On January 12, 2026, the Broken Arrow City Council convened a special meeting to consider a rezoning and permit request connected to a proposed Islamic center on land owned by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The city moved the meeting to Northeastern State University’s Broken Arrow campus to accommodate the crowd of more than 1,300 attendees, with roughly 400 people signed up to speak during public comment. Almost all of them opposed the Islamic Center.

After hours of testimony, the council voted 4–1 to deny the request, with city leaders emphasizing feasibility and infrastructure concerns.

The Islamic Center was defeated on logistical and procedural grounds, and rightly so. But what happened in Broken Arrow is also a window into something bigger.

Many Americans, especially Christians, sense that the question is not merely “Can a building be built here?” They sense a civilizational tension between Islam and America, but struggle to name it accurately or reconcile their deeply rooted uneasiness with the welcoming spirit and Christian sensibilities that have long defined American civil life.

Certainly, Christians should defend the equal protection of the laws for all people, including Muslims. Christians must also refuse naïveté about movements seeking to exploit and subvert welcoming societies, namely Christian nations. The path forward requires clarity, honest history, and sober policy judgment, paired with an unapologetic gospel mission from the Church.

Who are NAIT and the Muslim Brotherhood?

While we should fight Islamic expansion using any sound argument at our disposal, Conservatives and Americans cannot be content to win occasionally against Islamic expansion on procedural grounds. We need to win the broader argument against a competing militant civilization deeply committed to the subversion and destruction of our own.

In 2004, the FBI raided the home of suspected terrorist Ismail Elbarasse. In a hidden sub-basement, agents discovered 80 banker boxes containing the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood’s North American operations.

The documents, referred to as the Explanatory Memorandum, lay out the terrorist organization’s plans for “civilizational jihad.” A millennium ago, Muslim armies were comparable to those of Europe, so they waged war. Today, Islamists know they cannot win a war against America, so they are engaging in “civilizational jihad” to infiltrate, weaken, and eventually conquer the West from within.

The Memorandum outlined plans to build a comprehensive shadow government based on Sharia Law, complete with Islamic political, legal, and security organizations, financial and educational systems, and media and propaganda outreach.

They wrote of “Presenting Islam as a civilization alternative” and “Supporting the establishment of the global Islamic State wherever it is.” They are not seeking equal protection of the law or the free exercise of religion. The Memorandum outlines a strategy to undermine and replace the Constitution while taking advantage of its protections to build political power with which they will seek to conquer us and end our civilization.

Why is this relevant to a city council vote in suburban Oklahoma? Because in the appendix of the Memorandum, the Muslim Brotherhood listed a “network of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” NAIT, the owner of the land in Broken Arrow, was among them.

In 2007, NAIT was named an unindicted coconspirator in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which resulted, in part, from the uncovering of the Explanatory Memorandum. Despite NAIT’s efforts to be struck from the list of co-conspirators, the U.S. District Judge determined there was “ample evidence to establish the association” between NAIT, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas. However, he also noted that the Justice Department had infringed upon NAIT’s Fifth Amendment rights by failing to file the list under seal. While the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later sustained that ruling, it ultimately declined to remove NAIT’s name from the document.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the HLF reportedly used NAIT’s bank accounts to raise and launder money. Checks were found deposited in NAIT accounts that were made payable to the “Palestinian Majahideen,” the military wing of Hamas.

NAIT’s historic ties to Islamic terrorism are undeniable. Similar connections will be present in many cases of American Islamic expansion because NAIT controls hundreds of Islamic Centers across the country.

In addition to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islam’s primary political organization in the U.S., has expressed ambition to bring the United States under increasing Muslim rule. Basim Elkarra, Executive Director of CAIR Action, stated in 2024: “We are coming. We are building the infrastructure to not only challenge but to eventually lead.”

The goal of these groups? To see our great Christian civilization fall like Constantinople, with our cities turning into Islamic strongholds and our churches converted into mosques, just as the Hagia Sophia was in Istanbul.

“Radical Islam” or Just Islam?

Ultimately, what this shows is that “radical Islam” is a less accurate description of the problem than “Islam.” This should not surprise us. Radicalism is inherent to the religion because it springs from their Holy Books and the life of their false prophet.

