In his book on the ascent of moral relativism, Christianity in an Age of Terrorism, Gene Veith said that the attacks of 9/11 were so horrific that even sophisticated New Yorkers began to once again believe in objective evil.[1] As encouraging as that may be, the sad story is that they’ve come to label the wrong things as evil—Israel and wealth—a perversion reflected in their 2025 choice of a Muslim mayor who sympathizes with Hamas and has targeted the rich for insult and attrition.[2] It seems that “The City that Never Sleeps” has fallen asleep at the wheel.
1. Gene Edward Veith, Christianity in an Age of Terrorism (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002). See also Veith’s related article “What Hath Terror Wrought?” (adapted from the book), available at www.issuesetcarchive.org.
2. Anthony Izaguirre, Jill Colvin, and the Associated Press, “Zohran Mamdani Elected Mayor of New York in Largest Turnout Election in over 50 Years,” Fortune, November 5, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/11/05/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-mayor-election-democratic-socialist; see also “A Look at Zohran Mamdani’s Policy Ideas as He Becomes New York City’s Mayor,” CNN, December 30, 2025, www.cnn.com.
How in the wide world of sports has this come to pass? Let me venture to coin labels to spread the blame around:
1. The Islamorubes.
Okay, this is an ungainly word, but it’s more to the point than ‘Islamophobe,’ a term used to stigmatize as diseased those who reasonably fear the influence and spread of Islam. Unfortunately, we can thank President George W. Bush for a striking deployment of the counsel that “Islam is okay, and you’re not if you think otherwise.” It came in the days after 9/11, when he was speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington D.C., flanked by Muslim dignitaries. He assured us that “Islam is peace.”[3] Of course, those were wild times when he wanted to calm the nation. His speech was a political instrument, but there’s little reason to think he knew better than to serve up this pablum.
3. George W. Bush, “‘Islam Is Peace’ Says President: Remarks by the President at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C.,” September 17, 2001, Office of the Press Secretary, White House Archives, georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.
He insisted that “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.”[4] (Years later, Mamdani played on this alleged concern with a bogus story about his aunt’s anxiety.[5]) Not a hint of the fact that women who don’t cover their heads when they go outside in many Muslim countries will find themselves in peril. He also observed, “Like the good folks standing with me, the American peoples were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday’s attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world.”[6] Truth be known, millions of Muslims celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and a thousand of them gathered at London’s Finsbury Park mosque on the first anniversary to hail the hijackers’ murderous achievement.[7]
4. Bush, “‘Islam Is Peace’ Says President.”
5. “Zohran Mamdani Scrutinized for Saying Aunt Was Victim of Anti-Muslim Bigotry,” The Washington Times, October 27, 2025, www.washingtontimes.com.
6. Bush, “‘Islam Is Peace’ Says President.”
7. Farrukh Dhondy, “London Muslims ‘Celebrate’ 9/11,” City Journal, September 12, 2002, www.city-journal.org.
On the 10th anniversary of the attack, Baptist Press asked me to reflect on the intervening years. In that piece, I drew on a quarterly report from thereligionofpeace.com, which supplied an account of over 300 terrorist attacks, enough to construct an A-Z list , with every letter represented—from Abuja (Nigeria) to Zarqa (Jordan), and with entries from both North America (Toronto) and Asia (Pattani, Thailand).[8]
Ah, but the vast majority of Muslims aren’t up to this sort of stuff. Well, sure. But the vast majority of Southern Baptists don’t attend church weekly (“12 million members, and the FBI can’t find half of them”), don’t witness, and don’t manage as much as a tithe. So, we have a host of slackers, whose watered down or purely nominal discipleship is no guide to true Christianity.
In this connection, I’m reminded of a Kurdish friend’s observation, that ISIS is real Islam. By his account, seventh-century Muslims raced through his homeland (that of the ancient Medes), and forced conversions at the point of the sword. These were the same guys who, within a hundred years of Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, seized territory a thousand land miles east (India), west (Spain), north (Syria) and south (Sudan) of Mecca.
