9/11 Was One Day in a Long History

For the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, CRC News has prepared a series of stories about how the Christian Reformed Church and its members have responded – and what we have learned – in the last 10 years.

Rev. Herm Keizer, former director of the Christian Reformed Church’s Chaplaincy Ministries, was working as a chaplain with the U.S. Army in Washington, D.C., on that sunny Tuesday morning 10 years ago when a plane crashed into the Pentagon.

Nearly 190 people, many of them military personnel, died after the plane crashed into the western side of the Pentagon. All 64 people on board the aircraft, including the hijackers, were killed, as were 125 people in the building.

A portion of the Pentagon collapsed and firefighters spent days trying to fully extinguish the blaze.

Upon hearing of the situation, Keizer hurried from the State Department to the Pentagon. There he joined a group of volunteers who were helping out in any way possible, including working with the firefighters, to pull people from the ruins.

The next day Keizer went to the Army Operation Center in the Pentagon to work as a chaplain.

During his career as an Army chaplain, Keizer had been all over the world and seen many things. He served in combat situations in Vietnam and was wounded twice, so he was no stranger to violence and its aftermath.

Nonetheless, it was painful for him to help survivors sort through the wreckage at the Pentagon and then to serve as a chaplain to those who lost friends in the attack, or those dealing with what they came across during rescue efforts.

He also traveled to New York City to work with the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee to provide assistance there.

In the wake of the attacks and his work with survivors and others, Keizer thought hard about and read many books on terrorism and its roots and growth.

"Terrorism is not new in our modern world, but for us in the United States the terror was always someplace else. We could ignore it; we could distance ourselves from it and choose not to see what was there to see," he says.

"Most of us saw little of the devastation of the genocide in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives to the most primitive instruments of terror and death. We did not see the concentration camps and the murder of innocents in Bosnia. We dignified this atrocity by calling it 'ethnic cleansing.'"

But terror, on that day a decade ago, took on an American face – in New York City, in a Pennsylvania farm field where a hijacked plane crashed, and in the Pentagon.  

Since the attacks, Keizer has worked to expand dialogue between Christians and Muslims. He did that as director of chaplains for the CRC, a position he took in 2002, and has continued to do it in a variety of ways since his retirement from the CRC’s chaplain's office in 2010.

In a sermon he gave early in 2011 to a CRC congregation, he said that establishing a dialogue between Christians and Muslims "is one of my current interests and concerns and a pressing need in our religious world today."

He said his interest in this issue goes back many years, way beyondSept. 11, 2001, and has been part of his ministry for several years.

"My first exposure to the teaching of Islam came when I was in the seminary and took a course on world religions. That course did not really prepare me for my interactions with Muslims later in my ministry, but it did plant some very important seeds," he said.

His professor, Henry Stob, "taught us that we needed to hold other religions with some positive regard. He reasoned that with general Revelation, our creation means we are image-bearing creatures,  and  the testimony of special Revelation, all religions, no matter how distorted they are still a response to the one true God."

He then recounted some of his encounters with Islam and how he responded to them.

During the first Gulf War, he worked with the Saudi Embassy and the U.S. Department of State to get a Status of Forces Agreement that allowed U.S. chaplains to wear their religious symbols on their uniforms and for the Jewish chaplains to celebrate their holy days on Saudi soil.

“At the beginning of the war, our chaplains were forbidden to wear the cross and the tablets. We were able to make concessions with the Saudis and won the right to wear the insignia on our uniform and practice our faith,” he said.

He and his staff also wrote a training material on Islam which they taught soldiers and marines before they left for the Gulf.

When he was assigned to the Department of Defense, one of his responsibilities was to certify which religious groups could send chaplains into the military. At that time, he said, the Muslim community had several candidates they wanted to endorse.

"I did a lot of work with the Islamic community, on education requirements and certification of imams. I administered the oath of office to the first Army Muslim chaplain," he said.

When he served as a European Command chaplain, fighting was raging in Bosnia. The month of Ramadan was coming and so he did some research so he could advise the commander on what policy they needed to provide for U.S. Muslim soldiers.

"Things like physical training, heat exposure, afternoon break and serving meals after dark," he said.

He also studied the history of the celebrations at the end of Ramadan. When he briefed the commanding general of NATO that the Muslims celebrated the end of their holy month by firing their weapons, Keizer was sent to brief all the commanders so that there would be no return fire which could led to people being killed.

"I was also asked by our Secretary of Defense to work with the leaders of the Bosnian government on establishing a chaplaincy in their military, which was about half Muslim and half Christian," he said.

His last chaplaincy assignment was as a special military advisor to the Ambassador for International Religious Freedom at the U.S. State Department. In that position, one of his responsibilities was to manage a Muslim round table, established to address issues of religion freedom for American Muslims and Muslims of other countries. This was before 9/11.

"Once each month the senior Muslims in the D.C. area would come to the State Department for a meeting and twice a year we would bring Muslim leaders from all over the U.S. to meet together."

He was in that position on 9/11. Because the interest in Islam grew quickly after that day and, since he knew many Muslims, he arranged for many to meet with the senior leadership at the State Department.

"I met and had some long discussions with Islamic scholars and had many very interesting conversations."

Keizer now serves on a multi-agency task force in the Christian Reformed Church in North America looking at ways to prepare for witnessing to the Islamic world both overseas and in the United States.

"One thing I think we need to remember is that this present contact with Islam is not the first time in the history of the church," he says. "There is a very long history of conversations between Christian and Islamic leaders and scholars that goes back for centuries."