackson, was in the South Tower on Sept. 11. She has given me permission to tell part of her story. In 2001, Lolita was working for Morgan Stanley, the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. Her whole job was managing risk and staying in control. When the first plane struck the North Tower, she and colleagues did not stand around. They got up to leave the building.
Her friend Tom ducked into an empty office to call his wife. She began to follow him, but, she says, “Something told me not to go.” She went to the elevators and rode down to the sky lobby on the 44th floor. She was still there when the second plane hit her building about 30 floors above her. Tom reached the same elevator bank roughly five minutes after she did. He was in the elevator when the plane struck, and he died. “Had I been with him,” Lolita said, “I would have died as well.”
When that second plane hit, the crowd surged toward the nearest stairwell, but Lolita felt pulled toward a different stairwell on the other side of the floor that no one was using. She opened the door, found it empty and clear, shouted to others to come with her, and led about 50 people down to the street.
Lolita understands that she did not live because she deserved it, or because she was more spiritual; and Tom did not die because he was less so. The most prepared, most capable people in that building were not the ones who lived. She got into the building through meritocracy, her resume, her abilities. But that was not how she got out. It isn’t how anyone else got out either.
That truth should be obvious, but our meritocracy mindset makes it difficult to understand because it simultaneously pumps two poisons into us. Winning poison makes us think that if we are successful in life, it’s because we deserve it, which means the people who lose in life deserve that as well. Losing poison makes us think that we don’t just fail — we are failures. The first poison makes us cruel and arrogant. The second poison makes us depressed and anxious.
September 11 and John 11
The Sunday after the towers fell, my dad preached from John 11 about the death of Lazarus. Two sisters meet Jesus at the worst moment of their lives, and each says the exact same sentence to him: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, 32). In suffering, we always ask, “God where were you? You could have stopped this.”
With Mary, Jesus weeps and “was deeply moved” (John 11:33), though a more literal translation is that he was raging in anger at death. He already knew what he was about to do, but he wept anyway.
The miracle of that moment was not that he raised Lazarus, who would die again later. The real miracle was that by performing this sign Jesus set his own death in motion. “From that day on they made plans to put him to death” (John 11:53). The only way Jesus could call Lazarus out of a grave was to climb into it himself. That is how his words to Martha came true: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall live. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26).
If you are what you build and what you achieve, then that identity can be taken from you. You are only as secure as your last quarter, your kids’ performance, or as long as the thing you built stays standing. September 11 was a very physical way to watch it go.
By offering himself as the resurrection and the life, Jesus gives us an identity no one can ever take away. Your life, your name, your past, and your future are hidden in him so that they are out of reach of any attack, diagnosis, or failure.
In this way, Christianity is the opposite of “you are what you produce.” The world says, “Achieve, build, perform.” The gospel is received, given, and secured. Jesus’ life for you. If it is given, you cannot earn it, and if you cannot earn it, you cannot fail your way out of it either.
When you make the gospel the core of who you are, it becomes the antidote for both poisons. Winning poison is destroyed because you cannot look down on anyone at any time once you know you did not get where you are on your own merits. Losing poison is destroyed because your worth was never the sum of your output to begin with. Grace breaks the connection between who you are and what you produce, and the moment you experience that break, both arrogance and anxiety begin to lessen.
This truth confronts the religious as much as the secular person. Religious people often think they are fine because they are pious, go to church, and follow all the religious practices. Secular people often think they are fine because they are good, nice, tolerant, and caring. These two groups think they are opposites, but in reality they adhere to the same faith in different guises. It’s the faith of meritocracy: I am what I earn and what I do. One performs for God. The other performs for everyone else. Different performances, same religion.
The problem with performance-based religion is not just that it can be taken away from you. It is that you can never rest. Ross Douthat, on his last podcast for The New York Times, asked tech founder Bryan Johnson, who is spending millions to biohack his body so it will not die, if his project is really just about seeking control. Bryan’s answer was that in the future we will be able to rest because AI will run our health, but until then, “It’s a job to do this now.”
That’s meritocracy’s promise: Rest someday. But it’s earned by never resting. It’s why we are so tired. We don’t believe we are allowed to ever really rest. The gospel says the work is finished before you ever arrived, so you can stop. When your identity is in the gospel, failure may cost you a job, but it cannot cost you your name.
Lolita would tell you that it took years for her to embrace her new identity not just in her head, but in her heart. In the seasons after 9/11 she felt God stripping away the securities she had spent a life building. Sometimes God uses a crisis to show us the vaporous nature of the identities we’ve built. He takes things away that seem unshakable and immovable. He permits our cathedrals to collapse so that we will look for “the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).
For some, 9/11 is a wound that will not close on this side of the resurrection. For others, it has faded from memory. It has faded, in part, because we’re too busy with our performances.
Watching the towers fall from a distance kept me from the suffering. If we’re honest, in moments like 9/11, it can feel like God is also distant. That was the complaint Mary and Martha both leveled at Jesus: If you had been here, if you were not distant, things would have been different. They didn’t realize that Jesus’ presence in that moment was the surest sign that God was not distant. Jesus’ presence on earth in general, and at their brother’s grave in particular, ensured cosmically that he would go down into death to destroy it.
I watched the morning of 9/11 as a spectator. God never has.
The question Jesus asked Martha at her brother’s grave is the one he still asks us: Do you believe this? If he is the resurrection and the life, then we can work in towers without needing them, and we can grieve their loss without losing who we are.
Michael Keller serves as pastor of Redeemer Lincoln Square and is co-author of the forthcoming book, “The Stories We Live By.”