They’re Not Bigots. They Just Think, Talk, and Act Like They Are.

The House GOP’s “Sharia-Free America Caucus” is an un-American fraud.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) speaks at the lectern during the February 3, 2026 press conference for the Sharia-Free America Caucus in the U.S. Capitol. Visible behind him are, from left to right, Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas), Cory Mills (R-Fla.), Keith Self (R-Texas), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), and Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.). (Screenshot via YouTube)

Mosque-off Moment

The GOP needs a bogeyman in the midterms. The border crisis is over, DEI has been purged, and the panic over transgender bathrooms is getting old. What can House Republicans run against?

Many are turning to a familiar answer: Muslims.

Four months ago, two Texas Republicans, Rep. Keith Self and Rep. Chip Roy, founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus. Since then, the group has swelled to more than 60 members, including Majority Whip Tom Emmer. That’s more than a quarter of the House GOP.

Officially, the caucus opposes the imposition of Sharia—Islamic law—in America. It claims to have no problem with Muslims per se. But the more its members talk, the more obvious their bigotry becomes.

The caucus says certain nefarious Muslims are doing scary things in our country. That’s true if you just look at terrorist attacks. But only a few people commit acts of terrorism, which means they’re not enough to justify the broad crackdown the caucus wants. So caucus members argue that whole Muslim communities are up to no good.

To illustrate this alleged nefariousness, they point to Islamic community centers. On March 26, the caucus staged an hour of speeches on the House floor. In his closing remarks, Self decried a “pattern of Islamic centers being built next to police training facilities.” He gave all the examples he had: two.

If Muslims were planning mischief at these centers, it’s hard to imagine a more foolish place to put them. But Self found a way to portray it as sinister. He called the centers “fortresses overlooking our police academies” and insisted that “intimidation is clearly the intent.”

Another insidious trend, according to the caucus, is Muslims publicly praying on rugs. Caucus members are particularly upset that some of the prayers have happened in New York near the memorial to victims of 9/11. “People are just, you know, sick to their stomach of watching these, you know, people down on prayer rugs . . . right next to the 9/11 memorial,” Roy fumed two weeks ago on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

It’s misguided to treat the area around the memorial as a no-go zone for Muslims, since that would support Osama bin Laden’s lie that the 9/11 attack broadly represented Islam. But the larger problem is that the Sharia-Free America Caucus doesn’t just oppose displays of Islamic belief and practice near the memorial. It opposes them generally.

Take Muslim prayer calls, for instance. On February 3, the caucus held a press conference to outline its grievances. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican who was instrumental in founding the caucus, denounced the prayer calls as part of a plot:

Woke cities like Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey [sic] are replacing American civic norms with radical Islamic policies. Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to allow amplified Islamic calls to prayer year-round. . . . Why do they do it here? They want to be seen and heard. They want to be on television. They want to rally the troops.

Two weeks later, Rep. Randy Fine (R–Flor.), a member of the caucus, followed up on that complaint. In an interview on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing network, he declared, “The call to prayer is a call for submission. And I’m not okay with that. They need to cut it out.”¹

In his interview, Fine said Muslims could “do whatever they want in their mosques.” But the caucus’s founders, Self and Roy, routinely object to the number of mosques in the United States. On March 17, Roy told Bannon, “There’s 300-plus mosques and growing in Texas—more being built in Texas every year than any other state in the union. That’s a real problem.” A week later, Roy told Newsmax, “There are 330 mosques in Texas. This is a real war. . . . They are trying to wage jihad against our way of life. And we’ve got to stand up against it.”

Republicans used to distinguish radical Muslims from mainstream Muslims. The caucus is abandoning that distinction. “We have to stop the term of ‘radical Islam,’” Fine argued at the press conference in February. “It is mainstream Islam,” he said, that “want[s] to kill us.” Roy reinforced that point in his March 30 interview with Bannon:

Stop blaming this on “radical Islam” or, you know, some subset of folks. This is an overarching theme for the Muslims coming to the United States, to wage jihad against the West, take over the West, undermine our Christian heritage, our Judeo-Christian founding principles.

The caucus doesn’t deny that good Muslims exist. But its members argue that once the bad Muslims take power, the formerly good Muslims will join them. “When the jihadists take control,” Self predicted last week, most “moderate Muslims . . . will submit and begin to exercise the more radical elements of Sharia.”

The truth is that many of these Republicans just don’t like Islam. They can’t even hide it. On February 15, responding to a comment that Muslims didn’t think dogs should be indoor pets, Fine tweeted, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Later, a Newsmax host asked Fine, “Do you see how your original post, Congressman, could be offensive to some?” Fine replied, “Not at all. I’d choose dogs.”

