A White House social media post from Tuesday is stirring up reactions both for and against the Trump administration’s policies for reducing legal immigration. “Legal Immigration from Majority-Muslim Nations Was Cut 96% Since 2024” posted the X account “Rapid Response 47.” It included a graph produced by the CATO Institute showing precipitous declines in or about January 2025 and January 2026.

The X post generated opposite reactions. The pro-immigration researcher from the CATO Institute celebrated the visibility of his work but argued that the Trump administration’s policy was illegal. Meanwhile, another X user cheered, “I voted for this — and will again.”

Prudence directs us to adopt a more considered reaction not easily reducible to a soundbite in either direction. For starters, the language of “Majority-Muslim Nations” is problematic and muddy, and the White House communications team was ill-advised to accept CATO’s framing of the issue.

The instinct behind the White House’s desire to celebrate this trend is obvious: radical Islamist terror remains a threat to America, and defending the homeland is a much easier task if the federal government does not create an easy way for the “bad guys” to come over here.

In the past week alone, two incidents served as troubling reminders of the threat Islamist terror can pose, although thankfully in both instances tragedy was narrowly avoided. On Sunday, British authorities arrested five men apparently planning to carry out some sort of attack on RAF Fairford, an airbase housing long-range American bombers. The U.K. now suspects some connection to Iran. On Wednesday, the copilot of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv stabbed the pilot and briefly hijacked the plane until Israeli passengers intervened.

As courts established in the first Trump administration, the president is well within his rights to protect America by restricting immigration from nations that have proven to be terrorist breeding grounds. Does this list of nations happen to map closely onto the Islamic world? Yes, because the specific brand of terrorism is radical Islam, the most violent expression of what is an inherently political religion. And the U.S. government would be foolish to blind itself to the true nature of the threat simply because it falls into the category of “religion.”

On the other hand, it is insufficient to reduce the recognition of terrorist training grounds to “Majority-Muslim Nations.”

It is insufficient, first, because it is constitutionally unacceptable to impose a religious test as an immigration standard. The First Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The president has no separate authority in this regard, as his constitutional duty is to “take Care that the Laws [passed by Congress] be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3).

Second, it is insufficient because national identity does not determine a person’s religion. Many nations with a Muslim majority also have a sprinkling of Christians and other religious minorities, and those Christians are often persecuted, sometimes even killed. Such persecuted religious minorities have a compelling reason to flee their country, and the threat to their lives gives them a credible case for asylum. Lumping every person from a country into the clunky category of “Majority-Muslim Nation” only serves to entirely obscure the complex dynamics at play.

Indeed, the very fact that immigration from “Majority-Muslim Nations” has declined underscores the mistake of equating national and religious identities. It implies that many Muslims have already immigrated to the U.S., and many have become citizens.

European nations have invited even more Muslim immigration, and the reportedly “Middle Eastern-looking” men who nearly attacked the British air force base held British citizenship. If the U.S. believes restricting immigration from “Majority-Muslim Nations” will keep terrorists from our shores, Islamist extremist groups may simply import terrorists from less-threatening nations, like the U.K. or Australia.

Nor is a nation’s current religious composition a permanent condition. In the 4th century, what is now Tunisia was a Christian-majority region. In the 8th century, Spain was majority-Muslim. Countries change over time, primarily through individuals moving from one to another. This underscores the fears of many Americans, who believe Muslim immigrants will weaken America’s connection to Western civilization. But it also underscores the folly of equating a nation’s majority religion with the religion of every individual member of that nation.

Christians who seek to order their lives according to Scripture ought to be wary about the creeping assumption that national identity determines a person’s religion. The entire Christian mission is about taking the gospel of Christ into every nation, so that people of all nations will know God’s grace.

Jesus famously commands his followers, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” promising the blessing of his presence to accomplish this mission “to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

The ultimate goal of this project is God’s glory, when “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” will stand “before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9).

The Christian religion cuts across all national and ethnic boundaries. So let Christians not be co-opted into worldly ways of thinking that define a person’s religion by his or her national identity. And so that we can help our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world, let American Christians not settle for inaccurate categories that bar immigration from certain nations merely because of that nation’s dominant religion.