In October of 2024, an Islamist influencer who goes by “Way of Life SQ” stood in front of a room of Muslim teenagers at the Dearborn Community Center and told them the truth about why he thought they were there.
Not to build a life. Not to be good neighbors. To fix us.
Americans, he told them, are backward. Uncivilized. The lowest form of human nature. Proof being, in his telling, that we use toilet paper. Christians, he said, are jealous of Muslims, because their nation is dying. Allah, he said, sent them here to civilize us.
That lecture was recorded and translated by MEMRI (Middle East Research Institute). It wasn’t a private rant caught on a hot mic. It was a curriculum delivered to children, in an American city (the home of Ford Motor Company), about the country that hosts them.
I want to be precise about what I’m saying and what I’m not. I am not talking about the roughly two billion Muslims in the world, most of whom I will never meet, many of whom are good neighbors, hard workers, and loving parents just like you and me. I’m talking about a specific ideology, Islamism, political Islam, that has a coherent strategy, and this man just said the quiet part out loud to a room full of kids.
Here’s the strategy. Use the language of peace and freedom to secure protections. Use those protections to build strength. Use that strength, eventually, for dominance, for rules that don’t get extended back to anyone else. It’s a Trojan Horse dressed in the vocabulary of the very pluralism it intends to outgrow.
Christians use rules differently. We don’t ask for religious liberty as a staging ground for religious control. We ask for it because we believe every person, Muslim, atheist, whoever’s next door, is made in the image of God and gets to wrestle with Him freely, or not at all. Genuine peace, not conquest with better branding.
That difference is baked into the country itself. America made an unusual bet at its founding: freedom of religion, and no government-established religion. Both halves, together. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a specifically Christian confidence, the conviction that the Gospel doesn’t need the state’s sword to advance, because it never did. It grew under Rome’s boot. It doesn’t need Washington’s blessing now. A faith that trusts God to do the winning can afford to build a government that plays no favorites.
That’s the bet radical Islamism doesn’t make, and it’s the bet Way of Life SQ is teaching children to exploit.
I believe Bishop Robert Barron, in a recent homily on the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13, when he says God isn’t the author of the evil sown into a field. The enemy is. But He permits it, Barron says, because He’s using it. Not to abandon the wheat, but to grow it. He points to Paul’s thorn in the flesh, three times begged away and never removed. He points to FDR’s polio and Mother Teresa’s fifty years of interior darkness. Thorns that, left in, produced compassion no comfort ever could have.
I believe him, but I want to ask a question he did not ask: what if the discord Islamism is sewing into this country right now is a weed God is permitting for the same reason?
Not to punish America. To wake her church up.
It’s my favorite verse in the Bible. Romans 8:28, in living color: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
There’s a promise in that verse. In all things, God works for the good.
But it’s conditional. Of those who love him. Who have been called according to his purpose.
My fellow Americans. We the People. God wants us back. He misses our love. His eye of Providence is still watching over us. But we feel distant.
Because here’s what I keep coming back to. A ten-year-old boy in Dearborn just got handed a clearer statement of purpose than most American Christians could give you about their own faith. He knows why he’s supposed to be here. Do we?
Charlie Kirk stood in front of a room of pastors and asked why the church has gone quiet in the public square right at the moment it can least afford to. He said pastors are supposed to be the moral conscience of the nation, “no different than Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel,” not a place people go to be affirmed in whatever they already believe. He said the church has confused being loved with being faithful.
I believe him too, and I think the wheat and the weeds are growing in the same field here. The louder the Trojan Horse gets about its own intentions, the less excuse we have to stay soft, silent, and unsure of what we actually believe.
Scripture is not ambiguous on this. “Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked” (Psalm 97:10). Not tolerate it. Not explain it away. Hate it and love the people caught inside it enough to say so.
You don’t have to fear a Trojan Horse you can see coming. You do have to know what you believe well enough not to be the one who blinks. Every dad who can’t articulate why the Resurrection matters, every mom who’s never opened Deuteronomy 6 with her kids, every pastor who’d rather keep the peace than name the enemy. We’re the soft spot this strategy is counting on.
God first. Others second. Myself third. That order doesn’t waver just because someone else’s order is aimed the other way.
The call-to-action is old, but it still works. Fifteen minutes a day in the Word. Know your Book better than they know theirs. Raise kids who can tell you in one sentence why they’re Christian and what it costs them, the same clarity that boy in Dearborn was just handed, pointed the other direction.
If you want a place to start that habit as a family, The Family Wins Devotional is still free, still waiting, still built for exactly this kind of night around the table. You can find it here: The Family Wins Devotional @ MindWolves.
The weeds are loud right now. Let them be. Just make sure you’re not confused about which one you’re feeding.
Feed the Good Wolf.