Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero
PBS Frontline Special
It's been nearly a year since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and still the questions linger-including perhaps the ultimate question: Where was God on September 11th?
In "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," airing Tuesday, September 3, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE explores how the spiritual lives of both believers and unbelievers have been challenged by difficult questions of good and evil, God's culpability, and the potential for darkness within religion itself.
FRONTLINE examines the spiritual aftershocks of September 11th through the reflections of a cross section of Americans impacted by the attacks: from survivors pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers to the widow of a New York City firefighter; from priests and rabbis to security guards and opera divas; from Christians and Jews to Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists.
"Our foundations have been shaken, literally and metaphorically," says FRONTLINE producer Helen Whitney. "Out of the rubble and the pain and the terror has come the recognition that the language of economics, science, and politics no longer suffices to explain the catastrophe. The debate has suddenly become metaphysical as well."
The two-hour documentary special begins with September 11th itself, as both survivors and relatives of World Trade Center victims recount the shock of the initial attacks and the horror of realizing that their friends and loved ones had perished.
Stanley Praimnath, a loan officer who escaped from the World Trade Center just moments before the buildings collapsed, recalls looking out his 81st-floor office window and seeing the airplane bearing down upon him.
"Here coming towards me was the biggest aircraft I had ever seen in my life-eye level!" he says. "The sound that it made, when it crashed, it was like steel ripping against steel. That screeching, horrifying, ghostly sound. When the plane stopped, the wing was stuck in the doorway of the office twenty feet from where I was."
Almost immediately, it seems, some people began questioning the existence of God.
"I saw the pictures of the people at the windows knowing what was happening-that there was no ladder, there is no ladder long enough to reach me. There is no helicopter on the roof that is going to come," recalls Dr. Michael Brescia, executive medical director of Calvary Hospital. "I wonder how many of them thought if there was a God-and if there was a God, why me? Why this? And where am I going to go?"
Some people, even those who lost loved ones in the attacks, say the tragedy only affirms their belief in a higher power.
"At this stage, I have not questioned Him," says Bernie Heeran, a retired firefighter whose son Charlie worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and was killed on September 11th. "He had nothing to do with this. There were a lot more people who could have been killed. He was fighting evil that day like He does every day."
Others are neither so certain nor forgiving. In "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," FRONTLINE speaks with several individuals whose faith and spiritual beliefs have been sorely tested as a result of September 11th.
"I can't bring myself to speak to Him anymore because I feel so abandoned," says Marian Fontana, whose husband, David, was one of the 343 firefighters killed that day. "I guess deep down inside I know that He stills exists, and that I have to forgive and move on. But I'm not ready to do that yet."
Still others report that while they continue to believe in God, their image of Him has been irrevocably altered in the wake of the tragedy. Tim Lynston, a security guard who lost more than thirty friends on September 11th, no longer views God as a benevolent force.
"It was too barbaric the way the lives were taken," Lynston says. "So I look at Him now as a barbarian, and I probably [always] will.... I think I am a good Christian, but I have a different view and image of Him now. And I can't replace it with the old image."
Even atheists and agnostics found themselves questioning their beliefs-or lack of belief-in the days after September 11th. "I don't know if I ever believed in God, because I figured I was busy enough trying to stay alive," photographer Luca Babini, an agnostic, tells FRONTLINE. "What has changed after September 11th is that I wish for the opposite. I wish there was a God that I could access and that it could be proven that I can access Him. I wish God had a telephone number since September 11th."
The attacks also seem to have reopened the investigation of evil- a word that had seemingly fallen out of fashion. What is it we talk about when we talk about evil-and have we learned something new about evil since September 11th?
"I did question one word in my vocabulary after September 11th, and that was the word 'evil,'" says opera singer Renee Fleming, who performed "Amazing Grace" at the memorial service at Ground Zero. "I had decided that there was not even any black and white, that there were no extremes, that we lived in a world of gray. Everyone was more complex than the word evil would allow....I question it now: Does evil exist? Is it real?"
Columbia University English professor Andrew Delbanco thinks so.
"I have felt for some time that American culture has lost touch with the reality of evil," Delbanco, an agnostic, tells FRONTLINE. "We really did experience evil on September 11th, and we need to think about it and understand it in order to be able to cope with it, both in others and ourselves."
Author Ian McEwan disagrees. "I don't believe in evil at all," he says. "I think there are only people behaving-and sometimes behaving monstrously. And sometimes the monstrous behavior is so beyond our abilities to explain it, we have to reach for this numinous notion of evil."
Particularly troubling to some individuals is the role religion played in the attacks. In "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," FRONTLINE speaks with several religious leaders and scholars who now find themselves confronting the dark side of their faiths and the potential danger of religious fervor.
"From the first moment I looked into that horror on September 11th, into that fireball, into that explosion of horror, I knew it," says Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete. "I recognized an old companion. I recognized religion."
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield agrees. "Religion drove those planes into those buildings," he says. "It's amazing how good religion is at mobilizing people to do awful, murderous things. There is a dark side to it, and anyone who loves religious experience, including me, better begin to [admit] that there is a serious shadow side to this thing."
Khaled Abou El-Fadl, a professor of Islamic Law at UCLA and a Muslim, finds himself at odds with extremist elements within his own faith. "I am fighting for the soul and identity of Islam itself," he tells FRONTLINE. "There is no question that the extremists and puritans want to be the only representative of Islam....The most dangerous type of thinking would allow a person to think they speak authoritatively and decisively for God. And that type of thinking is more widespread in contemporary Islam than Osama bin Laden."
The documentary's final act explores the search for hope amid the rubble of Ground Zero. For Terry McGovern-a lapsed Catholic who had been both disillusioned by and alienated from the church-the loss of a loved one at the World Trade Center has led her to consider a spiritual reconciliation with her religion.
"I guess it made me reexamine all of my feelings and wonder if I didn't need to reenter the church community," she says. "I think on some very deep level I want the church's teachings on the spiritual life after death to be true. I need them to be true."
Father Joseph Griesedieck, an Episcopal priest who volunteered at Ground Zero, has witnessed positive changes that have come in the wake of the attacks. "Right after September 11th, a good many individuals that I talked to were reexamining their relationships and taking concrete steps to reconcile relationships that were not reconciled," Griesedieck says.
He remains troubled, however, by the ways in which people have been wounded spiritually by the tragedy. "There is this sense of being alone out there in a world that is a lot crueler than I thought," he says. "There's a sense...that we're surviving. To be open to faith takes vulnerability and some people aren't willing to do that-because we've been burned, some literally, by religion."
The documentary concludes with a brief epilogue in which people recall one of the more indelible images of September 11th: the sight of a man and a woman jumping from the burning towers, hand in hand. It's an image that few have forgotten, and one that provokes starkly different responses.
"To me it was just the bleakest possible image of the whole thing," author Ian McEwan says. "What I saw was utter desperation...I found no hope in that at all. If there is a God, he's a very indifferent God."
Writer and English professor Brian Doyle sees it differently.
"They reached for each other, and their hands met, and they jumped," he says. "I keep coming back to his hand in her hand....It's the most powerful prayer I can imagine-the most eloquent, the most graceful.... It's what makes me believe that we're not fools to believe in God."
"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" is a FRONTLINE co-production with Helen Whitney Productions. The producer is Helen Whitney. The writers are Helen Whitney and Ron Rosenbaum.
FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers.
FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.
Michael Sullivan is the executive producer, special projects for FRONTLINE.
The executive producer is David Fanning.
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FRONTLINE XXI/September 2002