8. Mark Coppenger, “9/11: A Decade of Studying Islam,” Baptist Press, September 7, 2011, www.baptistpress.com; the terror-attack figures are drawn from TheReligionofPeace.com.
Of course, Muslims no longer sweep on horseback across continents swallowing up nation after nation. Yes, here and there, they make an armed run at fresh territory, as when Turks seized a third of Cyprus in 1974. But internal, sectarian domination is the issue, as when the Shiite Ayatollah returned to Iran in 1979,[9] or, week-by-week, as Muslim Hausa slaughter Christian Yoruba in Northern Nigeria.[10]
9. “Iranian Revolution,” Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed June 10, 2026, www.britannica.com; Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979.
10. “Nigeria,” World Watch List 2025, Open Doors, accessed June 10, 2026, www.opendoors.org.
In our day, widespread damage is done through the outworking of Islamic culture, which is often corrupted by tribal and familial priorities. For instance, in her memoir, Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali observes, “In Somalia, to have a stake in government was to have a family member in the place where tax money and money from kickbacks was distributed. No more, no less. I saw what that does to a nation: it destroys public trust” (a social feature now coming to the attention of the citizens of Minneapolis). She observed that “almost every civil servant [she] encountered seemed abysmally ignorant . . . They were completely uninterested in doing their jobs, and spent their time scheming about how to ‘transfer’ government funds, a euphemism for stealing them.”[11]
11. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007).
2. The 30-Rock Climbing Club
“30-Rock” is the nickname for New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Center, the home of NBC (and the former MSNBC, which has morphed into MSNOW). CBS’s headquarters (“Black Rock”) is also on Manhattan, as is ABC’s base of operations. These three stand in for the Main Stream Media, whose bias is blatant and baleful when it comes to matters of public policy. Their zeal for “progressive” politics is as suffocating as their revulsion for all things Trump. (Think, for instance, of the performances by Joy Reid, Lawrences O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Al Sharpton, The View, Chris Hayes, Stephen Colbert, George Stephanopoulos, and Jimmy Kimmel.) Through them, New York and the nation are marinated in “Orange Man & ICE: Bad” and “Sanctuary City & DEI: Good.” In our media culture, aspiring influencers can quickly get the message that “there’s gold in them thar rocks” and tailor their careers accordingly.
3. The Socio-Econo-Delusians
Speaking of rocks, I’m reminded of the old song, “Big Rock Candy Mountains.” It’s evolved over the last hundred years into a children’s song, but, in its most popular version, it concerns the dreams of hobos. Here are some lines that resonate with Mamdami’s pitch:
. . . In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes, and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty, and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
Where the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth, and the hens lay soft boiled eggs . . .
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, the jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in
There ain’t no short-handled shovels, no axes, saws, or picks
I’m a goin’ to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.[12]
12. Harry McClintock, “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (New York: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1928).
Far be it for the mainstream media to gainsay the expenditure required—well over a billion dollars a year to shelter, feed, medicate, etc. the hundreds of thousands of “undocumented” immigrants in New York.[13] But it’s not just about goodies and escape from sanctions. The song also imagines lynching the one who “invented work.” Of course, that was God, for he gave Adam and Eve tasks in Eden, and then made their work lives more burdensome after the Fall. But we also need to turn our eyes to the wealthy who create paying jobs, the rich folks Mamdani demonizes.
13. Office of the New York State Comptroller, “Asylum Seeker Spending,” accessed June 10, 2026, www.osc.ny.gov.
Take, for example, NYC resident Valerie Mars, whose net worth is estimated at $11.6 billion. She’s the great granddaughter of Frank Mars, who invented the Milky Way bar in 1923, and she’s active in company affairs. Mars employs 80,000 people involved in the production and distribution of M&Ms, Juicy Fruit, Pringles, Kellogg’s, IAMS, and a hundred other much appreciated products. Her family’s sin—profitably creating remunerated work for the deliverance of good things to us.
