Listen to the western media and politicians talk about terrorists, and one common explanation you will hear regarding the terrorists' hatred for America is that they detest our freedoms and/or our money. This explanation has a grain of truth to it, but it dodges the point.
Certainly, Islamic terrorists cannot abide our religious freedom; Mohammed's Medina writings prescribe the sword for winning people to Islam. Other than that, though, terrorists have little problem with freedom and/or money in general. Several Arab states, after all, are some of the wealthiest in the world, and enjoy quite a bit of personal freedom, even when compared to the U.S. We like to think we're "free," but try doing anything of consequence without explicit government permission and you quickly realize that your "freedom" is tightly controlled by the government (in fact, our "Bill of Rights" has effectively been neutered by the courts--but that's another subject). No, the terrorists aren't worried about our freedoms or our money.
They're worried about our culture.
Islam still holds that the traditional family is the sacred, God-ordained, foundational building block of society. It holds that God not only exists, but should be worshipped freely, publicly, at all levels of society and government. Prayer is not only allowed, but encouraged, even required in many places. Much of the Muslim way of life mirrors what we call "Judeo-Christian" morals and values.
When a Muslim looks at America, what do they see? A country where human life is less important than "choice," where God-haters run the judicial system, legalizing everything from pornography to homosexual "marriage," forbidding prayer in schools, removing God's law from public display. A country where the entertainment industry produces pornography for prime-time viewing, and distributes godless filth over every medum imaginable, from broadcast TV to satellite to the internet. A country where religious conservatives are forced to fight against their own culture, with extremely limited success. In short, they see a culture that mocks God and tears families apart, ruining countless lives in the process.
Muslim extremists are, in large part, simply trying to protect their culture and their families from "the great satan." Many of their methods to date have been misdirected at best, evil and ungodly at worst. But what if, instead of destroying the Twin Towers, they had destroyed the "entertainment" industry in America, or the abortion industry, or the leftist judiciary? Certainly, we would have been indignant--after all, that's our fight, and we want to fight it in our own way--but the majority of Americans would have quietly breathed a collective sigh of relief...and then gone back to their Gameboys.
I do not suggest that, if all the anti-God, anti-family forces in America were magically eliminated, that the terrorists would stop hating America. After all, they still hate religious freedom, and they still hate Israel. But I maintain that both would be easier for them to swallow in the absence of the cultural destruction that America currently exports. We need to be more honest with ourselves about the state of our culture, and we need to be more aggressive about righting the wrongs. Liberty is not license. Liberty involves responsibility, and a right regard for God. Liberty involves fighting against licentiousness--sometimes with more than just words. When necessary, Jesus turned over tables, threw things, and did some yelling. He expected his disciples to defend themselves with swords against physical attacks. He was a man of peace, but he was not a pacifist.
While our men and women in uniform are in harm's way fighting evil abroad, perhaps we need to be in harm's way to fight evil at home. Think about it.