Michigan church hosts interfaith rally supporting Muslim neighbors as hate groups target Dearborn
The Rev. Halim Shukair speaks at a news conference for “Hate Has No Home in Michigan” at Christ Episcopal Church in Dearborn, as seen on a Facebook video of the event from DearbornOn.
[Episcopal News Service] Interfaith leaders gathered this week inside an Episcopal church in Dearborn, Michigan, in a show of solidarity after recent incidents of anti-Muslim hatred and to rally the community against a rising trend of religious bigotry that has coincided with this year’s midterm elections.
The “Hate Has No Home in Michigan” event was hosted Aug. 25 by Christ Episcopal Church and Mother of the Savior Church, an Arabic-speaking congregation that worships at Christ Episcopal Church. The event’s news conference featured speakers from several different faith traditions, including Muslim and Jewish, as well as the Rev. Halim Shukair, the two Episcopal congregations’ priest-in-charge.
In his remarks, Shukair emphasized that his church also is home to the Intercultural Community Center in Dearborn, of which he serves as president.
“This building is more than a church building. It is a sacred and community space where people from different cultures, languages and backgrounds come together,” Shukair said. “Here, people worship God in Arabic and English. Here Christians from different traditions share the same space, and through the Intercultural Community Center, neighbors from many faiths come together to serve the community.”
The show of support for Dearborn as a diverse, welcoming and inclusive city comes as hate groups target the city, known for its large Muslim population. A group of right-wing activists staged a protest last week criticizing Muslims and Islam, and similar rhetoric targeting Muslim groups has raised alarms after a Muslim candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, earned the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s November election for U.S. Senate.
El-Sayed, a Muslim of Egyptian heritage who was born in Michigan, attended the “Hate Has No Home in Michigan” event at Christ Episcopal Church and spoke during the news conference there. This was a conversation, El-Sayed said, “that we unfortunately have to have yet again, about what it means to be American in a place that could not be more American.”
“This country has always been about bringing people across our differences together,” El-Sayed said. The organizer of last week’s anti-Muslim demonstrations wasn’t motivated to target Dearborn “because he hates a particular group of people,” El-Sayed said. “It’s because he hates that thing about America, that America is bigger than the small version of it that he wants it to be. He hates the idea that he doesn’t get to define America to be so small that it only includes a few people who look and think and act just like him.”
Nationwide, the American Civil Liberties Union warns that attacks on Muslims are increasing at a time when overall hate crimes are down. Much of the anti-Muslim rhetoric this year has originated in right-wing circles online and has been amplified more publicly by some Republican lawmakers, such as Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who suggested earlier this year that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was a terrorist.
Dearborn has long been targeted for such xenophobic vitriol because of its large Arab American population. People of Arab descent now make up a majority of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents, including Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who spoke Aug. 25 at Christ Episcopal Church.
“We have to stand with one another and lift one another up,” Hammoud said. He invoked the example of Dearborn’s children. “When they’re on the playground making new friends, they have no preconditions on those friendships. They’re not asking a young child, what direction do you pray or where did your father come from? … They’re learning about one another and playing with one another, because kindness leads.”
Christ Episcopal Church also has been an example of that spirit in action. It partnered with Mother of the Savior, an Episcopal-Lutheran congregation, to launch the Intercultural Community Center with the backing of a $260,000 grant from Trinity Church in New York in 2022. The center’s mission is to serve as a “networking hub in Dearborn for nonpartisan social justice action which gathers individuals and groups from various cultural backgrounds.”
“Dearborn and Metro Detroit represent something beautiful about Michigan,” Shukair said during the Aug. 25 news conference. “We are Muslims, Christians and Jews and people of other faiths and traditions. We speak Arabic and English and many other languages. We come from many parts of the world, but we share one community and one home. And when one part of our community is targeted by hate, all of us must stand together.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.