Florida Republicans are furious that Muslims are using a voucher program meant to boost Christianity
The same lawmakers who voted to send taxpayer funds to private Christian schools are panicking now that Muslim schools are participating in the program
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Florida Republicans who backed a program funneling taxpayer dollars to private Christian schools are now panicking because some Muslims are taking advantage of those vouchers. They’re claiming—with no evidence, naturally—that the schools in question are promoting Sharia Law, all while their preferred brand of Christian indoctrination is propped up by their own legislation.
The voucher program in Florida began almost 30 years ago, specifically to help low-income families and students with disabilities get access to private schools that could accommodate them. In 2023, Republicans in Florida passed House Bill 1, which expanded the voucher program significantly. Under that bill, pretty much anyone in the state could get a taxpayer-funded “scholarship”—and that money could be spent at private religious schools. Republicans said this would expand “school choice” to all families, though the reality is that voucher proponents have long been trying to destroy public education.
The multi-billion-dollar plan has worked as intended. One report found that over 300,000 students are now using vouchers to attend 2,278 different schools—costing the state over $3 billion a year—and most of the private religious schools are Christian ones. Some of them, according to the Orlando Sentinel, “ban gay students and enforce strict gender-specific dress codes.” In fact, in 2020, the newspaper found that 156 private Christian schools in the state had anti-gay policies, including 83 that outright refused to admit openly LGBTQ students or would expel them if they were discovered.
About two dozen of the participating schools are Islamic. At least a couple of them have policies requiring girls to wear hijabs.
And that is now freaking out powerful Republicans who cannot believe taxpayer money is boosting Islam.
Last week, the founder of an anti-Muslim organization posted videos on X/Twitter from the administrators at a couple of those Islamic schools. The men were promoting their campuses and explaining why Islamic education was vital for the Muslim community. These videos were no different from ones you’d see from private Christian schools… except the administrators spoke Arabic and talked about the importance of the Qur’an.
That anti-Muslim founder claimed this was essentially funding terrorism, saying the state was paying to “educate [Muslim] children inside Sharia-run institutions” and that “Florida’s school-choice program is now bankrolling Islamic schools tied to Muslim Brotherhood–linked networks.” She was disturbed by “Sharia dress codes,” and how those schools didn’t celebrate Christmas, and how they were bringing in “clerics trained in militant Sharia institutions who signal sympathy for terror actors.”
She backed none of this up, of course. It was just standard right-wing bigotry where anything Islamic is inherently scary.
She ended with this plea:
This is not “diversity.” This is a rival legal-civilizational system built with public funds.
Parents think they are choosing freedom — but Florida is subsidizing the construction of a permanent Islamic power base that will not vanish when the money stops.
The handbooks, leadership, networks, and expansion plans all admit the endgame.
Florida is not merely allowing this — Florida is financing it.
If this was one bigot just bigoting, it might have been ignored. But Florida officials jumped on it.
Attorney General James Uthmeier shared that tweet and added “Sharia law seeks to destroy and supplant the pillars of our republican form of government and is incompatible with the Western tradition. The use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers to promote Sharia law likely contravenes Florida law and undermines our national security.”
Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson shared Uthmeier’s tweet, saying that when he was Senate President, “universal school choice was one of my top legislative priorities.” But he now believes schools “that indoctrinate Sharia law should not be a part of our taxpayer-funded school voucher program.”
When the Orlando Sentinel asked Uthmeier for evidence that any of these schools were promoting “Sharia” or doing anything illegal, they got no response.
Uthmeier’s office did not respond to an email from the Orlando Sentinel this week asking if he could provide examples of sharia law in schools that take vouchers or explain how that type of instruction might conflict with state law, which allows for religious instruction in campuses that take public money.
But Florida Republicans aren’t letting a lack of evidence interfere with their fictional narrative. There’s already a bill working through the legislature that would ban state courts and agencies from using Sharia Law… which is a thing that doesn’t happen.
If those conservative lawmakers want to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding Islamic schools, there’s an obvious solution: End the voucher program entirely.
But they’re never going to do that because they love it when state funding props up Christian schools. They just don’t believe other religious should be given equal treatment under the law.
This is Christian Nationalist hypocrisy in a nutshell. For decades, these Republican lawmakers have demanded that public money flow into private Christian schools under the banner of “school choice,” insisting it’s about freedom, not faith. But now that a non-Christian faith is playing by the exact same rules, they are suddenly appalled. Their outrage doesn’t expose any particular problem with Islam. It just reveals how little they ever cared about religious freedom. As critics have long argued, they only wanted to promote their own religious dominance, not champion religious equality.
The bottom line is that if you open the public coffers to religion, this is what will happen. A religion you don’t practice will get to take advantage of the opportunity. We’ve seen it with school chaplains and city council invocations. That’s how “religious freedom” actually works. And in this case, the moment the system stopped exclusively enriching Christian institutions, the Republican mask slipped. These lawmakers aren’t defending faith—they just realized their plan for a statewide theocracy comes with some inherent flaws. The panic over “Sharia” schools is nothing more than projection: they fear others doing what they have long done—building ideological fortresses with taxpayer money.
As David Williamson, vice president of the Central Florida Freethought Community, told me in an email, “This selective outrage exposes their real aim: Christian privilege, not freedom.”
The voucher program has always been a Trojan horse. It drains public schools, deepens inequality, and replaces education with indoctrination—all while siphoning billions from the very communities that rely on public education the most.
If Florida—or any state—wants to stop this farce, the answer isn’t more fear-mongering or unconstitutional bans on certain religions. They just need to end vouchers for all private schools. Public money should serve the public good, not subsidize a sectarian agenda.
A simple solution to a simple problem: NO GOVERNMENT FUNDS FOR RELIGIOU$ SCHOOLS.
We desperately need Total, Absolute, Permanent Separation of Religion & State.
I remember in Louisana they tried setting up a similar thing and the person who submitted the law was outraged when Muslim schools got the same treatment. She's quoted as saying, "I thought 'religious' meant 'Christian'!" and got the law repealed.