There are moments when you look at what is happening in your own country and wonder whether everybody else is seeing the same fucking thing.
Dearborn, Michigan, has become one of those moments for me.
Religious chants in the streets. Foreign political grievances spilling into American politics. Demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. Americans screaming at each other over Islam, immigration, assimilation, extremism and what we’re even allowed to question anymore.
And after watching what happened at the Dearborn City Council meeting on August 18, I keep coming back to one question:
What the fuck are we doing, America?
Let me get something out of the way immediately, because I’m not interested in having an argument about something I didn’t say.
“Allahu Akbar” means “God is greatest.” Muslims say it as part of their faith. Muslims have every constitutional right to worship openly in this country.
Period.
Mosques belong in America for exactly the same reason churches and synagogues belong in America.
The First Amendment.
I don’t want the government deciding which religions Americans are allowed to practice.
I don’t want Christianity imposed through government.
I don’t want Islam imposed through government.
I don’t want any religion imposed through government.
And that’s exactly why what I watched on August 18 bothered the hell out of me.
I watched the Dearborn City Council meeting myself.
I watched someone ask the council members to denounce Sharia law.
And I watched them stay silent.
Not one of them gave the answer that should be the easiest fucking answer imaginable for an elected official in the United States:
American law governs America.
That’s it.
Nobody was required to denounce Islam.
Nobody needed to denounce Muslims.
Nobody needed to say that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to follow the religious teachings of their faith.
The question was about law.
And there is an enormous difference between practicing your religion and expecting your religion to govern everybody else.
Why are we suddenly afraid to say that?
A Christian can believe the Bible is the word of God.
That doesn’t make Leviticus the Michigan Compiled Laws.
A Jew can follow Jewish religious law.
That doesn’t make the Torah the United States Code.
A Muslim can personally follow Sharia as part of his or her faith.
That doesn’t make Sharia American civil law.
This shouldn’t be controversial.
It shouldn’t even be particularly interesting.
Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where stating the obvious feels provocative.
And that’s what concerns me.
Because America has become absolutely fucking terrified of making distinctions.
Question Islamist extremism and somebody immediately says you hate Muslims.
Question immigration policy and somebody says you hate immigrants.
Question assimilation and somebody decides you want everyone eating hamburgers, speaking only English and going to church on Sunday.
No.
Assimilation does not mean erasing your ancestry.
It doesn’t mean abandoning your religion.
It doesn’t mean forgetting where your family came from.
America has never required cultural sameness.
What America requires—or at least what I thought America required—is something much simpler:
Whatever else you are, politically and civically, you’re American first.
We are, after all, one nation under God.
Those words are in our Pledge of Allegiance.
Not one nation under the Christian God.
Not one nation under the Muslim God.
Not one nation under the Jewish God.
And certainly not one nation under religious law.
One nation.
That’s the part we seem to be forgetting.
Americans are free to disagree about God. We’re free to understand God differently. We’re free to worship differently, and we’re free not to believe in God at all.
But we don’t get separate constitutional orders based on those beliefs.
Our religious freedom exists under the same Constitution, the same civil government and the same rule of law.
And that standard applies to everybody.
Christian nationalist who wants biblical law governing the country?
No.
Islamist who wants Sharia governing the country?
No.
Jewish extremist who wants religious law governing the country?
No.
White nationalist who thinks his race gives him some superior claim to America?
Fuck no.
The Constitution is the deal.
That’s the thing binding together more than 300 million people who don’t look alike, don’t worship alike, don’t agree politically, don’t come from the same places and increasingly don’t even seem to inhabit the same fucking reality.
And we’ve already seen why Dearborn deserves scrutiny.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum.
Dearborn made national news in 2024 when an Al-Quds Day rally included chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
I’m sorry, but “Death to America” being chanted in America deserves condemnation.
I don’t give a shit what religion the person chanting it belongs to.
I don’t care whether the person saying it is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, communist, fascist, MAGA, Antifa or the fucking Easter Bunny.
You have a First Amendment right to say it.
And I have a First Amendment right to look at you and ask why the hell you want to live in a country you apparently want dead.
That’s America too.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from criticism.
Religious liberty doesn’t mean freedom from scrutiny.
And tolerance doesn’t mean Americans have to become intellectually lobotomized whenever religion enters the conversation.
We should be capable of saying two things simultaneously:
Muslim Americans belong here.
And:
Islamist ideology does not get a special exemption from scrutiny.
Those statements do not contradict each other.
In fact, refusing to make that distinction is insulting to millions of Muslims who want exactly what everybody else wants—to live their lives, raise their families, practice their religion and participate in a free country.
The problem isn’t Islam.
The problem is any ideology—religious or political—that believes it should stand above American constitutional government.
And that’s why the silence I watched on August 18 matters to me.
Maybe those council members believed the question was inflammatory.
Maybe they didn’t want to dignify the person asking it.
Maybe they thought answering would validate the entire spectacle happening around them.
Fine.
Then say that.
But then follow it with the sentence every American elected official should be able to say without checking which constituency might get pissed off:
No religious law supersedes the Constitution or the laws of the United States.
Why is that difficult?
Why would that require political calculation?
Why should Americans have to wonder what the answer is?
This is where the conversation about Dearborn becomes bigger than Dearborn.
Because America is conducting a massive experiment in pluralism.
People from virtually every country, religion, race and culture on Earth live here.
That’s extraordinary.
But pluralism only works if there’s something underneath all those differences holding the country together.
There has to be a baseline.
There has to be something that comes before tribe.
Before religion.
Before ancestry.
Before whatever country your grandparents came from.
Before whatever foreign conflict you’re emotionally invested in.
And that baseline is American citizenship and the constitutional order that makes all of this possible in the first place.
You are free to worship.
You are free not to worship.
You are free to speak Arabic.
You are free to say “Allahu Akbar.”
You are free to carry a Bible.
You are free to criticize America.
You are even free to say things about this country that make the rest of us furious.
But none of us gets our own government.
None of us gets our own supreme law.
None of us gets to say, “My God outranks your Constitution.”
One nation under God does not mean one nation under religious law.
That’s the distinction.
That’s the bargain.
And if we’ve become so frightened of offending each other that elected officials can’t plainly articulate that bargain anymore, then we have a much bigger problem than one city in Michigan.
So yes, I’m looking at Dearborn.
I’m watching what’s happening there.
I’m asking questions.
And I’m not going to be bullied into pretending that asking those questions is somehow hatred.
Because the question isn’t whether Muslims can be Americans.
Of course they can.
Millions already are.
The question is whether America still has enough confidence in itself to demand that America comes first.
One nation.
One Constitution.
One system of law.
Under God.
Because diversity without a common civic identity isn’t pluralism forever.
Eventually, it’s fragmentation.
And on August 18, watching elected officials sit silently when given an opportunity to draw one of the simplest lines in American government, I couldn’t stop thinking:
What the fuck are we doing?