By Philip C. Johnson | July 10, 2026
Fifty-six men signed their names to a sentence that has not stopped echoing for two hundred fifty years: all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Not granted by a king. Recognized as already given by God, and therefore beyond any state’s power to revoke.
Here is the question this anniversary keeps forcing on me. Does America, does Western Civilization, get another two hundred fifty years? Not automatically. Not without getting serious about who we let in and what they believe. Specifically, not without a hard, honest conversation about immigration from the Islamic world, which carries a comprehensive worldview fundamentally at odds with the one that produced the American experiment in the first place.
That experiment rested on a set of premises Scripture supplied: equal dignity under one Judge, higher law above rulers, conscience free from coercion, liberty as the fruit of moral self-government. We did not earn any of it. It arrived by grace and sacrifice, and every generation has to choose again whether to keep what it was handed.
Connecting the Dots
Three things this summer would not let me look away. In Northern Ireland, streets burned after a Sudanese asylum-seeker was charged with a stabbing that left a man partially blind. A low-budget vigilante film shot to the top of rental charts across the West and got blocked or delayed by more than one European government. And here at home, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has immigration numbers that are no longer possible to ignore. Different continents, same fracture. America, a nation built upon a biblical worldview, is being asked to absorb, at an unprecedented scale, immigrants who often do not share, and sometimes openly reject, its moral and cultural foundations, while making few serious demands for assimilation or enduring civic loyalty.
Not a Private Faith
Danny Burmawi grew up devoutly Muslim in Jordan, met Christ as a young man, and spent fourteen years watching the Middle East up close from Lebanon before founding the Ideological Defense Institute here in the States. He does not do the thing most Western commentators do, which is carve out a “moderate Islam” that just needs better PR. His point is blunter: Islam is not a private faith that occasionally gets hijacked by extremists. It is a political ideology with a religion riding inside it, and the ideology sets the terms. The moderate and the extremist are reading the same texts. What separates them is not doctrine, it’s obedience. So when someone condemns terrorism in one breath and insists in the next that the sources commanding it remain perfect and unchangeable, Burmawi doesn’t hear a reformer. He hears cover. The West bet that anyone who moved here would simply absorb the liberties a Scripture-shaped civilization had produced. That bet has not paid off, because the authoritative texts of Islam never arrived at the same terms on human dignity, limited power, or the status of women. Importing these populations while expecting the outcomes to match our values was never wise. It was sentimentality dressed up as policy.
Burmawi is not wrong. I did not come to that conclusion from a think tank memo. I have sat in cafes in Cairo and living rooms in Sana’a, and in dozens of other rooms across scores of nations in between. Burmawi is not off base.
A Film Governments Wanted Banned
Then there’s Citizen Vigilante. Not a good film. Not one I’d point you to. I bring it up because of what its success says, not what it shows. An ordinary man is driven to take justice into his own hands after European authorities fail, again, to protect citizens from migrant crime and a system more interested in optics than victims. It’s graphic. It’s blunt. It also became the number-one rental on Apple TV and Amazon Prime, reached hundreds of millions of viewers after Elon Musk posted it free on X for forty-eight hours, and got refused classification outright in Germany. That kind of popularity doesn’t come from good dialogue. It comes from striking a nerve. A lot of Western citizens have quietly concluded their institutions won’t defend them, and they’d rather watch a fantasy of rough justice than keep waiting on the real thing.
Northern Ireland Burns
Belfast is what happens when nobody will name the conflict out loud. On June 8th, a Sudanese asylum seeker tried to behead a man in the street. The victim survived, but lost an eye in the frenzied stabbing. After the event, masked men went door to door marking immigrant homes and setting them on fire. A bus burned. Twenty-seven people lost their homes in one night. The Times called it a spontaneous pogrom. Authorities logged the highest annual total of racially motivated crime since records began. I would not agree with that assessment of “racial motivation.” What actually collided in those streets were two incompatible worldviews: one where the stranger is received under the law of a common Creator, and one where the house of Islam expands until every rival order surrenders to it.
Britain’s grooming-gang scandals, where men of Pakistani and other Asian heritage were wildly overrepresented among convicted offenders, ran on the identical pattern of official denial. Europol’s latest terrorism assessment recorded 58 terrorist attacks across the European Union in 2024. Thirty-four carried out, 5 failed, and 19 foiled before they could be executed. In addition, authorities arrested 449 individuals on terrorism-related charges.
On this side of the Atlantic, the 2026 U.S. intelligence threat assessment documented at least three Islamist attacks on American soil in 2025 and fifteen additional plots disrupted. None of that is coincidence. It is the measured cost of admitting a political theology faster than that theology is asked to assimilate to the freedoms that let it in.
Welcoming the stranger is a Christian obligation. Pretending that obligation requires no discernment about the stranger’s ultimate loyalties is not.
Here in Texas
I don’t have to cross an ocean to watch the same trajectory. Dallas-Fort Worth now holds sixty-two Sunni mosques and five Shia mosques, more than a fifth of every mosque in Texas packed into one metroplex. Statewide, Texas counted roughly 140,000 Muslims in 1990, well under one percent of the population. There were 166 mosques in 2011, 224 by 2020, well over three hundred now. The single largest decade of mosque growth in American history was the decade after September 11, 2001. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened the door. Post-9/11 policy and chain migration have kept it open ever since. Churches still outnumber mosques by a wide margin, so this isn’t demographic replacement. It is the rapid addition of a comprehensive belief system whose own authoritative texts reject the Judeo-Christian foundation that American liberty was built on.
Not Self-Sustaining
The founders’ wager was never self-sustaining. It needed a people who kept believing that human equality and limited government rest on truths older than any constitution, truths Scripture supplied and the culture used to pass down. For a generation we told ourselves any worldview could be privatized, rendered harmless by simple residence. Belfast doesn’t believe that anymore. The audiences who made Citizen Vigilante a hit don’t believe it. And the quiet transformation of neighborhoods across Texas is unfolding in real time, whether Americans choose to notice it or not. The only real question left is whether the people entrusted with this inheritance will stop pretending before the inheritance is gone.
What this generation owes is honesty and resolve. Slow the pace of immigration until assimilation can actually happen. Require real fluency in the language and laws of the country being joined. Say plainly that liberty of conscience, the equal legal dignity of women, and the refusal to place any religious law above the civil law are non-negotiable terms of membership. None of that is bigotry. It’s the plain maintenance schedule for a civilization whose moral architecture came from the Bible. Skip it, and you get hardened enclaves, parallel authorities, and eventually Europe’s friction becomes our domestic pattern.
Fidelity to a Biblical Worldview
Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people (Proverbs 14:34). That principle travels. No civilization coasts forever on its founding documents once the people who wrote and sustained them are replaced by people who never shared their premises. Two hundred fifty years in, the wager is still what it always was: ordinary men and women, under God and under law, deciding whether to keep what was never theirs to begin with. Scripture gave us the vision that made America possible. Only fidelity to it, renewed by every generation, buys another two hundred fifty years.
Lord, let us be found faithful with what You have loaned us.
The Global Nexter 