There is a particular kind of Texas story that keeps repeating itself, and it repeated again this month.
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport planned to install a modest set of foot-washing stations — sinks, essentially, in existing restrooms — so Muslim travelers could perform wudu, the ritual washing that precedes daily prayer. The project was privately funded. It would have been small.
Houston’s Bush Intercontinental has had something similar since 2019, without incident, without controversy, without threatening the republic. And then Gov, Greg Abbott heard about it.
Nick Mumejian
Within days, Abbott fired off letters to the U.S. Department of Transportation and to DFW Airport leadership, threatening to pull state and federal grant money, calling the stations “illegal,” and framing a sink as a constitutional crisis. DFW Airport capitulated and canceled the project.
Abbott is now demanding a broader review of religious accommodations at both Texas airports, including the ablution room and prayer space that has existed quietly at Houston’s airport for years. He has gone after a North Texas water park for hosting a private Muslim community event. He ordered school districts to cancel a beloved interscholastic sports tournament over its past sponsor’s ties to a Muslim civil rights organization he has decided, by fiat, to call a terrorist group.
The pattern
There is a pattern here, and the pattern has a name, and the name is not religious liberty.
I want to be plain about why this troubles me not as a matter of politics but as a matter of faith, and specifically as a matter of Christian faith, because Abbott and many of the officials cheering him on identify as Christians and frequently invoke that identity to justify exactly this sort of thing.
“There is a pattern here, and the pattern has a name, and the name is not religious liberty.”
Jesus was asked once which commandment in all the law was the greatest. He answered with two, inseparable from each other: Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. “On these two commandments,” he said, “hang all the law and the prophets.”
The Greek verb behind “hang” — krematai — means to be suspended from or hinged upon something. Jesus is naming the hinge the entire structure of the law and the prophets turns on and suspends from. Not the parts that are convenient. All of it.
The second commandment is how the first gets lived out in public, among people who do not worship as we do, who may not look like us, who may not even like us very much. A faith that claims to love God while treating a religious minority’s request to wash before prayer as a threat to be neutralized has failed the test Jesus himself gave for what the whole of Scripture is about.
This is not a minor or occasional theme in Scripture. It is one of its most persistent threads.
Leviticus commands the people of Israel to treat the immigrant among them as a full member of the community, loved “as yourself,” and grounds that command in Israel’s own memory of having once been aliens in Egypt (Leviticus 19:34). Deuteronomy describes God as the one who executes justice for the orphan and the widow and “loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing” — and commands Israel to do likewise, for the same reason: They were once strangers too (Deuteronomy 10:18-19). The letter to the Hebrews tells the early church not to neglect hospitality to strangers, “for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2). And Jesus, when a lawyer tried to narrow the definition of neighbor down to something manageable, answered with a Samaritan — a man from a hated, theologically suspect outsider group — who was the only one in the story who behaved like a child of God (Luke 10:25-37).
Perhaps you see this goes even beyond wash stations in airports and into how we treat immigrants, but that is another piece for another day.
My teacher
I know this isn’t just theory, because I’ve lived alongside it for years. The late Professor Mahmoud Ayoub, my teacher, believed ignorance — not malice — was the original sin of interfaith relations. Malice was simply ignorance that had learned to shout.
He spent his career insisting that real dialogue begins only when we’re willing to look at another tradition through the eyes of the person who lives it, rather than through the anxieties of our own.
I don’t think Gov. Abbott hates Muslims, or at least I hope not. I think he doesn’t know any, or doesn’t know enough, and has been handed a megaphone anyway. Abbott’s letters look at a sink through the lens of suspicion rather than through the eyes of a traveler who simply wants to wash before they pray.
I serve as an editor of a journal on Islamic Studies, housed at Hartford International University, and I have worked in a building that holds the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations — the very center where Ayoub himself once taught for almost 18 years. Both that building and HIU’s main campus building have wash stations and dedicated prayer rooms for our Muslim students, faculty and staff. In all my years with HIU, I have never once been inconvenienced by their presence — and I don’t know a single non-Muslim colleague who has been either. Nobody’s meeting has ever run long because someone stepped away to pray. Nobody’s day has ever been disrupted by a sink. It is, in practice, exactly what it sounds like: Unremarkable.
“Hospitality to the outsider, particularly the religious outsider, is one of the load-bearing walls of the biblical witness.”
Hospitality to the outsider, particularly the religious outsider, is one of the load-bearing walls of the biblical witness. It is not a modern liberal add-on to the tradition — it is the tradition. When a government official treats a sink installed so a fellow human being can pray as an emergency requiring the withdrawal of federal funds, he is doing the opposite of what Christian Scripture, on nearly every page it addresses the question, tells God’s people to do.
Consistency
I understand the legal argument Abbott is trying to make — that a government-owned airport cannot show favoritism toward one religion. Great. Let’s take that seriously for a moment, on its own terms. A quiet room where Muslims wash before prayer is not favoritism; it is accommodation, the same kind of accommodation that gives us hospital chapels, kosher meal options on American Airlines, and interfaith prayer rooms in airports around the world that nobody has ever organized a press conference to denounce.
If Abbott were consistent about neutrality, he would be no more or less bothered by a sink for wudu than by a chapel for mass. He is not consistent — he has targeted. A government action that singles out Muslims for suspicion while leaving every other religious accommodation alone is the actual Establishment Clause problem here, not the one he claims to be solving.
What troubles me most, though, isn’t the legal sleight of hand. It’s the theological one. Abbott and those around him have built a political brand, in part, on the idea that they are the defenders of a Christian nation. But there is nothing in the Sermon on the Mount, nothing in the red letters, nothing in the prophets, nothing in the story of a Messiah who was himself a refugee before he could walk, that authorizes using the machinery of the state to make a religious minority’s ordinary practice of prayer harder and more humiliating than it needs to be.
When the prophets in Scripture condemn a nation, they rarely condemn it for tolerance. They condemn it for how it treats the vulnerable, the stranger and the one who worships differently. If we are going to invoke Christianity in the public square, we should be prepared to be held to what Christianity actually says.
I do not know what it is to be a Muslim traveler standing in a Texas airport, needing 5 minutes and a sink before you can pray, and finding that a governor sitting in Austin, a couple hundred miles down the road, has decided you washing your feet is a threat to be investigated. But I know what my own tradition asks of me when I watch it happen to someone else. It asks me to say, plainly, that this is not Christian.
Not because Gov. Abbott needs my theological credentials to weigh in — fortunately, no one does — but because silence from Christian pulpits when this kind of thing happens is its own kind of statement, and it is not the statement the gospel calls us to make.
Love your neighbor as yourself. On this, and on the commandment beside it, hinge the law and the prophets. Everything else Abbott wants to say about sinks and airports and the Constitution is an argument he is welcome to have. But he does not get to have it in Jesus’ name.
Nick Mumejian serves as senior pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, and as interim editor in chief of The Muslim World journal at Hartford International University where he taught and has been an editor of the journal for more than 16 years.