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Public religious culture post-09/11/01 251

It is significant in this account that conventional religion and religious
doctrine is nearly absent. Moved to action, this family finds solace in refer-
ences to God in the context of a more fundamental invented ritual of
commonality and oneness with victims and the rest of the nation. As with
many, this writer found herself pushed in the direction of religious faith,
but at the same time moved to engage in ritualization directed toward
coming to terms with the tragedy as a civil, not a religious, event. The
mediated experience brought the power and the horror and the loss of the
events home, and people in their homes were moved to respond.
Some of our interviewees described their experiences around 9/11 in
similar terms. Paula Wilcox lives in a major western city with her mother,
Molly, and her daughter, Denise. 53 When interviewed soon after the
attacks, they initially express a sense of distance from the events.
Paula: We watched the beginning of it and now I just think it’s gotten to
the point where it’s too much.
Interviewer: Too much, how so, in what way?
Molly: Well, they’re repeating everything. So you’ve already seen every-
thing. If something new happens, then I want to watch it. But I don’t
want to watch all the repeat[ing].
Paula: I personally don’t like to hear – I mean if it happened to me, I
wouldn’t want to be on TV. I wouldn’t want to have anyone watching
me and hearing about my sorrow and stuff. And I don’t enjoy
watching other people suffer. And so watching everybody talk about
how bad they’re suffering is just not something for me to watch.
There’s so much suffering in the world and I don’t want to sit and
watch it over and over again. I mean it’s not that I don’t feel for them.
It’s not something that I want to watch.

We might expect, then, that the Wilcox family would avoid the kind of
integration into ritual surrounding 9/11 that we’ve been talking about.
They have seen a great deal of coverage (indeed, this interview took place
within a week of the events) and have well understood the level of
suffering experienced by those directly involved. When asked if they did
participate in any ritualizations, it turns out they did.

Paula: Denise and I did some stuff. Like on the Internet, some people sent
stuff about it. Like, at this time you’re supposed to go out and light a
candle. We did that. School – I don’t think the grammar school that
they do current events and stuff like that. They don’t make a big deal
of it.

The Wilcox family then commemorated the event in their own way. They
were not overly involved; they did not travel to New York or send gifts or