What would faithfulness look like if America lived under Sharia?
“And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”Jeremiah 29:7
Many American believers speak of Sharia with something close to dread. It is the cautionary tale, the thing that happens “over there,” the system we are sure we would never tolerate here.
So let’s run a thought experiment. This is not a prediction, and it is not a commentary on the Muslim family down the road, most of whom want the same quiet life you do. It is a question aimed squarely at the Christian heart:
If the government over you became one you despise, what would Jesus ask of you?
The answer is in the Book. Most of us just haven’t wanted to read it with that question in mind.
What It Would Actually Look Like
Sharia is not one single code. It varies by school, by country, and by century. But for most of the last fourteen hundred years, Christians living under Islamic rule have known a recognizable pattern called dhimmistatus: “protected” people, with conditions attached.
Those conditions have historically included a special tax on non-Muslims (the jizya, rooted in Qur’an 9:29). Limits on building new churches or even repairing old ones. No public crosses, no church bells, no processions. Evangelizing a Muslim forbidden, and leaving Islam treated as a serious crime. Court testimony from a Christian weighted less than a Muslim’s. Blasphemy laws with teeth.
This is not ancient history. Believers in Iran worship in house churches that move from living room to living room. In Pakistan, a blasphemy accusation can end a life. In parts of northern Nigeria, churches are burned and congregations rebuild anyway.
Now bring it home. Your church can’t add the fellowship hall. The cross comes off the steeple. There’s a line item on your tax bill with your faith’s name on it. Your son can’t share the gospel with a coworker without risking prison. Your word in court is worth half your neighbor’s. And, needless to say, the Second Amendment is not on the ballot.
New. Unpleasant. Deeply offensive to everything we were raised on.
So what does Scripture say to do?
The Government Paul Told You to Obey
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.”Romans 13:1–2
Paul wrote that around AD 57. The emperor was Nero, the man who would later light his gardens with burning Christians and take Paul’s own head.
Peter wrote the same thing: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors… Fear God. Honour the king.” (1 Peter 2:13–17). The king Peter told the church to honor was the same Nero who would crucify him.
Paul told Titus to remind the churches “to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work” (Titus 3:1). He told Timothy to pray “for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Timothy 2:1–2).
Jesus was handed a coin bearing the image of Tiberius, an emperor whose coins proclaimed him son of a god. Jesus did not lead a tax revolt. He said, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21).
And when Judah was carried off to Babylon, a pagan empire that had just burned the Temple, God did not tell the exiles to form a resistance. He told them to build houses, plant gardens, raise families, and pray for the city that held them captive (Jeremiah 29:4–7). Daniel then served three foreign kings with such integrity that his enemies could find no fault in him except his God.
Notice what all of these have in common. None of them were written to people living under friendly governments. Every one was written to believers under rulers worse than anything an American has pictured. The command to submit was never conditional on the government deserving it.
Where Submission Ends
Here is where honest engagement matters, because Scripture does not teach submission without limit.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego held Babylonian offices and paid Babylonian taxes. But when the king commanded them to bow, they answered: “Be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Daniel 3:18).
When Darius outlawed prayer, Daniel “went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime” (Daniel 6:10). He didn’t hide. He didn’t riot. He just kept doing what he’d always done, and went to the lions.
When the Sanhedrin ordered the apostles to stop preaching Jesus, Peter answered, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Then they went back out, preached, took their beatings, and left “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name” (Acts 5:41).
So the line is clear:
Caesar gets the coin. Caesar never gets the knee.
Obey in everything that does not require sin. Where the law demands you deny Christ, stop worshiping, or stop telling the truth about Him, refuse. Openly, respectfully, and without the sword. Then accept what comes.
That last part is the hard one for Americans. When Peter drew a sword in Gethsemane, Jesus told him to put it away (Matthew 26:52). “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4). “Here is the patience and the faith of the saints” (Revelation 13:10).
The apostles never organized a revolt against Rome. They outlasted it. Within three centuries the empire that fed Christians to lions was building churches. Tertullian’s old observation held true: the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church.
The Mirror
There’s one more question worth sitting with, and it’s an uncomfortable one.
When we say we despise Sharia, what exactly do we despise? The loss of liberty? Or the loss of being in charge?
Because plenty of believers who dread the idea of a religious law being imposed on them would happily impose their own if they had the votes. Jesus had a word for that: “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12).
The Kingdom of God has never advanced by statute. It advances by new birth. Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). We are “strangers and pilgrims” here (1 Peter 2:11), people who “desire a better country, that is, an heavenly” (Hebrews 11:16). America has been a gracious place to sojourn. It was never the Kingdom.
If God ever allowed the American church to live under a law not its own, it would not mean He had lost control. It might mean He was finally teaching us what the rest of the body of Christ already knows.
What to Do Now
- Pray for those in authority now. If the day ever comes when it’s hard, you’ll want the habit already in place.
- Learn from the persecuted church. What is a thought experiment for us is a Tuesday for millions of believers. Read their stories. Pray for them by name.
- Love your Muslim neighbors. They are not the enemy; they are the mission field. Some of the most striking reports of people coming to Christ in our generation have come out of the Muslim world, often through dreams of a man in white.
- Hold your things loosely. The Hebrew believers “took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance” (Hebrews 10:34).
- Settle your line today. Decide now, in the quiet, what you will render to Caesar and what you will never give him. The three Hebrew boys didn’t hold a committee meeting in front of the furnace. They had already decided.
A Prayer
Father, You set up kings and You remove them. Teach me to honor whoever You place over me, to pay what I owe, to pray for those I would rather resist. Keep my knee bent to You alone. If I am ever asked to choose between the law of man and the name of Jesus, let the choice already be made. Give me Daniel’s open window and Peter’s rejoicing. And let my neighbors, whoever they are and whatever they believe, see Christ in how I suffer as well as how I live. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
To God be all the Glory · Maranatha
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