When we see a professing Christian commit heinous acts of violence–and, sadly, that does sometimes happen–we may question whether he is a genuine, born-again Christian because he is not obeying and following Jesus Christ and Scripture. When we see a Muslim commit heinous acts like mass murder, wars of aggression, child sexual abuse, marrying 9-year-olds, female genital mutilation, and other unimaginable horrors, we can point directly to the Quran and Hadiths and say, “That Muslim is faithfully following the example and teachings of Muhammad.”

What we see today in the Muslim Brotherhood’s work to conquer Western civilization is the entire history of Muhammad’s religion. From the earliest days, it did not spread by evangelism. It spread by the sword. Within a few short years, Muhammad morphed from self-proclaimed prophet into ruthless warlord, unleashing jihadist armies that slaughtered, raped, and ravaged their path to dominion over the Middle East, culminating, just six decades later, in their brazen assaults on Constantinople, the bastion of Christian civilization.

Within 100 years, Muslim forces began successfully entering Europe and conquering Christian territory, first through Constantinople in the East and then through Spain in the West. By the 10th century, Muslims had conquered much of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Malta, and Greece.

The Crusades, often misrepresented by academicians and even woke pastors today, were a response to well over 400 years of unprovoked aggression from invading Muslim armies. This aggression involved all the usual brutal war crimes approved by Muhammad that the Muslim forces brutally inflicted wherever they went. See Raymond Ibrahim’s books The Sword and the Scimitar and Defenders of the West for more on the Crusades and Muslim aggression that preceded them.

While Islam qualifies as a religion in the narrow sense of possessing a deity and theological framework, the way most Christians use the term “religion” inadequately captures Islam’s essence as a comprehensive political and militaristic jihad ideology bent on civilizational conquest by the sword. This is evidenced by the unbroken line of jihad from Muslim forces laying siege to Constantinople in 664 to the Muslim Brotherhood today, where warfare, jihad, and civilizational jihad share the same goal of advancing not just as a faith but as a conquering political civilization in accordance with the instructions and example of its prophet.

This does not mean every Muslim is part of the plot, but there is a plot, and it involves the highest levels of American Muslim leadership. That cannot be ignored because of liberal sensibilities. In seeking to love our neighbors well, we cannot surrender, via suicidal empathy, the civilization that made such neighbor-love possible. Islam is hell-bent on the death of the West. Loving our neighbor means defending ourselves and our posterity from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Sharia Law versus the U.S. Constitution

As stated earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum outlines building a shadow government and a parallel society until they obtain enough people and political influence to re-enter the mainstream. Make no mistake: this is about replacing the U.S. Constitution with Sharia.

Sharia law, taught in the Quran, is Islam applied to all areas of life. That includes their version of personal piety, but Sharia law is also a Muslim manual for civil law, economic arrangements, and war. Islam, properly understood, isn’t like the differences we have among Christians, Mormons, or agnostics.

It’s a hostile civilization waging war—”civilizational jihad,” as the Muslim Brotherhood puts it—against the West.

Islam versus the Christian West is a struggle that goes back 1300 years virtually uninterrupted. Those who know US history know that the first war we fought as a new country was against Islamic pirates in the Barbary Wars. Leading Muslim organizations continue to engage in this civilizational warfare to this day.

This struggle can be understood both in religious and legal terms. In Texas, plans for an Islamic city, where Sharia would likely have been the civil law, were recently scrapped after nearly coming to fruition. Leaders of the project expressly denigrate US law in favor of Sharia. Sharia law is a competing legal system to the US Constitution, one which many Muslims seek to implement.

Accordingly, federal legislation has been introduced by Representative Chip Roy and Senator Tommy Tuberville, prohibiting Sharia law from being enforced by any U.S. court, prohibiting Sharia adherents from entering the United States, and revoking visas for any alien currently in the US found to be an adherent of Sharia. This does not amount to a ban on Muslims, but it would ban public implementation of Islamist civilizational objectives as well as those who would seek to implement them.

In Oklahoma, Rep. Wooley has introduced a similar resolution, HJR1040. These bills represent the first step toward ensuring Sharia law does not replace our own.

The Red-Green Alliance: Marxists and Muslims

Fuelling this subversion is the strategic convergence between Islamist movements (green) and Marxist or far-left movements (red); the Green-Red Alliance. These ideologies are incompatible, as demonstrated by absurdities like “Queers for Palestine.” But they cooperate tactically against shared enemies: Western Christian civilization and capitalism.

