Can Jihad Be Stopped in America?
Opinion Piece By | Molly Krempski
We all used to know what jihad was, or at least we knew it when we saw it. Things are not as clear today, when a simple Google search of the term yields multiple definitions and hundreds of links to liberal college websites. Colleges have suddenly felt the call to repurpose web space previously dedicated to gender discussions to enlighten us with the “new and improved” definition of “mostly peaceful” jihad.
Many modern definitions and explanations limit jihad to a term describing an individual’s struggle to obey Allah. However, the jihad that should be on our radar is not an individual’s private spiritual struggle, but the broader sociopolitical movement. It is a coordinated, collective effort aimed at the Islamization of a territory through networks of individuals and organizations that seek to influence policies, laws, institutions, and societal norms through political advocacy, public pressure, cultural demands, financial influence, strategic investment, institutional funding, land acquisition, protests, and other forms of peaceful and not-so-peaceful activism.
This is not a claim that every Muslim participates in such a movement or that Muslims should be denied the right to worship, own property, raise families, or participate in American life. Those rights must be protected. The issue is whether religious liberty will remain a shield for private conscience and peaceful worship or be transformed into a sword for building parallel institutions, separate civil structures, and a competing legal and cultural order.
Sociopolitical jihad may appear similar in concept to Christian nationalism because both movements make claims about religion’s role in public life. The comparison, however, ends with the radically different identities, teachings, and résumés of the beings behind them. Jesus has the power to forgive sin and reconcile mankind to the Father; Muhammad does not.
Spiritual powers reveal their character through their actions to those with eyes to see. Discernment is the ability to evaluate those actions and identify which powers and principalities are driving various social and political movements. In parts of Europe, concerns about parallel communities, sharia councils, failed assimilation, and the erosion of longstanding national cultures have become part of an increasingly urgent public debate. In Washington, D.C., the political influence of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Barack Hussein Obama, and numerous advocacy organizations has helped shape Islam’s expression as a political and cultural force.
Some of our more moderate Islamic neighbors like to assert that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Yet Muslims worship a being who denies the sonship and divinity of Christ, while Jesus claims to be the Divine Son of God and the only path to the Father. Muslims submit to a being who reigns over his people through a law of condemnation, forcing them to rely upon their own works for salvation, works that will never be enough.
Jesus, knowing that we would always fall short of God’s perfect standard, saved us through His perfect obedience: His sinless life, undeserved death, resurrection, and ascension. There is great peace in salvation guaranteed by Divine Perfection. Relying upon our own works to attain God’s perfect standard is a fool’s errand, a fact that the fallen god Allah knows firsthand. The character and teachings of Islam’s god, even the god of “moderate Islam,” are not the character and teachings of the Christian God. Allah is distinct from America’s God, and Allah’s sharia is distinct from the law of God that shaped our constitutional order.
Our God is our shield. He gives us vision and imparts spiritual strategies for casting down every false sociopolitical movement that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. See 2 Corinthians 10:3-5. His Word tells us that if we submit ourselves to God and resist the devil, the devil will flee from us. See James 4:7.The generations before us were familiar with and relied heavily upon God’s Word, and they incorporated protective biblical principles into our founding documents and early institutions.
Those documents were then used to cultivate our early government. Today, however, our government struggles to build upon the original intent of those documents, and many churches no longer preach the full Word of God. Until we begin declaring the supremacy of Jesus Christ from both the pulpit and the podium, and fully operate with the head and heart knowledge that Christ holds supreme authority over both the Church and American government, we will remain vulnerable to attacks from those who serve foreign gods.
And no, as will be demonstrated shortly, those declarations do not violate the “separation of church and state.” Our Founders and the generations who followed were Christians who understood that submission to Christ, who overcame every foreign god approximately 1,700 years before America’s inception, would enable them to live securely in their new home. How, then, did we become vulnerable to infiltration and oppression by foreign gods? In retrospect, we can easily retrace our missteps.
Most Christians still seem to understand that they have a biblical obligation to declare Christ’s supremacy in their own lives. Many, however, are unaware of the longstanding historical precedent supporting the public acknowledgment of Christ’s authority over the nation. Generations of Americans had their constitutional understanding sabotaged by 50 years of court rulings based upon the Lemon Test.
The Lemon Test was a judicial test adopted in 1971 to assess alleged violations of the Establishment Clause. By ignoring our Founders’ original intent and our nation’s history and traditions, Lemon licensed judges to categorize government participation in almost anything remotely religious as a violation of the Establishment Clause. Fifty years of corrupted Lemon Test precedent caused Americans to screech, “SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE,” whenever government and the Gospel of the Kingdom were properly seated together.
