City council members in Dearborn, Michigan, refused to denounce Sharia law when a local pastor demanded each of them do so at a town hall meeting Tuesday.
Lorenzo Sewell, who leads 180 Church in Detroit, had told the council members earlier that the city was no longer governed by American law. “America, we have lost this city. This is a city that is no longer up under American laws; we are up under Sharia law. We will not have it anymore,” he said. “Enough is enough.” Looking at the members seated in front of him, he added: “You are only 1% of this nation. We are not a nation of Muslims.”
“None of them denounced Sharia,” Sewell told the Daily Wire. “They laughed at me.”
None of them took up his demand. The crowd’s reaction that followed made the moment feel to Sewell, like something that should not have been happening in an American city. He later told the Daily Wire that walking into the Dearborn city council meeting “felt like walking into Iran.”
Dearborn officials reject the premise. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, speaking at the same meeting, argued that casting the city as overtaken by Muslims erases its Christian residents and those of other faiths.
Dearborn’s demographics changed how the confrontation landed. The 2020 count was the first in which the Census Bureau designated Middle Eastern and North African origins as their own category, and the results showed 54.5% of the city’s roughly 110,000 residents claiming MENA ancestry — enough to make Dearborn the first majority-Arab city in the country, the Detroit Free Press reported.
The confrontation did not emerge abruptly. Sewell has spent years watching the same reality unfold around him in Dearborn. “I cannot go to a place right now where I’m sitting and not encounter Muslims,” he said. The encounters are ordinary and constant, he said. Gas stations, car washes, oil-change shops, the places that sell candy bars, cookies, and chips. “Multiply that by 700,000 people,” he said. “This is what people don’t understand.”
To Sewell the town hall reassured what he said to be commonplace for a long time. What struck him most was how ordinary the moment should have been. “A pastor in a Christian country talking about Jesus,” he said. “What did I do? I did what the Bible says to do.”
Since the town hall incident, the public response has been different. People stop Sewell on the street, they call him, and send emails. Many tell him they share the same concerns about the direction of the city but are too scared to say so in public.
Sewell noted that the video of him at the town hall went more viral than the prayer he once delivered at a presidential inauguration. He told the Daily Wire he found it crazy that a black pastor simply talking about Jesus in a place still called a Christian country would spread that far and draw that kind of reaction.
Sewell tied the town hall to what he sees as a global pattern of Christian persecution, and faulted Pope Leo XIV for how the pontiff has described the killing of Christians in Nigeria. Leo has addressed Nigeria more than once — in June 2025 he condemned the killing of roughly 200 people in Benue State, most of them displaced families sheltering at a Catholic mission — but in November he told reporters that both Christians and Muslims have been slaughtered there and attributed the violence largely to terrorism and fights over land and money. That framing is what Sewell rejects. “He would never say anything against Sharia law. Never,” Sewell told the Daily Wire. “He should be an imam, not a pope.”
The Dearborn town hall ended with no council member denouncing Sharia law. The video of the exchange has continued to circulate.