Both reject constitutional limits, natural rights, and individual liberty—rights that flow from the Christian understanding of man as created in God’s image—favoring totalizing systems that supplant God’s ordained order with man-made tyranny. They use agitation, subversion, street pressure, and institutional capture, often deploying the Hegelian dialectic to manufacture crises: pitting a thesis (stable, Christian-influenced Western society) against an engineered antithesis (social chaos, identity conflicts, or economic overload) to force a synthesis that advances their authoritarian goals.

This mirrors the Left’s Cloward-Piven strategy, which deliberately overwhelms public systems—such as welfare, healthcare, immigration, and infrastructure—with unsustainable demands, like flooding communities with third-world migrants promised endless entitlements, to precipitate collapse and justify radical restructuring of the country under collectivist control.

Historically, the Soviet Union armed Islamists against the West. The Muslim Brotherhood borrowed Marxist narratives of oppressor-oppressed relations. Iran’s 1979 revolution fused jihad with socialist methods. And today, groups like Hamas align with Western leftists who frame jihad as “anti-imperialist resistance.”

In the West, this shows up as Muslims portrayed as an “oppressed minority,” with Marxists defending Sharia under anti-racism or intersectionality banners, pushing speech restrictions, blasphemy norms, and parallel legal structures that erode biblical freedoms.

This alliance targets capitalism, free speech, equal protection, religious liberty (especially for Christians), and self-government. If the Red-Green Alliance achieves its objectives, it will eventually fracture—but by then, our society will be dismantled.

Conclusion: Gospel Courage, Civic Duty, and Southern Baptist Boldness

Christians have two duties that must not be neglected.

First, we must preach Christ to all nations and all peoples, including Muslims. Every Muslim neighbor is a person for whom the forgiveness of Christ should be offered in the gospel. The church must not yield to the pride of thinking that people of a certain religion are too different or too far gone to be reached by the gospel. Islamic researcher Dudley Woodbury estimates that 20,000 American Muslims convert to Christianity annually. We cannot lose our evangelistic zeal as we pursue political efforts.

But, second, this does not lessen in the slightest the duty of Western governments and us as American citizens to think clearly and act boldly in the face of the unique civilizational challenge that Islam poses. We act not because all Muslims are “bad people” who should be treated with suspicion, but because their “religion” presents a rival claim of law and sovereignty that conflicts with constitutional order and Christian moral foundations. And because global Islamic leaders have always been and likely will continue to be at war with Western civilization.

Finally, Southern Baptists should lead the efforts to defend against the civilizational threat posed by the spread of Islam in America. This is not, in any way, incompatible with our historic commitment to religious liberty.

Remember how when Russell Moore was President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC, he used our Cooperative Program tithe dollars and his position as chief political spokesman of Southern Baptists to defend the construction of a mosque in New Jersey? When asked about why he did this at an SBC annual meeting, Russell Moore rudely dismissed pastor John Wofford’s concerns. Moore mistakenly constructed a false binary choice, claiming that the “answer to Islam is not government power. The answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

But the citizens of Broken Arrow, OK, show that this is not the case. They exercised their rights to stop (for now) the threat of jihad from gaining an even greater foothold in their community. As both an Oklahoma State Senator and a Southern Baptist pastor, I stand with my fellow Oklahomans in Broken Arrow who rightly oppose the proposed Islamic Center.

As I said above, we have the duty to both witness with the power of the gospel AND do our civic duty to stop the spread of Sharia in America; and yes, that will require the use of so-called “government power.” I had the opportunity to join a national news program last night and address these concerns. You can watch a portion of that interview below.

The bottom line is that Broken Arrow’s meeting reminded Oklahoma, and all Americans, that these issues are no longer “somewhere else.” They are here in the reddest states.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s stated allies are operating and expanding within our borders. The faithful response is neither panic nor denial. It is courageous evangelism to change hearts, truthful historical assessment to wake up the apathetic, and bold political action to rescue Western civilization from one of its oldest and most aggressive enemies.

In seeking to love our neighbors well as Christians, we cannot surrender the civilization that made such neighbor-love possible.