There is no question in my mind that Lemon was used to remove God’s covering from America, and it almost worked, until the Supreme Court abandoned it in 2022. We were set free in 2022. We simply do not yet know how to think or behave like free people.
Will we find a way to exercise our newly regained religious freedom to extinguish the sociopolitical jihadist movement being kindled in America? We have two clear paths forward. We, as a nation, can obey God’s Word, submit ourselves to God, and resist Allah’s claims upon our society. Or we can continue pandering to a rival spiritual and legal system until it gains the power to rule over us. Revisiting our founding may help us recover some artifacts from the pre-Lemon era, when men understood what it meant to live in a nation dedicated to and ruled over by Jesus Christ alone.
The story of the Jamestown expedition provides a glimpse into the earliest colonists’ frame of mind. In 1606, Robert Hunt, a priest in the Church of England, embarked upon a four-and-a-half-month journey to the New World as chaplain to a crew of Englishmen. While many set sail in pursuit of wealth, power, or freedom from their former lives, Reverend Hunt sought to plant a Christian church. In April 1607, the company made landfall at what would become Cape Henry, Virginia.
According to the historical tradition surrounding the landing, Hunt required three days of prayer and fasting aboard the ship before permitting the colonists to explore the territory. Hunt understood that if they were to succeed, they would first need to consecrate the land to God’s purposes with pure hearts. After three days, the crew erected a seven-foot wooden cross on the beach. [1], [2] Joined by the crew, Hunt is traditionally credited with declaring:
“We do hereby dedicate this Land, and ourselves, to reach the People within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to raise up Godly generations after us, and with these generations take the Kingdom of God to all the earth. May this Covenant of Dedication remain to all generations, as long as this earth remains and may this land, along with England, be evangelists to the world.
May all who see this cross remember what we have done here, and may those who come here to inhabit join us in this Covenant and this most noble work, that the Holy Scriptures may be fulfilled. From these very shores the gospel shall go forth, not only to this new world, but the entire world.”[3]
Hunt continued by proclaiming Psalm 22:27–28:
“All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord. And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Thee. For the Kingdom is the Lord’s and He rules among the nations.”
This covenant laid the spiritual foundation for Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America. Hunt also read from Deuteronomy 8 during the brief service. That chapter reminded the Hebrew people to honor God as they came into their inheritance. The choice of that passage speaks clearly to Hunt’s state of mind: he appears to have viewed the New World as a type of second Promised Land.
His soon-to-be neighbors to the north, the Pilgrims and Puritans, held a similar view of the New World. They saw an opportunity for Kingdom living to advance in America. On April 29, 2025, President Trump recognized the 418th anniversary of the first landing and raising of the cross at Cape Henry through a presidential proclamation. He declared that the planting of the Cape Henry cross had “sown the seeds of America’s destiny.”[4]
One year later, on May 17, 2026, thousands of Americans gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise and Thanksgiving. Through Scripture, testimony, worship, and prayer, participants rededicated the United States as One Nation Under God in preparation for America’s 250th anniversary. [5]
The date was deeply significant. On March 16, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed May 17 as a national “day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.” The colonies were urged to confess their sins, seek God’s pardon, and pray for His protection and guidance. Exactly 250 years later, Americans returned to that date to thank God for His providence and ask for His blessing upon the nation’s future. [6]
The May 17 rededication did not create a new national foundation. It publicly remembered the foundation that had already been laid and called the present generation back into agreement with it. The gathering declared that America was awakening to the existence of her founding covenants and that this generation still had an opportunity to join the noble work begun at Cape Henry, to dedicate our land, our government, and ourselves to God’s purposes.
In 1643, Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed the United Colonies of New England, one of the earliest intercolonial governing alliances in America. Its Articles of Confederation declared:
“Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace…”[7]
In 1854, the United States House Judiciary Committee of the 33rd Congress issued the following statement:
“In this age, there is no substitute for Christianity… That was the religion of the founders of the republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.”[8]
In 1856, the House of Representatives declared:
“The great, vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”[9]
Our Founders came to America to worship Christ freely without denominational interference, which they often understood as religious interference. They were fleeing an oppressive, state-controlled religious system. They never intended the Establishment Clause to secularize government or prohibit the public acknowledgment of God. The Founders unmistakably grounded American liberty and governmental accountability in a transcendent moral order.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the letter to the Danbury Baptists containing the phrase “separation of church and state,” regularly attended church services inside the United States Capitol. In fact, he attended a service in that building only two days after writing his famous letter. During Jefferson’s presidency, the War and Treasury Departments also hosted Sunday church services. [10] This was how the New World functioned for centuries. Our defenses weakened when the Supreme Court opened the door to 50 years of misinterpretation of the Establishment Clause through Lemon, but Lemon is now dead. Our nation is healing.
