The steeple is still there. The cross is not.
For more than eighty years that brick building in Warren, Michigan, was a Lutheran church. Kids played pickup games on the lawn. Sunday bells marked the week. About six years ago the property sold, the cross came down, and the building became the Al Ihsaan Islamic Center. Justin Tye, 57, grew up here, left, and bought his childhood house thirteen years ago. He took a Fox News Digital reporter on a tour of what the neighborhood looks like now.
“They’ll turn anything into a mosque,” he said.
He was not speaking in metaphor. Within seven miles of his block there are five mosques. An old industrial machinery shop that once employed blue-collar men is now Masjid Al-Fath. A Baptist church is the Islamic Center of Nine Mile. A sign outside that converted church directs women to a separate parking lot and a separate door. Another mosque is going up. Neighbors fought a plan to turn a residential house into still another worship site. The city council finally said no. That one fight is the exception, not the rule.
The Neighborhood Did Not Vote for This Change
Warren is Michigan’s third-largest city, built almost overnight after World War II when veterans came to work for Ford and General Motors. Earlier waves of Lebanese, Iraqi, and Syrian families, many of them Chaldean Christians, came for the same assembly lines. That is not the story Tye is telling.
The later wave, fed by wars in the 1990s and 2000s, refugee admissions, and chain migration, is. Dearborn, a short drive away, already draws the cameras. The 2020 census put Middle Eastern or North African ancestry at 54.5 percent of Dearborn. Warren’s working-class streets get treated as a footnote until the church bells stop.
Tye stood on the corner with his longtime neighbor, Wendy Schneider, and walked through the calendar.
“It all started when they bought the mosque, roughly six years ago. After Ramadan, they would have their Eid al-Fitr prayer service. It was unannounced. We didn’t know anything. All of a sudden, we were just woken up to 100-plus people behind the mosque, with an imam on a podium with big amplifier speakers, belting out his prayer service. So it woke up the whole neighborhood.”
Since then, he said, Friday afternoons and Muslim holidays have meant chaos. Schneider needs frequent doctor visits. She will not schedule them on Friday. Worshipers flood the streets for Jummah prayer. She called the driving dangerous and said people who do not speak English do not fully grasp the rules of the road. Tye did not renew his motorcycle plates this year for the same reason.