Conservative Christians in Texas are trying to harass Muslims out of existence

Their latest gambit? Legally redefining religion to exclude Islam, a move they think will let them ignore Muslims’ civil rights

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In a troubling sign of how Christian Nationalists plan to extend their power, it appears that Texas Republicans and the white evangelical Christians who prop them up are going to relentlessly harass innocent Muslims like it’s 2001 again. But instead of merely pretending that every Muslim—or anyone who passes for one—is an extremist, they’re hoping that a conservative judiciary will help them redefine the law so that Muslims are just prevented from having the same rights as everyone else.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s been happening in isolation for years, but it now seems to be an unofficial strategy.

A troubling front-page story in the New York Times this week summarizes not just the ways Muslims have been harassed in recent months but the bigoted policy decisions that arguably violate Muslims’ First Amendment rights.

In recent months, a man was arrested and charged with making a terroristic threat at a major new Islamic center in Houston. Not far away, in Conroe, a woman told Muslim shoppers at a grocery store they were “not welcome in this state or this country” — after losing her job, she received nearly $250,000 from supporters after video of her comments circulated widely. In McKinney, a Dallas suburb, a woman grabbed a former mayor and stuffed paper with an anti-Muslim message down his shirt during a heated City Council hearing over a mosque expansion.

…

State leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have since opened investigations into Muslim institutions across Texas. They’ve sought to block the real estate development and investigate religious divorce counseling. Mr. Abbott threatened to take state funding from Texas airports that provide ritual washing stations for Muslim travelers, ordered the cancellation of a private water park party celebrating a Muslim holiday and labeled the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights group, as a terrorist group — a step that even the Trump administration has so far not taken. (Florida followed Texas in applying the same label to CAIR.)

In short, if Muslims try to do what Christians always get to do, Republicans put up obstacles in their path.

If Muslims are abused in public spaces, conservatives reward the harassers.

If Muslims dare to take advantage of public spaces, right-wing bigots will find a way to block them from using it.

And if Muslim lawyers dare to push back, conservatives will just label them as terrorists, as if practicing Muslims and religious extremists are all one and the same.

Each of these stories is horrific on its own. When you start seeing them on a regular basis like this, though, the trend becomes obvious: Conservative Christians and Republicans have decided terrorizing Muslims is perfectly acceptable and virtually no one in their circles has both the platform and courage to call this out for what it is. Why would they when Donald Trump has built his political career in part on dog whistles and attacks on Islamic communities? If Muslims spoke about Christians the way these Christians are speaking about Muslims, they might have a damn point. But conservative Christians don’t seem to care as long as the hate only flows in one direction. (There’s a reason they’re branded as “Y’all Qaeda.”)

A pointless promise from Sen. John Cornyn during his failed re-election campaign (screenshot via YouTube)

Speaking of which, we haven’t even gotten into what Republican politicians have said about Muslims (who are among their own constituents!):

Take Rep. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee Republican who declared last month that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Since that post, Ogles has shared anti-Muslim content on X more than 100 times.

Ogles is not alone, either. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) wrote on X in February that, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” He added this month: “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), meanwhile, recently shared photos of the 9/11 terror attacks alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with the caption, “The enemy is inside the gates.”

What did Speaker Mike Johnson do about those comments? Nothing, of course. He’s a conservative white evangelical. You can’t expect him to take the high road when his religion constantly teaches him to do the opposite. He’s not interested in treating Muslims as if they’re Americans with the same rights as him; he’s interested in Christian supremacy.

If this was just election-year pandering, it’d be bad enough. But consider that Texas Republicans have already injected Christianity in public schools—through the curriculum and through Ten Commandments posters in classrooms—and then realize those are just the initial phases of a long-term plan. They even have a perfect laboratory to test their ideas since there’s a growing Muslim population in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. The thinking goes: Let’s go after Muslims in that area, then expand from there.

They want to make Muslims feel so unwanted and out-of-place, that they remove themselves from society entirely.