America’s founding documents and covenants demand that we uphold the law of God and preserve biblical values in the public square. In a Christlike manner, we will not force anyone to swear allegiance to our God. We will, however, expect everyone who lives here to respect America’s constitutional order, obey American law, and live peaceably within the broader civic community.
That distinction matters. Religious liberty protects Muslims, Christians, Jews, and members of every other faith from government persecution. It does not require a community to ignore legitimate questions about zoning, ownership, density, infrastructure, financial representations, environmental impact, public safety, foreign financing, beneficial ownership, or the creation of a self-contained development organized around a separate cultural and religious ecosystem.
Americans often assume that these questions belong to Europe, Washington, D.C., or some distant metropolitan area. They do not. A version of the same question has arrived quietly in rural LaSalle County, Illinois, where residents are attempting to understand plans connected to the former Fox River Resort near Sheridan.
The immediate dispute concerns land use, ownership, financing, and control. Residents are asking whether the property is being redeveloped as a resort or transformed into a dense, gated, faith-centered residential community containing hundreds of condo-style units and religious, educational, commercial, and community amenities. They are asking whether the existing zoning permits the proposed use, who is behind the project, where the investment money originates, who ultimately benefits from or controls the companies and property-holding entities involved, and what effect the development could have on roads, water, sewer systems, schools, emergency services, taxpayers, and the long-term character of the surrounding area.
Those are ordinary and necessary questions. Yet beneath them is the deeper issue examined throughout this article: Are we still one people living under a common constitutional order, or are we gradually becoming a collection of separate civilizational, religious, and ideological enclaves?
The Sheridan controversy should not be reduced to a debate over whether Muslims may live, worship, or own property in LaSalle County. Of course they may. The relevant question is whether any development, Islamic, Christian, secular, or otherwise, should be permitted to function socially, economically, culturally, or legally apart from the surrounding community while imposing significant burdens upon rural infrastructure and taxpayers.
No religious legal system, whether sharia, canon law, or any other, may be elevated above the Constitution, state law, due process, equal protection, property rights, zoning law, criminal law, or the civil rights of American citizens. Religious freedom protects worship and conscience. It does not create a right to construct a rival legal order or avoid the ordinary rules governing every other resident, developer, investor, business, and property owner.
The questions do not end with zoning or infrastructure. LaSalle County contains nationally significant facilities, including the LaSalle Clean Energy Center, a two-reactor nuclear power facility near Marseilles, and the Marseilles Training Center, an Illinois National Guard facility that supports military readiness, weapons qualification, mobilization preparation, law-enforcement exercises, and first-responder training. [11], [12] Their presence makes transparency regarding foreign ownership, foreign financing, beneficial control, international affiliations, and the long-term use of substantial nearby land especially important.
A community should not be required to prove that a national-security threat already exists before asking federal authorities to determine whether one could develop. The concern is not that people from a particular ethnicity, nationality, or religion may purchase American property. The concern arises when strategically located land may be controlled, financed, or influenced by foreign governments, organizations, movements, or investors whose loyalties, legal traditions, political objectives, or cultural commitments may be hostile to the United States and its constitutional order.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, commonly known as CFIUS, is an interagency committee authorized to review certain transactions involving foreign investment in American businesses and certain real-estate transactions by foreign persons for their potential effect on national security. [13] Its real-estate authority is structured around particular transactions, foreign persons, property rights, covered ports, military installations, and defined geographic areas. Proximity to a sensitive facility does not automatically establish CFIUS jurisdiction, and not every foreign-involved real-estate transaction is covered.
That does not make the questions irrelevant. It makes factual transparency essential. Whether CFIUS or another federal agency has jurisdiction over the Sheridan transaction depends upon facts that have not been fully established in the public record, including the identity and nationality of the ultimate beneficial owners, the sources and structure of the financing, the rights being acquired, the relationships among the participating companies and investors, and the property’s intended long-term use. These unanswered questions are precisely why residents have requested federal review rather than attempting to make a final national-security determination themselves.
