CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (ABP) — The executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention reportedly claimed the “real threat” to the United States is that “Islam has a strategic plan to conquer and occupy America.”
David Clippard, in his address at the opening session of the group's annual meeting Oct. 30 in Cape Girardeau, said the combination of an apathetic church and a changing culture means Islam could push Christianity to the side as the nation's dominant religion.
“They have a plan to take over,” he said, according to Cape Girardeau's Southeast Missourian newspaper. “The first city is Detroit, which has 600,000 people. Three hundred thousand are Muslims today.”
However, in a 2000 survey, the Association of Religion Data Archives estimated that 46,492 Muslims lived in the county that includes Detroit. The largest religious body in the city in 2000 was the Catholic Church, with 451,069 adherents. According to 2004 estimates by the American Religious Identity Survey, about 1.5 million adult Muslims live in the United States.
Clippard said the Saudi Arabian government has funded scores of Islamic study centers and mosques in North America — including ones on or near the University of Missouri campuses in Columbia, Rolla and St. Louis.
In addition, Clippard said, the Saudi Arabian government paid for 15,000 Muslim college students to come to North America to study — with the intention, he claimed, of taking the continent for Islam.
“They are after our sons and daughters, our students,” he said.
According to the Missouri newspaper, Clippard said U.S. churches were arguing over inconsequential matters instead of confronting the true threats to Christianity. Those, he said, included homosexuality, stem-cell research, gambling and Islam.
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