Oklahoma residents successfully pressure city council to block mosque proposal

BROKEN ARROW, Oklahoma (LifeSiteNews) — An estimated 1,300 people attended a city council meeting in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, earlier this week and successfully pressured elected representatives to vote 4-1 against a rezoning proposal that would have allowed a new 15-acre Islamic mosque to be built.

Sarah Gray, chairwoman for the Tulsa County Democratic Party, claimed that their opposition was rooted in bigotry. “These are not terrorists, these are our community members,” she said. “No public meeting should be allowed to be filled with such hatred directed at a specific community based on their religion.”

But others maintain the main issue was concern over infrastructure. “Some say last night was a victory for freedom of religion, some say a failure of freedom of religion. I say it was not based on religion,” city councilor Justin Green commented. “The facts are that, at this time, that particular piece of land is not adequate for commercial development. Not simply talking about a mosque, but any commercial development.”

The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in between opposition to Islam and infrastructure concerns, as one of the more than 400 persons who spoke at the meeting told councilors, “I have a daughter who is 15 years old. I don’t want this ideology imposed on her.” Others expressed concerns over traffic jams and parking.

Approximately 10,000 Muslims reportedly live in Broken Arrow. The land they wanted to build on was purchased in 2014 by the North American Islamic Trust. The trust has properties in over 40 states.

The real story here is that Muslims in Broken Arrow, which is located in rural Oklahoma and has just over 110,000 citizens, is growing. They have a center in the town at present that is currently overflowing. They needed this new center to accommodate their members.

The decision to vote down the mosque comes just weeks after it was announced that a 155-foot statue of a Hindu “god” in North Carolina is going to be built. Once completed, it will be the tallest statue in the United States. The statue will be part of the Carolina Murugan Temple Campus, which is being built on 130 acres of land.

In August 2024, a 90-foot-tall statue of the monkey-headed Hindu “god” Lord Hanuman was completed in Texas. At the time, it replaced Our Lady of the Rockies, a sculpture of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Montana, as the third-tallest statue in the U.S. The pagan idol, dubbed the “Statue of Union,” was unveiled at the Sri Ashtalakshmi Temple in Sugar Land on the outskirts of Houston during a “Prana Prathishta” ceremony.

The erection of these sorts of statues, worship centers, and buildings is only going to continue in the years ahead, as pockets of non-Christian communities have been spouting up across the country for years. Somali Muslims in Minnesota and Arab Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, are just a few of them. Catholic charity groups have played a role in helping these persons arrive in the United States.

Growing numbers of Generation Z and Millennial Americans are subscribing to LGBT ideology and wokeism. That reality, coupled with monkey statues, calls to prayer at 5 am, and other non-Christian worship, is dangerous for the United States from a spiritual perspective. Not only does Psalm 95:5 tell us, “For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils,” but Proverbs 14:34 says, “righteousness exalts a nation but sins condemns any people.” God-fearing American citizens who truly believe their faith and have an ardent love for their country they need to take these changing realities seriously.

For centuries, America has welcomed immigrants from foreign lands. But the majority of those persons were from Europe and shared a generally Christian religious outlook with those who lived in the U.S. as they arrived. But a 2022 Pew Research Center found that the number of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped from 90 percent in 1972 to 63 percent in 2020. Over that same period, those who identify as agnostic, atheist, or “nothing in particular” jumped from five percent to over 30 percent.

Pew’s study also found that “new arrivals” are more likely to come from Asia, especially China and India. Worryingly, it noted that “most of the world’s people who identify as religiously unaffiliated, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain live in either China or India, and this is reflected in the changing profile of immigrants.” The political and cultural ramification of this coming change will mean that what unfolds in Broken Arrow will likely occur in other cities as well in the near future. Americans need to prepare themselves for these realities.