Resist now or regret later
by Rabbi Nancy Kasten People of conscience live with a perpetual sense of inadequacy. We should use less water. We
This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of an event that shook our nation to the core. A quarter century after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which took the lives of nearly 3,000 people, Americans still carry grief, anger, fear, patriotism, and memories of extraordinary national solidarity.
Muslims carry those memories too. But many Muslim Americans also remember what happened after September 11: they were regarded as suspect Americans and asked, implicitly or explicitly, to prove that they belonged.
Do they belong in America? Is there anything Muslims can do to prove they belong?
Recently, it has become clear that some believe they do not—and that no evidence Muslim Americans can offer of their loyalty to the nation’s ideals and values will convince them otherwise.
Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, wrote, “I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.” [1] He has also endorsed the call to “round up every Muslim and send them home.” [2] Think about what such language proposes: excluding or expelling people on account of their religion, including law-abiding American citizens, whom he assumes would have another home to go to.
He is not alone. Representatives Chip Roy and Keith Self launched the Sharia-Free America Caucus in late 2025; by the spring of 2026, it had attracted dozens of members of Congress. Its leaders describe Sharia as “fundamentally incompatible with American values and the rule of law.” In fact, Sharia—an Arabic word often translated as “the path” or “the way”—refers broadly to Islam’s moral and religious guidance. Fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, is the human interpretation and application of that guidance to matters such as worship, charity, business, and family life. In the United States, religious rules do not displace civil law. In this respect, Islamic jurisprudence is comparable to Jewish halakha or Christian canon law: it may guide believers and religious communities, but it does not supersede the Constitution or American courts. [3]
Other troubling examples are becoming too numerous to dismiss as isolated incidents. Among them are Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a “foreign terrorist organization” under state authority; threats to withhold state funding from airports over publicly accessible washing facilities used by Muslims preparing for prayer; obstacles placed before Muslim private schools seeking participation in the state’s voucher program; a state-developed public-school curriculum that draws on the Bible from a predominantly Christian perspective and portrays Muslims through a lens of violence; [4] public opposition to a mosque that had passed required permitting and code reviews; and the cancellation of a Muslim organization’s privately rented water-park celebration.
Why is all of this happening?
Discomfort with difference is common. People who speak different languages, dress differently, or enjoy different foods, music, and sports may challenge our habits. But America has always been a nation of nations, bringing people from various ethnicities, religions, and ancestral lines under a national identity defined by shared civic values, democratic principles, and a collective commitment to the U.S. Constitution.
When Muslims among us are told that their dress, food, or ways of forming community are incompatible with American culture, the accusation promotes the misconception that America ever had—or could have—a single national culture. Immigrants to this country are required to adhere to the U.S. Constitution, not a uniform way of life. If there is any such thing as “American culture,” it is a culture cobbled together from borrowed languages, symbols, values, beliefs, norms, and materials.
Antipathy toward Muslims is about more than discomfort with cultural differences. It assigns collective guilt to an entire religion for the actions of a few, as after al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001, or Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. The reasoning is circular: because some terrorists claim a divine mandate for their violence, Islam itself must be fundamentally violent, and every faithful Muslim must therefore be a threat.
Christians rightly reject collective guilt for the Crusades, chattel slavery, antisemitic persecution, and other crimes that perpetrators have justified in Christian language. We insist on distinguishing Christianity from those who have used it to sanction atrocities. Yet many proud, self-identified Christians today refuse to make that same moral distinction among people who practice Islam.
Long ago, the prophet Ezekiel declared to Israelites living in captivity in Babylon: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father with him, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son with him; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” The verse rejects collective and generational guilt and emphasizes individual moral responsibility. God judges every heart separately and justly. [5]
When Abraham Lincoln addressed the crowd at Gettysburg, he invoked the nation’s founding proposition that “all men are created equal.” After the bloodiest conflict over who truly belonged as Americans, Lincoln reminded his listeners that the battle was not only about preserving the Union; it was also about the meaning of that Union. Who would be included? [6]
The anniversary of September 11 is an opportunity for Americans to renew our national solidarity and focus on real and present threats to our national security. Those responsible for our safety and wellbeing are falsely accusing Muslims of constituting that threat. They hope their specious claims will distract Americans from the real sources of danger to our country: an endless war in Iran, environmental degradation and hazards, our national debt, and isolation from our global partners and allies.
Roger Williams offered an early American model of a society inclusive of diverse cultures and religions. Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Williams found refuge among Indigenous peoples whose languages and customs he had taken pains to learn. He argued that colonists should purchase land from Indigenous nations rather than simply confiscate it. In 1636, he founded Providence on land obtained from Narragansett leaders, and he later helped establish what became the First Baptist Church in America. Yet he did not envision an exclusive Baptist colony. Rhode Island became a haven for people of diverse faiths and for those persecuted for conscience.
Williams likened the relationship between civil law and religious liberty to a ship on which people of diverse faiths traveled together. All shared responsibility for the ship’s civil order, even though none could be compelled to participate in another’s worship. He wrote that “all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges—that none of the papists, protestants, Jews, or Turks, be forced to come to the ship’s prayers of worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.” In the language of his time, “Turks” referred broadly to Muslims. [7]
Edwin Markham’s short poem “Outwitted” captures the spirit that can bring us together in this—and every—time:
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in! [8]
Our strength as a nation will only be further compromised if we allow our leaders to divide us from one another. Love and we have the wit to unite with others and defy their vision.
~ George Mason
[1] David Martin Davies, “GOP Leaders Shunned Bo French for Racist Posts. Now They Want Him to Regulate Texas’ Oil and Gas,” Texas Public Radio, June 4, 2026, https://www.tpr.org/government-politics/2026-06-04/gop-leaders-shunned-bo-french-for-racist-posts-now-they-want-him-to-regulate-texas-oil-and-gas.
[2] Lauren McGaughy, J. David Goodman, Ruth Graham, and Jesus Jiménez, “Islamophobia’s Rise in Texas: ‘I Won’t Rest Until Every Muslim Is Gone,’” New York Times, August 19, 2026; republished by RealClearReligion, https://www.realclearreligion.org/2026/08/19/islamophobias_rise_in_texas_i_wont_rest_until_every_muslim_is_gone_1201196.html.
[3] Office of the House Majority Whip, “Whip Emmer Joins Sharia Free America Caucus,” January 9, 2026, https://www.majoritywhip.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3976.
[5] Ezekiel 18:20 (Jewish Publication Society translation, 1917).
[6] Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, Nicolay Copy, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-war-in-america/ext/al0186p1.html.
[7] Roger Williams to the Town of Providence, January 1655, in The Founders’ Constitution, University of Chicago Press, https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions6.html.
[8] Edwin Markham, “Outwitted,” in The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1915), 1.
The roots of Islamophobia in the U.S. predate 9/11 by decades
See the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which reads in part: “ … the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims]” (Art. 11).
Muslims were not hypothetical outsiders when the United States was founded. Documented practicing Muslims already lived in colonial and Revolutionary America, although many were denied the very liberty the new nation proclaimed. The Library of Congress estimates that there may have been hundreds if not thousands of Muslims in America before 1776.
Thomas Jefferson on the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) recalled that legislators rejected an amendment identifying Jesus Christ as the source of religious liberty. He said this proved that the law was intended to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
Richard Henry Lee, who introduced the resolution for American independence, wrote James Madison in 1784: “True freedom embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo as well as the Christian religion.”
by Rabbi Nancy Kasten People of conscience live with a perpetual sense of inadequacy. We should use less water. We
“His name is engraved in marble. His virtues in the hearts of those he helped to free from slavery and