When the Republican legislature in Texas reconvenes next year, the Times says, they want to redefine “religion” so that it excludes Islam entirely, giving conservative Christians a pathway to restrict the civil rights of Muslims even further:

In what would be an apparent first, one avenue being explored in Texas is to try to use state law to ban or regulate some Islamic cultural practices, such as tribunals for marriage and other decisions governed by religious rules, often referred to as Shariah law.

Some want to do it as soon as the Texas Legislature meets next year.

“One of the first things we’re going to try to do is define what a religion is,” said State Representative Alan Schoolcraft, a San Antonio Republican. “Islam itself is not just a religion. It’s much more than a religion.”

How’s that for a strategy? The freedom of religion no longer applies if you simply say a religion isn’t actually a religion.

Except Islam is very much a religion. The idea that Islam is any different, in that regard, from other faiths that have their own unique practices is ridiculous. (It’s deeply ironic that the bigots here often argue Islam is bad for women given that many conservative Christians ban women from preaching, demand their silence in church, and promote child marriage.)

You would think that the fact that Muslim politicians like Zohran Mandani or Rep. Ilhan Omar or Abdul El-Sayed have never even suggested that their beliefs should become law for everyone would put an end to the “Sharia Law” propaganda, but the people who are ignorant enough to believe that nonsense aren’t interested in facts. They don’t care that religious beliefs literally cannot override secular law (unless, of course, Christians do it, in which case the courts now say it’s okay.)

For what it’s worth, in 2010, during the Obama administration, the Justice Department argued against this very line of thinking, writing in a brief that “Islam is plainly a religion” deserving of First Amendment protections. As the Times notes, however, that doesn’t mean the Trump administration would say the same thing today.

Just because it seems unlikely that a federal judge would go along with this batshit crazy theory doesn’t mean it can’t happen. After all, conservatives have already succeeded in installing right-wing ideologues to lifetime appointments on the federal bench.

But even if they succeed, this could backfire. Because the idea that my religion isn’t just a religion is one that conservative Christians have adopted for a long time. They’re the one who constantly bristle whenever someone calls Christianity a religion; it’s a relationship, they argue. As Christianity Today deputy editor Bonnie Kristian writes,

… many of our own religious liberty arguments—arguments I support, to be wholly clear—rest on the point that Christianity is not and cannot be confined to what we do inside the sanctuary on Sunday morning…

… if Texas were to define religion down because of Christians’ discomfort with Muslims, what’s to prevent that same redefinition squeezing Christians in the future?

She’s not wrong to point that out. The problem is that she’s thinking steps ahead of conservatives in Texas. She’s committing the cardinal sin of thinking about how rules meant to stifle other groups might be applied to her own… even though a hallmark of Christian Nationalism is that rules are only ever meant to harm other people, not them. There’s no sense of community or equal treatment under the law. There’s just us versus them. And conservative Christians have been pretty damn successful, legally speaking, in getting away with things non-Christians would never be allowed to do.

By the way, also consider that conservative Christians don’t believe Catholics and Mormons are “true” Christians either. The idea that a redefinition of religion would spare non-Muslims is absurd.

However this plays out, it’s all the more reason for people who care about religious equality and church/state separation to defend those who simply want to practice their faith. There’s a huge difference between criticizing religion (fine!) and defending the ability of people to believe and practice their faith in a way that doesn’t harm others. Supporters of church/state separation ought to be able to do the latter without hesitation. We have to. No one else will.

Republicans aren’t interested in religious pluralism because their voters thrive on out-group hatred. Conservative Christian leaders aren’t going to defend it because their ministries will suffer if they equate their faith with other religions. The Justice Department isn’t about to uphold the law because it’s currently run by people who actively oppose the Constitution. And it would be deeply unfair to expect Muslims to defend their rights on their own, because the same people going after them right now aren’t going to stop with Islam. They’ll just find other groups to harass later.

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