When a major development is being promoted near nuclear infrastructure and an active military training facility, public officials should want to know who actually owns it, who finances it, who exercises control over it, and whether any foreign government, organization, or ideological movement stands behind it. Asking those questions is not religious persecution. It is responsible stewardship of American land, infrastructure, and security.
This is why the public message One Nation Under God matters. It reminds us that America’s strength depends upon unity under a common moral and constitutional order, not the formation of isolated enclaves within it. It also explains why what is happening near Sheridan deserves attention beyond LaSalle County. The project presents a local test of a national question: Will communities recognize and defend their foundations before those foundations are permanently altered?
DefendLaSalle.com was created to gather records, preserve promotional materials, examine the people and business entities connected to the project, track zoning, ownership, financial, and national-security questions, and provide residents with the information they need to evaluate the proposal for themselves. Readers who want to understand how the broader issues discussed in this article are appearing at the local level are invited to register for updates on the Defend LaSalle website. [14]
We will get exactly what we deserve if we fail to awaken to the fact that nothing is secular. The belief that the Establishment Clause required us to banish God from schools, government, libraries, and the public square was a deception that opened the door to lesser gods. These fallen created beings, all of whom were defeated at the cross, immediately seized the opportunity we gave them to influence life in America.
Nothing is secular, nothing is sterile, and everything in the material realm has a spiritual counterpart. Today is our day to choose whom we will serve: a being whose system has repeatedly been used to justify the shedding of innocent blood, or the God who shed His own blood so that mankind could find life and true peace. The Lord of lords extends salvation to every person, Black or White, Muslim or Jew.
It is in Christ - not in the condemning spirit of religion, but in the person of Jesus, that America will find the peace and unity she longs for. We can stop jihad in America, but will we? I believe we eventually will, after a significant shaking in our nation awakens the sleeping Church.
Now is the time for each of us to choose which side of history and eternity we want to occupy. That decision will also determine the role each of us will play in the America that is awakening to the existence of her founding covenants. It will be through this knowledge, and the heart change that accompanies genuine revelation, that America reclaims her status as a nation operating under the protective, jihad-proof covering of Jesus Christ.
Molly Krempski
Endnotes
[1] “Cape Henry Memorial Cross.” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 16 Mar. 2016, https://www.nps.gov/came/cape-henry-memorial-cross.htm. Accessed 17 July 2026. [nps.gov]
[2] “The English Establish a Foothold at Jamestown, 1606–1610.” Library of Congress, U.S. History Primary Source Timeline, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/colonial-settlement-1600-1763/english-at-jamestown-1606-1610/. Accessed 17 July 2026. [loc.gov]
[3] “Virginia 1994.” WallBuilders, 1 Dec. 1994, https://wallbuilders.com/resource/virginia-1994/. Accessed 17 July 2026. [wallbuilders.com]
[4] "418th Anniversary of the First Landing and Raising of the Cape Henry Cross”, accessed May 23, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/418th-anniversary-of-the-first-landing-and-the-raising-of-the-cape-henry-cross/
[5] “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” Freedom 250, https://freedom250.org/celebration/rededicate-250-a-national-jubilee-of-prayer-praise-and-thanksgiving. Accessed 17 July 2026. [freedom250.org]
[6] “Religion and the Congress of the Confederation.” Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel04.html. Accessed 17 July 2026. [loc.gov]
[7] “Avalon Project - The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England; May 19, 1643”, accessed May 23, 2025, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/art1613.asp
[8] Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives Made During the First Session of the Thirty-Third Congress (Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854), 6–9.
[9] Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: Cornelius Wendell, 1855), 34th Cong., 1st Sess., 354, January 23, 1856; B. F. Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1864), 328.
[10] Library of Congress - “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic”, accessed May 23, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06-2.html
[11] “LaSalle County Nuclear Generating Station.” Grokipedia, https://grokipedia.com/page/LaSalle_County_Nuclear_Generating_Station. Accessed 17 July 2026. [grokipedia.com]
[12] “ILNG Showcases Upgrades of Automated Record Fire Range at MTC.” Illinois National Guard, 27 July 2021, https://www.il.ngb.army.mil/News/News-Article-View/Article/2708387/ilng-showcases-upgrades-of-automated-record-fire-range-at-mtc/. Accessed 17 July 2026.
[14] DefendLaSalle.com, including “The Problem,” “Our Position,” “Who Is Behind the Project?” and “One Nation Under God.”