On March 9, another member of the caucus, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), tweeted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Three days later, Fine tweeted, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” On March 17, Roy declared, “Islam is not compatible with the West.” And on Sunday, Roy told Fox News that he was running for attorney general of Texas “to defend us from this march of Islam across the state of Texas and our country.”

Some members flatly deny that religious freedom in America should extend to Muslims. At the press conference, Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas asserted,

Islam is largely alien to American history. It certainly didn’t come into the United States on the Mayflower. It’s something that we deliberately imported as a matter of immigration policy into our country, and it’s going to destroy us just like it’s destroying Europe right now.

Speaking to Newsmax on March 20, Ogles added:

The first Muslim prayer rooms didn’t start popping up into this country until about 1920. The first mosque . . . was built in Iowa in the early 1930s. And so, when the Founding Fathers were talking about freedom of religion, they were talking about Judeo-Christian values.²

Sometimes the caucus cites polls showing that many American Muslims support Islamic influence in government. At a hearing on February 10, Gill paraphrased findings from a Heritage Foundation survey. “Thirty-nine percent of Muslims in the United States want Sharia law implemented in the next 20 years,” he warned, and 33 percent “believe that Islam should be declared as our national religion.” Roy, at the same hearing, said those numbers “should be troubling to every American.”

But nobody in the caucus mentions the much higher numbers among American Christians responding to similar questions. In a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of all American Christians agreed that “the United States should be a Christian nation,” and 38 percent said that “when the Bible and the will of the people conflict with each other,” the Bible “should have more influence on the laws of the United States” than the people’s will should. Among white evangelicals, 81 percent said the United States should be a Christian nation, and 65 percent said the Bible should override the people’s will.

The caucus is especially hypocritical in its condemnation of Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim mayor of New York City. On March 12, Tuberville quote-tweeted a post that featured a picture of Mamdani on a prayer rug next to a picture of the 9/11 attack. The senator wrote, “The enemy is inside the gates.” His tweet, offering no other context, implied that a Muslim mayor was inherently dangerous.

Tuberville didn’t mention where the Sharia-Free America Caucus originated. It came from a conversation he had with Rep. Self in December. The conversation didn’t happen on Capitol Hill. It happened at the White House Christmas party. To these men, religious observance in political office is perfectly innocent, as long as the observance is Christian.

The Sharia-Free America Caucus isn’t just a fraud. It’s the opposite of what it pretends to be. Its founders and members avidly support religious control of government. “The press can call me an Islamophobe all they want. I don’t care,” Tuberville huffed at the press conference on February 3. “I love this country. I love what it stands for. I love that it’s a Christian nation, and it’s going to stay that way.” Speaking after Tuberville, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona protested that “Sharia rejects America’s foundational roots, the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Another member, Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho, called Sharia a threat to “our Christian values.”

During the caucus’s hour of speeches on March 26, Self quoted John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” He denounced Islam as an assault on “our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Another member, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, argued that “the separation of church and state . . . cannot be found in the United States Constitution.”

That same day, appearing on Washington Watch, a conservative Christian show, Roy started with his anti-Sharia message but segued to his real agenda. First he decried “the March of Islam across Europe.” Then he said the real question was, “Are we going to defend our Judeo-Christian culture?” Then he warned, “We will lose the West if we do not re-center our entire existence on our biblical values.” Then he claimed that Americans had won World War II because we were “united . . . as a country predominantly if not almost entirely Christian.”

All of this might be amusing, as a display of hypocrisy, if the stakes weren’t so serious. The caucus is pushing its agenda in several bills, one of which would suspend all immigration until a series of right-wing demands are met. The bill’s author, Roy, says he’s trying to halt the “massive wave of Muslims” coming to America.

Self, the caucus’s other co-founder, might go further. A month ago, he told Newsmax, “We have got to make sure that now the people of Muslim—uh, uh, the Muslim law—are deported.”

The Sharia-Free America Caucus isn’t wrong that there’s a dangerous movement afoot to impose religious law in the United States. They’re just wrong about which religion it is.

1. “Islam,” meaning “submission” in Arabic, refers to the complete spiritual surrender to God’s will. A “Muslim” is one who submits. In the broader Abrahamic tradition, it’s not unlike Christians declaring themselves “slaves to Christ” or Jews bowing down before God on Yom Kippur.

2. Per the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

African Muslims . . . fought alongside colonists during the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Multiple men with Muslim names appear on the military muster rolls, including Bampett Muhamed, Yusuf ben Ali (also known as Joseph Benhaley), and Joseph Saba. Other men listed on muster rolls have names that are likely connected to Islamic practice, such as Salem Poor and Peter Salem, whose names may reflect a form of the Arabic salaam, meaning peace. These men often distinguished themselves on the battlefield.