On Oct. 17, at a town hall in Caro, Mich., a man who gave his name as Tommy asked the state Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, a question: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Tommy’s question was not about an Egyptian political movement. It was about whether a Muslim candidate could be trusted to put the U.S. Constitution first in his decision-making.
Stephen Narain
On Nov. 3, Michigan answered. El-Sayed will be the first Muslim elected to the Senate after a campaign in which Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called him a “jihadist leprechaun” and President Donald Trump asserted that El-Sayed, a Rhodes Scholar and Columbia-educated public health official, would “have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”
We all need to read Abdul’s and Tommy’s exchange closely. It is a civics lesson in miniature. It’s also a masterclass in remaining composed under pressure, the power of straightforwardness and the disarming effect of humor.
El-Sayed, a gifted athlete, took control of the frame without hesitation. He asked Tommy why he assumed El-Sayed would not disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, then called out Tommy’s assumption: That a Muslim would owe “allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.”
El-Sayed reached for John F. Kennedy, who faced similar suspicion as a Catholic candidate in 1960. “I’m running for U.S. Senate,” El-Sayed said, “and happen to be Muslim.”
“It’s a masterclass in remaining composed under pressure, the power of straightforwardness and the disarming effect of humor.”
El-Sayed asked Tommy about his own faith. Tommy said he was a Christian who lives by Christian doctrine. El-Sayed asked, “Do you think I have to live by Christian doctrine?” Tommy said it was up to El-Sayed “because we have free will.” With that sentence, Tommy stated the principle of religious liberty. Then El-Sayed asked, with passion but without disrespect, whether Tommy disavowed any attempt to read religious doctrine into the laws of the country.
“I do not,” Tommy said, declining to rule out writing his faith into law.
Tommy was no random questioner. As The Handbasket reported, he is Thomas Teepell, a former aide to Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Tommy’s father, a Republican strategist, has close ties to Sean Feucht, a worship leader who has embraced Christian nationalism.
Article VI of the Constitution forbids any religious test for public office and requires officials to swear or affirm an oath to support it. Any faith may serve, but every officeholder answers to the same document. Tommy’s opening question, which assumed a Muslim candidate owed his loyalty elsewhere, was a religious test, although without the force of law. El-Sayed’s response was a forthright testament of faith in the Constitution, which the Senator-elect calls “the guiding light.”
The Christian novelist Marilynne Robinson told President Barack Obama during a widely read 2015 interview that “the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.” In the same conversation, she said she believes “people are images of God.”
Tommy’s question assumed the worst of a neighbor. Tommy wanted to paint a Michigan doctor, father of two girls and college lacrosse player as a threat not simply to the American body politic, but to constitutional principles.
Robinson was my former professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’ve sat in seminars where she helped us work out how Old Testament Scripture relates to Babylonian myths. She taught us how a piece of literature — my first novel took me 20 years to complete — abides by its own, perhaps otherworldly timeline and logic.
Four states (Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Alabama) have passed laws requiring Ten Commandments displays in public schools. This year, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for Texas and let Louisiana’s laws stand, and a petition has asked the Supreme Court to take the Texas case. Whatever the justices decide, classroom walls have become an argument.
“Wherever the Commandments go up, state legislatures and school boards must ensure the Bill of Rights is posted beside them at equal size.”
Let us answer in kind.
First, wherever the Commandments go up, state legislatures and school boards must ensure the Bill of Rights is posted beside them at equal size, with the First Amendment’s religion clauses highlighted. Those clauses bar government from establishing a religion and from blocking anyone’s free exercise of their own. Arizona already requires public school districts and charter schools to place a copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights beside every classroom flag in grades seven through 12, and Missouri’s Constitution requires public schools to display the Bill of Rights.
Second, the teachers who explain the First Amendment should bring the Caro exchange into the classroom and leave El-Sayed’s last question open for students to answer for themselves.
Third, debate moderators, reporters and voters should ask every candidate heading into 2028, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or secular: Do you disavow any attempt to make one faith’s doctrine the law of the land?
Will it work? Perhaps. The Supreme Court struck down Kentucky’s Ten Commandments mandate in 1980 for having “no secular legislative purpose.” Today, Kentucky law requires the Bill of Rights to be posted in every public school classroom.
Tommy affirmed free will in a single sentence, then would not rule out writing his faith into law. When El-Sayed challenged him, the room cheered, the clip went viral, and voters in a state Trump carried in 2024 sent El-Sayed to the Senate.
The next time a neighbor is asked to prove their loyalty, let us all answer as El-Sayed did, with a Constitution that lets every American pray as they choose, or not at all.
Stephen Narain, a former legal assistant at the ACLU’s Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology, is the author of the forthcoming novel The Church of Mastery. He is a P.D. Soros Fellow and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project.