Of course, there are evil rich in NYC. At his death, Jeffrey Epstein’s estate was estimated at nearly $600M. But to treat the wealthy as pariah’s per se is daft. There’s no disgrace in wide income gaps. In the last two weeks, I’ve taken friends to the Opry and to a stock car race, thanks to the kindness of vettix.org, and organization that donates event tickets to U.A. military veterans. In both cases, we applauded the deliverances of two wealthy, Christian brothers who’d ventured into very challenging professions—Ricky Skaggs ($20M) and Joe Gibbs ($100M), whose NFL team won three Super Bowls before he became car owner with several NASCAR championships. (One of his drivers, William Sawalich, won the 2026 race.) I submit that grumbling over their financial success would be churlish.
Contrary to the Mamdani mindset, I find myself continually thanking God for many of the very rich. When I was a kid in the 1950s, on a family visit to visit a grandma in Florida, we spent time at the carillon-equipped Bok Tower and Gardens at Lake Wales. Edward Bok, an immigrant from the Netherlands, began his labors as a boy in New York City, washing windows at a bakery and scavenging coal dropped from delivery carts in the streets. He eventually became editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, a post he held for thirty years. At his death in 1930, his estate was valued at around $24M ($430M today).[14] His philanthropy was vast, as is our debt to him. He was blessed to escape the Mamdanian insult and agenda, and, so, we are blessed as we walk those enchanting grounds.
14. “Edward Bok,” Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed June 10, 2026, www.britannica.com.
We might well call those who embrace the mayor’s topsy-turvy economic fantasies “Ninevites.” As a New York friend observed, “Young people don’t have a clue what socialism is” for “They are entitled and have never suffered under the regimes they are advocating for.” Also, thanks to their schooling, they’re likely baaing and bleating in the sheep herds led by historical reconstructionists Howard Zinn (People’s History)[15] and Nikole Hannah-Jones (1619 Project).[16] Thus, they’re remindful of the citizens of ancient Nineveh, for whom Jonah had no sympathy. God counseled him that the city contained “more than 120,000 persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left” (Jonah 4:11). Knuckleheads. And NYC can best that number by a long shot.
4. The Pharisites.
15. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
16. Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021).
When I moved back to Nashville in 2011, I got a front row seat at a debacle at my graduate alma mater, Vanderbilt. A lesbian was in place as dean of the divinity school, and the administration forbade the campus chapter of the Christian Legal Society to bar homosexuals from leadership positions. The university said this would be like excluding blacks from such roles, and they stuck with this conceit in the face of some serious backlash, including from the Commodore quarterback, Jordan Rogers, who spoke for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
The modern university has distinguished itself for purveying this sort of stupidity, and Vanderbilt was determined to hold up its end of the bargain. But they don’t hold a candle to Columbia, where the Kool Kids admire Hamas and despise Israel. It’s well-connected to “critical theory” madness, whereby generations are being taught that you have to divide the entire world into oppressors and the oppressed, with the former condemned and the latter sainted. On this model, it’s exhilarating to don a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf and rail against the Jews, and, indeed against Judeo-Christian/Western culture in general. (Never mind that mostly Muslim-majority nations would make life miserable if not shorter for their friends in another “oppressed” group, the homosexuals. A course in logic somehow got lost in the curricular shuffle.)
Like the Pharisees in Jesus’s day, these exalted Ivy Leaguers have “lost the plot.” Columbia was founded by the British (as King’s College) in the eighteenth century and their first presidents were Anglican clergy. In the early nineteenth century, the school employed a classical curriculum, requiring entering students to be fluent in Latin and Greek, and all juniors were required to take a course in European literature.[17] Then, in the 1890s, the University (now named Columbia) built its signature hall, the [Seth] Low Memorial Library. It’s modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, is fronted by Greek, Ionic columns, and has a Greek Cross footprint. The inscription declares that the school was established “for advancement of the public good and the glory of Almighty God.”
17. “The History of Columbia College,” Columbia College, accessed June 10, 2026, www.college.columbia.edu.
