Why did millions of Americans feel that need to publicly gather and pray together?
ZALESKI: Well September 11th was such a huge shock, it was such an existential shock, it was just, the abyss just opened up for Americans. I mean, this is a country where we’ve certainly experienced wars, but we didn’t have World War I and World War II on our own soil, for the most part. And so, we’re just not used to that sort of thing, and it was just so bizarre that it truly seemed demonic, I think, to many people. Whether or not they would use that language, seemed apocalyptic, it seemed demonic. And, even though, in fact, there was a religious motivation for that act of terror in some respects, you could say religion fueled it as much as being a response to it. The spontaneous response to it was prayer and that just seems to be the American psyche. When you hit bottom, you reach out for prayer and for one another. It’s really a replay of the AA story that we were talking about earlier, you hit bottom, you recognize that you’re out of your depth, and that you need two things, you n
