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Jake Lang carried his “Christian Crusader March” into Dearborn, Michigan on Tuesday evening, and roughly 2,000 protesters and counterprotesters converged on the Henry Ford Centennial Library, where the city had relocated its council meeting ahead of the march.
Before the night ended, demonstrators were shoving officers and throwing down barricades; a SWAT team moved in, and police made multiple arrests. Men wearing swastikas stood openly among demonstrators who had come in the name of a Christian crusade.
Lang is a Great Replacement conspiracy theorist and U.S. Senate candidate who spent nearly four years in jail on charges of assaulting police officers on January 6 (Donald Trump’s Day One pardon set him free). During public comment inside the chamber, he claimed white Christians were being replaced in the city, and the residents inside jeered him.
Before the night was over, he had declared that “the crusade has begun” and that Muslims had come to “steal our wealth.” The people of America’s first Arab-majority city, he warned, would find their “time in this country is running short.”
He did not build the spectacle alone. Lorenzo Sewell, the Detroit pastor who delivered a benediction at Donald Trump’s second inauguration and spent that same afternoon hawking a $LORENZO memecoin that collapsed within days, helped organize the visit, and one of Lang’s allies, Jayden Scott, supplied its creed: “This is a Christian nation. A Christian nation it shall remain.” The marchers, Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said, “are attacking the idea that everyone can belong to America.”
Dearborn’s Christian clergy had begun rejecting the crusade days earlier. The pastor of the Church of the Divine Child, one of the city’s Catholic parishes, called Dearborn “a place where people can love and draw close to each other and to worship freely,” and the chaplain of St. Kateri parish put the commandment plainly: “Doesn’t matter, it’s love your neighbor.”
The archbishop of Detroit had answered them before they arrived.