Then, in mid-twentieth-century, Dwight Eisenhower became president of the university (before becoming president of the US). This was the man who, as Supreme Allied Commander in WWII, played a major role in saving Judeo-Christian, Western Civilization from Nazi and Fascist madness (a madness applauded by the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who also hated Jews[18]). And now the university is sucking the life out of that heritage and the good sense out of its sophomoric matriculants. Like Pharisees of old, these “scholars” heap contempt on the pillars of Western Civilization, while parading about in their political correctness, “tithing the mint and cumin” of their wokeness, while “neglecting” (and even dismissing) the weightier matters of the law” (both divine and natural).
18. “How Nazis Courted the Islamic World during WWII,” Deutsche Welle, accessed June 10, 2026, www.dw.com.
Alas, the termites have been feeding off the school’s original timber for well over a century. Anthropologist Franz Boas (faculty member, 1899-1937) fast-tracked cultural relativism, and his student-then-colleague, Ruth Benedict, was lesbian lover to another Boas student, Margaret Mead. Mead’s famous for penning Coming of Age in Samoa, a book which delighted the godless with her (later discredited) demonstration that marital fidelity was merely a restrictive, social construct.
Then there’s John Dewey, who infused “progressive education” into Columbia’s Teachers College during his tenure (1904-1930). He was a signatory to the original Humanist Manifesto, which said, contra orthodox Christianity, that “any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age.”[19]
19. “Humanist Manifesto I,” American Humanist Association, accessed June 10, 2026, americanhumanist.org/.
Thus, exhilarated by their Ivy League degrees granted in the Big Apple (“If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”) they parade about in their sloganeering. Never mind that the Palestinians they glamorize could no more have created a Columbian University than a CAT scan.
5. The Corvusians.
Corvus is the scientific name for the genus that includes ravens and crows. They’re known for their attraction to foil and other shiny objects. Well, Mamdani certainly shines in his smiley perkiness, glib observations, and TikTok animation. It dazzles a good many people who are looking for cool, upbeat, winsome characters, never mind substance and goodness. In this connection, I’m reminded of the eighteenth century statesman, John Randolph, who said of Henry Clay, “He is a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.”[20] Still, good enough for the congenitally superficial.
20. Quoted in David Johnson, John Randolph of Roanoke (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).
6. The AWOLitans.
Recently, our church held a Saturday missions conference, hearing from men who’d spent their lives seeking to reach Muslims and Hindus. I asked one of them, Al Fadi, to comment on the 9/11-Mamdani transition, and he offered a number of observations, e.g., that Americans have a “90 second attention span,” whereby we forget the tens of thousands of Iranians killed recently by the government but fixate on the “horrors” of $4 gas; that we think that “fence sitting is a strategy”; that we’ve bought the media’s pitch that “Islamism” is not real Islam. He argued that we’ve become slackers.
And, so, we should ask how many sensible New Yorkers failed to vote. And how it is that the alternative, Cuomo (deemed “corrupt and a womanizer” by a New Yorker I contacted) was the best they could field. Simply put, a lot of otherwise good folks just don’t show up . . . to vote, to caucus, to write, to run, to donate, etc. They’re “Absent Without Leave.”
7. The Nonions.
We read these days of the proliferation of “nones” in America, those who list no particular faith. (About a fourth of New Yorkers so identify.) Not surprisingly, the counsel of Scripture meets with increasing indifference and hostility. Let the Bible fall open and put your finger on a passage. There’s a very good chance you’ll hit upon something at odds with Mamdani’s agenda, whether, for instance, the topic is covetousness, original sin, the plight of the lazy fool, the rule of law, the path to true blessedness, integrity, or, yes, the sanctity of human life, a principle at odds with the Democrat sacrament of abortion.
And we should not stop at professing Nonions, for there are plenty de facto Nonions in the churches—those who claim the name of Christ but who discard and twist the counsel of Scripture at every turn.
And so, if even one of these groups becomes influential—whether Islamorubes, the 30-Rock Climbing Club, Socio-Econo-Delusians, Pharisites, Corvusians, AWOLitans, or Nonions—a city is headed for trouble. When, as in New York, we see a de facto coalition of all seven, the wretched outcome now unfolding is predictable. The question is not “How this could have happened?” but, rather, “How could it not have happened?”
