Anti-Muslim legislation and policies violate the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that government remain neutral in matters of religion, said Amanda Tyler, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
Tyler offered the perspective during a May 13 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on “Sharia-Free America: Why Political Islam and Sharia Law are Incompatible with the U.S. Constitution: Part II.”
The session came amid the continuing rise of Islamophobic rhetoric by Republican state and federal officials and a corresponding wave of anti-Muslim legislation and discriminatory actions. A similar hearing in February included vitriolic warnings of a looming U.S. takeover by “political Islam” and claims Islam is an “existential threat” to the nation and Constitution.
Amanda Tyler (BJC photo by Cherilyn Crowe Guy)
“Religious freedom is foundational to what it means to be an American,” Tyler said. “Our country’s leaders should be actively working to make the promise of full belonging without regard to religion a reality for all, not fearmongering and distorting one religious tradition for perceived political gain.”
But Republicans are plowing ahead with bills to demonize Islam and Muslim institutions in the U.S. The “No Sharia Act” and “Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act” have been introduced in Congress, and similar measures are being considered in multiple state legislatures.
Texas and Florida have been particularly aggressive with Islamophobic rhetoric and with executive orders and decrees accusing the Council on American-Islamic Relations of being a terrorist organization. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed two new laws limiting free speech and due process for Muslims.
Republican U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Keith Self, both of Texas, launched the Sharia-Free America Caucus in December to support federal- and state-level actions considered necessary in saving the U.S. and Western civilization from Islam.
In his remarks during the latest anti-Sharia subcommittee meeting, Roy expressed Republican anxiety about Islam as a religion fundamentally incompatible with American values.
“Religious freedom is foundational to what it means to be an American.”
“This Congress should routinely reexamine the existential threat facing our republic and how to counter its spread into our social, societal and political systems,” he said. “And to my colleagues who may conflate critiquing Islam and Sharia as undermining the First Amendment rights of Muslims, I remind them people do not have protection from imposing a foreign legal system or code that overrides or replaces U.S. civil or criminal law, nor the Constitution.”
But the actual threat to faith freedom in the current situation are proposed state and federal laws targeting Muslim people and organizations for discrimination, Tyler explained. “Religious freedom depends on government remaining neutral when it comes to religion, neither favoring nor denigrating any religious viewpoint held by individuals and groups.”
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that principle in a 2025 ruling reiterating “that ‘the clearest command of the Establishment Clause’ is that the government may not ‘officially prefer’ one religious denomination over another, nor pass laws that ‘aid or oppose’ particular religions,” she said.
The clause reflects the concerns of the nation’s founders about the harms to religion when faith and government are intertwined.
“Anti-Muslim government action violates that clear command. Even proposed legislation targeting a particular religion can undercut our fundamental religious freedom by perpetuating harmful stereotypes and misinformation about Islam and Muslims,” she testified.
In fact, it was the intention of the nation’s Founders to establish a system that avoided the religious discrimination they had faced in Europe, she said, citing Thomas Helwys, Roger Williams and John Leland as Baptist leaders and activists who championed religious freedom before and during the Colonial era.
“Baptists were instrumental in advocacy for religious freedom for all people in the United States. This advocacy predates American independence by more than 150 years.”
And it is again time to deliberately choose a system that disestablishes religion from government, Tyler urged.
“In this 250th year of American independence, our country has the opportunity to reaffirm the foundational values that unite our diverse people. Core to what it means to be an American is a rich religious freedom tradition that protects the free exercise of religion of all people by ensuring that government not single out any one religion for special favor or disapproval.”
But that’s increasingly difficult task with Republicans using Islamophobic rhetoric in campaign ads ahead of the 2026 primaries, she warned.
“Efforts like these sow misunderstanding about Islam and Sharia, which means ‘the path to water’ and refers to the religious law that guides Muslims in their beliefs and actions. This broad denigration of Sharia directly impacts approximately 1% of the U.S. population, or an estimated 3.5-4.5 million American Muslims.”
Democrats in the hearing blasted the event as little more than a tactic to scare Republican voters.
“I can’t believe that the cupboard of Republican ideas is so barren now that in order to distract America from Donald Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional, ruinous war and his ruinous, illegal, unconstitutional tariffs and the spiraling price of gasoline and the unlivable economy he’s created, that we have to go back and have this exact same hearing over and over again,” U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin said.
“Why don’t we generalize the proposition of this anti-Sharia Law movement to say the government should not be endorsing or establishing any religion in America, whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Jews for Jesus, Seventh Day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Unitarian-Universalism, Branch Dravidianism or Hare Krishna?”
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