Abdul El-Sayed made history this month by becoming the first Muslim American to be elected to the Senate. Conservative Christians are gnashing their teeth, certain that this heralds the imposition of sharia law.

For example, here’s a tweet from self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer:

I hope everyone is learning Arabic.

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 4, 2026

She also raged at the heavens, “If God is in charge, why did he let our country get taken over by Muslims?” and lamented the “Islamic communist takeover of America”.

I’m not sure how Loomer thinks that American constitutional procedure – or basic arithmetic, for that matter – works, if she characterizes one Muslim vote out of 100 in the Senate as a “takeover”. Perhaps she needs a remedial viewing of “How a Bill Becomes a Law“.

During the campaign, El-Sayed said repeatedly that he supports freedom of religion and wouldn’t try to impose sharia law. That only made Christian conservatives angrier and more paranoid, because, of course, that’s just what a secret supporter of sharia law would say. For example, in this Fox News interview:

“Nobody is trying to push Sharia law on anyone else, just like I hope nobody is trying to push canon law on anybody else, because we live in an America where you should have the freedom of your religion,” El-Sayed said.

…Conservative commentators and Christian voices quickly challenged the comparison, arguing that Catholic canon law and Sharia law do not function in the same way.

Andrew Kolvet, executive producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” wrote that canon law governs the internal affairs of the Catholic Church and carries spiritual penalties, while Sharia can be understood much more broadly as a system governing religious, social and legal conduct.

“Sharia law is MUCH more comprehensive, governing all aspects of life,” Kolvet wrote.

This is comically ignorant and hypocritical to anyone who knows anything about American history. The idea that “canon law” is a purely private belief system with no relevance to public life is an idea of extremely recent vintage.

From the colonial era well into the 20th century, conservative and nativist Protestants routinely whipped up fear and hate against Roman Catholicism. They believed the Pope was a foreign despot plotting to conquer America and impose Catholic rule on everyone, and that Catholic immigrants had to be kept out because they’d vote in lockstep to support his sinister plans.

In the 1800s, there were anti-Catholic riots in Massachusetts. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses outside Catholic churches and universities. James Coyle, a Catholic priest, was murdered by the KKK. When Al Smith, a Democrat, became the first Catholic presidential nominee, there was a conspiracy theory which claimed that, if he were elected, the Pope would move into the White House and make it his seat of power.

Even today, evangelical ministries like Jack Chick still publish and sell anti-Catholic tracts (like the memorably named “Death Cookie“) which assert that the Catholic church is run by demons that want to “gain control” of all people and that “kings, presidents and dictators fear the power of the Catholic laws”.

Obviously, there are some nuances to this that deserve mention. Conspiracy thinking, vigilante violence and xenophobia are always deplorable. However, the historical fact is that there was an era when the Roman Catholic church saw itself as the supreme authority and tried to force everyone else to obey its laws: whether it was censoring books, torturing and burning religious dissenters, or commanding national leaders to do the bidding of the pope. In that respect, the nativist fears weren’t complete fabrications based on nothing.

It’s fair to say the church no longer aspires to world domination the way it once did. However, ironically, one way that Catholics have overcome anti-Catholic prejudice is by being useful to the Protestant religious right, signing on to their theocratic agenda of banning abortion, contraception, LGBTQ rights, and divorce. Because they’ve come to treat right-wing Catholics as allies, conservatives now try to rewrite the historical record and claim that Catholicism was never treated as a threat. They want to downplay the comparison because they know it reflects unfavorably on their bigotry, both then and now.

That’s why this part of the Christian argument against El-Sayed rings hollow:

Conservative commentator Michael Knowles mocked the comparison between Catholic rules and Islamic law by pointing to the obvious difference between internal sacramental requirements and civil laws governing marriage.

Did Knowles just wake up from a twenty-year coma, perhaps? When American progressives proposed legalizing same-sex marriage in the early 2000s, did the Catholic church – or any conservative Christian denomination – shrug its shoulders and say that this was strictly a civil issue with no relevance to their internal sacramental requirements?

You can tell that all these Republican freakouts aren’t sincere, but bad-faith attempts to win elections by inflaming voter prejudice. If they were truly concerned about sharia law, there’s an obvious step they could take: they could affirm their support for separation of church and state.

Senator-elect El-Sayed made this point himself in a viral moment during the campaign. At a town hall, a Republican plant named Thomas Teepell challenged him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood (?!).

El-Sayed did so, but not before pointing out the bigoted assumption of dual loyalty inherent in the question. He compared the situation to John F. Kennedy, who likewise faced anti-Catholic prejudice during his campaign, and defused it by reminding voters that America is a secular country where the Constitution protects everyone’s right to believe or not as they see fit:

I’m going to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States. And that Constitution guarantees us all the right to practice whatever faith we want or no faith at all. And now you assume… that because I am Muslim, that somehow, I would have allegiance to something that is not our Constitution. That’s your assumption. That’s implicit in the question. And what’s interesting to me is that this is not the first time people have asked those kind of questions. Because you know who John F. Kennedy is?

…When he ran for President, he was asked whether or not he was going to have allegiance to the Pope at the Vatican, because of course, he’s Catholic. And his answer, famously, was that he was not running to be a Catholic President. He was running to be President that happened to be Catholic. I’m not running to be a Muslim Senator. I’m running for US Senate, and happen to be Muslim.

In a brilliant coda, El-Sayed turned the question back on the questioner, asking Teepell if he, as a Christian, would disavow any attempt to force his faith on others. Teepell said no, proving himself to be a glaring hypocrite who doesn’t hold himself to the standard he demands from others, and slunk out in humiliation.

El-Sayed’s answer was exactly correct, and every atheist and freethinker should endorse his logic. We may disagree with Christians, Jews, Muslims or Hindus about the existence of gods, but that isn’t relevant to their fitness for office. The only thing that matters is whether they understand that the United States was founded as a secular nation, where no religious test for office is permitted, and where no faith or non-faith is given special privileges or is subject to special disadvantages relative to others.

Separation of church and state is the keystone of America’s democracy. It’s the reason we’ve been able to survive and thrive as a diverse society where different faiths exist peacefully side by side, rather than turning every election into a life-or-death power struggle.

The religious right refuses to understand this, which is why they’re backed into a corner of their own making. They’ve spent decades arguing that there’s no such thing as separation of church and state, and that whatever party is in office has a right to enact their religious beliefs into law and force everyone else to obey.

They said this because they were arrogantly convinced that only Christians would ever win elections; they assumed it would benefit them and no one else. But that turned out not to be true. Muslim candidates are increasingly winning elections, becoming mayors and senators. In Christian conservatives’ twisted worldview, that means Muslims have the right to impose their beliefs, and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

Because the religious right rejects the constitutional principle that protects their rights, they’re afraid of being treated the way they’ve always treated others. That explains their frenzy of rage and terror.