The publishing house of the 3 million member Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is disavowing its own recent book, which alleged that the Bush administration actually blew up the World Trade Center and fabricated the strike on the Pentagon on 9/11.
Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 was written by process theologian David Ray Griffin at United Methodist Claremont School of Theology in California, where he co-directs the Center for Process Studies. Process theology believes that God is constantly evolving and that history is also controlled by ongoing sinister conspiracies that super-cede divine authority. Griffin also is a member of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth," a non-partisan group "dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11."
After several months of enormous criticism, the board of directors of Westminster John Knox (WJK) Press finally had this to say about Griffin’s conspiracy potboiler: "The Board believes…the conspiracy theory is spurious and based on questionable research"; and "This particular volume is not up to WJK editorial standards and not representative of [our] publishing program.”
Despite the disavowal and the embarrassment, WJK is still not withdrawing Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 from circulation. The book is still promoted on the church’s website with glowing blurbs. According to Griffin’s book, federal officials brought down the World Trade Center through “controlled demolition,” in a conspiracy that included Vice President Cheney, Mayor Giuliani, and thousands of others in federal and local law enforcement. Meanwhile, according to Griffin, the U.S. shot down flight 93 over Pennsylvania, and staged an explosion at the Pentagon.
Why did the Bush administration want to kill thousands of Americans on 9/11? According to Griffin, it was to justify an expansion of the American “empire,” which regularly murders 180 million people every decade through U.S.-imposed poverty and disease, exceeding by at least three fold even the number of victims of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is nice that Griffin at least admits that the Nazis and Soviets murdered tens of millions, even if they were not as bad as the U.S.
Among Griffin’s fans is radical Catholic dissident theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, advocate of Gaia the earth goddess, and now an emeritus scholar colleague with Griffin at Claremont seminary. "David Griffin has previously made the case for the Bush administration's complicity in 9/11 and the cover-up of this evidence by the 9/11 Commission,” Ruether explains on the Presbyterian Publishing House’s website under its “bestsellers” section. “Here, in this important book, he puts these shocking realities in the context of Christian theology and the challenge to the churches. In a profound exploration of the nature and history of the demonic, Griffin suggests that American empire is a culmination of human demonic alienation from God."
Even more gushing is Richard Horsley, religion professor at the University of Massachusetts, and author of Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. According to Horsley, the U.S. has become the “New Rome,” invading other countries to control their resources. “Griffin makes a compelling case that the imperial practices of the American government have become a destructive force in the world,” Horsley proclaims obligingly for the Presbyterians. “And he clarifies the biblical and theological basis for Christians to challenge the resurgent American imperialism that often claims divine blessing on its destructive actions.
The Presbyterian Publishing House website goes on to explain that Griffin has “sorted through enormous amounts of government and independent data” and surfaced “very unsettling inconsistencies” about what really happened on 9/11. Griffin then applies his shocking discoveries to “a distinctively Christian perspective” as seen through the lens of “Jesus' life, death, and teachings.” Even more adroitly, according to the Presbyterians, Griffin “applies Jesus' teachings to the current political administration.”
But the Presbyterian Publishing House board of directors apparently is no longer buying the hype of its own website blurbs. The board’s chairman told the Presbyterian News Service that Griffin’s religious content “helpful and timely” but the controversial 9/11 theories expressed by the author were unaffiliated with the beliefs of the company.
It is not clear exactly what aspects of Griffin’s process theology are helpful and timely, from a Presbyterian perspective. Griffin believes that Jesus mission was really to overthrow the oppressive Roman Empire. But the early church, starting with the Apostles, connivingly covered up the Lord’s original intent and instead invented a Gospel based on forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation. In other words, according to Griffin, the Christian Church has had it all wrong from the very start for 2,000 years. Why would Presbyterians find that perspective “helpful?”
In an interview with the Louisville Courier Journal,” the Presbyterian publishing board chairman further explained about his board’s disavowal of Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: “We gave Dr. Griffin a platform that he did not have before for his views. He had previously published two other books about 9/11 from a smaller publisher…that did not get the same level of media attention. While the book is his responsibility, the fact that we published it connected it to a church-owned publisher, so we felt the need to explain to our own constituency the decision to publish.”
It only took close to five months since Griffin’s book’s publication for the Presbyterian Publishing House to admit the books has problems, which they evidently had not considered prior to publication. It took ridicule and scathing critiques from secular media, including two features in The Washington Post about Griffin, to finally open these Presbyterian publishing eyes.
But in fairness to Griffin, he merely wrote what the Religious Left, including the curia of mainline church denominations, mostly believe. For much of the Religious Left, Christianity is mostly fraudulent, based on erroneous scripture, pointing to a non-existent heaven, and premised on impossible supernatural occurrences. For them, the church only has relevance if it endorses flamboyant forms of political “liberation,” that range from Marxism to even radical Islam, but unified by a common hostility to traditional Christianity, Western culture, democracy, free markets, human rights, and belief in transcendent truth.
Congratulations to the Presbyterians for finally discovering, post-publication, that it was actually al Qaeda, and not the Bush Administration, that massacred 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Such a thorough investigation! But Professor Griffin, if he can be reached through the Styrofoam antenna that he might have wrapped around his head, should perhaps be thanked for speaking explicitly what much of the Religious Left believes but only have the nerve publicly to imply.
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