The FFRF Action Fund is naming “Christian Crusaders” Jake Lang and MAGA Pastor Lorenzo Sewell our Theocrats of the Week for wrapping anti-Muslim bigotry in Christian nationalism.
The pair have helped turn Dearborn, Mich., one of the nation’s largest Arab American communities, into a stage for an ugly campaign portraying Muslim Americans as invaders who threaten a supposedly Christian nation.
Lang, a participant in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol who received clemency from President Trump, has repeatedly descended on Dearborn for what he calls “Christian Crusade” events. He has called Muslims “insidious parasites” and has advocated removing Muslims from the United States.
His most recent crusade at a Dearborn rally on Aug. 18, bizarrely promoted as a “pig roast,” drew hundreds of demonstrators and counterprotesters. Armed individuals and neo-Nazis were reportedly among those who appeared, while police in riot gear attempted to keep the situation under control. More than 20 people were ultimately arrested. During the Dearborn City Council meeting that evening, Lang claimed Muslims “have not come here to assimilate” and accused them of coming to America “to steal the wealth of this land” and “rape our women.”
The effect of Lang’s self-proclaimed Christian crusade is not abstract. Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud told the New York Times that a boy no older than 7 approached him before the rally to ask whether the “crusaders were going to kill him.”
Rather than distancing himself from Lang’s campaign, Sewell has amplified its central message.
Speaking before the Dearborn City Council, Sewell declared: “America, we have lost this city.” Absurdly, he claimed that Dearborn is “no longer up under American laws” but instead governed by Shariah law, concluding, “We will not have it anymore. Enough is enough.” Sewell also proclaimed, “We are not a nation of Muslims,” while demanding that city officials denounce what he claims is Islamic religious law controlling the community.
It goes without saying that Dearborn has not abandoned American law for Shariah law, which would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Sewell’s complaints instead include ordinary examples of Muslims exercising the same religious liberty Christians enjoy, such as choosing to buy halal food or personally participate in the Muslim call to prayer.
Sewell’s toxic rhetoric is especially revealing because his vision of Christianity is explicitly political. Earlier this year, Sewell declared that “Jesus was a politician” and claimed that America’s Founders believed “the church should be leading the state.”
Sewell’s extremism has been lifted up by Trump, who chose him to deliver the benediction at Trump’s second inauguration. In connection with the Trump administration’s National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving in May, House Speaker Mike Johnson invited Sewell to attend a private briefing for pastors. According to evangelist David Herzog, pastors were encouraged at that gathering to mobilize their congregations politically ahead of the midterm elections.
More recently, Sewell responded to Muslim candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary by alleging “skulduggery and malfeasance” and declaring that there was no way Black or white voters would willingly support what he called an “Islamic jihadist.”
Lang represents the most belligerent edge of Christian nationalism: calling himself a crusader, demanding that an entire religion be banned and treating Muslim Americans as an enemy population. Sewell gives that same project a pastor’s collar and a prayer.
Both rely on the same un-American premise: that Christians have a superior claim as American citizens and that Muslim Americans are outsiders whose equal citizenship, religious freedom and political participation are somehow threats to the country.
The Christian nationalist movement thrives by convincing a religious majority that equality for non-Christians is persecution of Christians. Lang and Sewell are putting that strategy on vivid display in Dearborn.
For transforming religious pluralism into a political enemy and using Christianity as a weapon against the equal rights of Muslim Americans, Jake Lang and Lorenzo Sewell should be ashamed to be named FFRF Action Fund’s Theocrats of the Week.
FFRF Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that develops and advocates for legislation, regulations and government programs to preserve the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. It also advocates for the rights and views of nonbelievers, endorses candidates for political office, and publicizes the views of elected officials concerning religious liberty issues.