After the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, MAGA hauled out a decades-old bogeyman using decades-old tripe: “Muslims are going to impose Sharia Law!” AMAC, the extremists’ answer to the AARP, “Spearheads Effort to Ban Sharia Law in Texas.” The Daily Hater has a whole slate of stories warning of the supposed advent of Sharia Law. Not to be outdone, the Acerbic Malcontents And Cranks has this “EXCLUSIVE: House to Probe Sharia Law During Hearing.”
This is not at all new. The SPLC-listed hate group American Family Association warned in 2017, “Sharia law is already making encroachments in American culture in large ways and small, whether its Target cashiers getting a pass for refusing to serve customers who want to buy bacon, or Christians being arrested for handing out free copies of the gospel of John to Muslims on a public sidewalk.” The theocratic website Sharper Iron alleged in 2007, “A former Muslim wisely observed, ‘Islam is not just a religion. It is a lifestyle imposed by force.’ … The summation of teachings is called Sharia or Sharia law.”
The Christian Coalition’s Action Alert dated Oct. 22, 2002 stated “The radical extremist government of Sudan has for years attempted to impose Muslim Sharia Law upon several million of its citizens who are Christian or non-Muslim. … Under Sharia law, only Muslim men enjoy equality under the law and rights of political participation.” In Dr. Thomas Lee Abshier’s article “The Militant Islamic Threat,” (preserved here), Abshier critiques Sharia Law as he sees it in exhaustive detail., describing it as a “militant Islamic threat.”
Hold these thoughts in the back of your mind.
This same Dr. Abshier appears to advocate for a kind of “Sharia Law Lite” that allows for some grace or mercy, but it is still basically the same: reliance on Old Testament death penalties for “offenses” that are oftentimes minor or even completely irrelevant to the functioning of society. “Theonomy” calls for barbaric death penalties; Sharia Law as depicted by MAGA calls for barbaric death penalties. The difference between “Christian nationalist” theonomy and Sharia Law is getting harder and harder to spot.
Pete Hegseth shared videos of pastors expressing the belief that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, including the pastor of the very church that Hegseth is involved in. Pastor Doug Wilson argues that “Giving Women the Right To Vote Is the Result of ‘Men Becoming Spiritual Eunuchs’.”
Far-fetched? Not at all. The so-called “SAVE Act,” by coincidence or more likely not, would go a long way to disenfranchising married female voters. Disenfranchisement of married women would be a perfect fit for theonomists’ “Doctrine of Federal Representation,” which asserts that the “man of the house” alone votes as the “representative” of the entire family.
Remember the Christian Coalition’s warning that “Under Sharia law, only Muslim men enjoy equality under the law and rights of political participation?” Under MAGA’s theonomy, only Christian men would enjoy equality under the law and rights of political participation.
It gets worse. Tennessee Republicans propose bill that would allow the death penalty for women who have an abortion. Not to be outdone at “Christian Sharia” barbarism, a Tennessee GOP candidate calls for executing parents & doctors who help trans kids. So much for MAGA’s pretending to support parental rights. Tennessee may have passed a parental rights bill that sounds great on the surface: “The liberty of a parent to the care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of the child, is a fundamental right.” But MAGA will always look for some way to create loopholes and exceptions to that right.
As with all things MAGA, the accusation is the confession. MAGA’s renewed scaremongering about “Sharia Law” is in fact a proclamation of their own intentions and plans for imposing Sharia Law on the American people. Or, in the words of Sharper Iron, “a lifestyle imposed by force.“