The Texas Republican Party's Bible Stops Before Matthew 25

The Texas Republican apparatus is using the name of Jesus to terrorize Muslim families in everyday life across the state.

A woman walks into a Texas grocery store, sees two Muslim women, and begins to scream. “Islam is a terrorist organization, not a religion,” she yells. “This is a Christian country; this is not a Muslim country.” A fundraiser for this woman raises nearly $145,000, drawing the public support of Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace.

Let us sit a minute with the phrase that woman hurled across the produce aisle. This is a Christian country.

I have spent thirty years in Texas pews, and I know the rhythm of the “Christian culture” defense, the insistence that our national identity is inextricably bound to a specific heritage. But I am reading the red letters now without the interpretation machinery in the way, and I need you to look at what Jesus actually said about what a “Christian country” looks like.

The phrase “Christian country” does not appear anywhere in the New Testament. What does appear, in Matthew 25, is this — and I want you to hear it in the King James, because the King James is the version the people waving this Bible were raised on: “I was a stranger, and ye took me not in.” The criterion for final judgment, in Jesus’s own words, is not whether you voted for the right platform or defended the right cultural heritage. It is whether you welcomed the stranger. The Greek word is xenos. Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoner, the sick, and the stranger. To turn the stranger away is to turn Jesus away.

When a lawyer tries to limit the scope of that command in Luke 10 — “And who is my neighbor?” — Jesus does not draw a border. He tells the story of the Good Samaritan. A man is beaten and left for dead. The religious insiders walk by. The one who stops to bind his wounds is a Samaritan — the hereditary enemy, the theological outcast, the one whom respectable people are taught to step around in the road. Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three was neighbor to the man. The lawyer cannot even say “the Samaritan” out loud. He says “the one who showed mercy.” Jesus says: “Go, and do thou likewise.” The neighbor, in Jesus’s mouth, is the one who shows mercy — not the one who shares your doctrine or looks like you or prays like you.

Now look at the record.

The Texas Republican Party’s 2026 state convention in Houston voted “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” into the party’s official legislative priorities — a measure that, on its face, calls for the criminalization of a moral code followed by millions of American Muslims, and that convention delegates pointed out was already being practiced in the convention hall by the Muslims in the room. Brandon Gill, the Republican congressman who represents the 26th district north of Dallas, sent a fundraising email to his constituents titled “Stop Islamic Immigration Now or Our Children Will Pay the Price,” and followed it with a Fox News interview in which he warned that, if current trends continued, his daughter and other American girls would be “going to public schools wearing burqas.” Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, publicly backed the grocery store woman’s fundraiser, putting a member of Congress behind a $145,000 reward for an act of religious harassment. The Republican-controlled State Board of Education — the same body that has spent the spring weighing a Bible-inclusive reading list for public schools — advanced a social-studies rewrite that scales back instruction in world religions and in Islam’s role in world history, trims civil-rights content from the curriculum, and increases emphasis on American exceptionalism and “Judeo-Christian” influence.

And at the University of Houston, on a public campus, a Qur’an was burned.

That is the record of the 2026 primary cycle and the June convention. That is what the platform looks like when it hits the ground.

The Bible the Texas Republicans are waving does not survive contact with this record. It stops before Matthew 25. It stops before Luke 10. It opens at Leviticus, where it can be wielded against the wrong people, and it closes at Romans 13, where submission to authority can be preached to the people being ground under that authority. The verses in the middle — the ones where Jesus says I was a stranger and you took me in, the ones where the neighbor turns out to be the Samaritan — those verses are skipped. The “Judeo-Christian” language the State Board of Education is writing into the new social-studies standards keeps the tribal branding of the Bible and discards its content.

Now look at the harvest.

Naila Syed, a mother in Dallas, sat in a State Board of Education hearing and watched half a dozen speakers object to teaching about Muslim civilizations, misconstruing the Qur’an while the women next to her nodded and softly clapped. A young Muslim man named Omar attended the GOP convention as a supporter and was told to his face to convert to Christianity or leave the country; he has since been hunted online by strangers. “This is not the America I believe in,” Omar said. “But I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.”

The fruit of the “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” platform is not a safer state. The fruit is a grocery-store assault. The fruit is a Qur’an burning on a public campus. The fruit is a child reciting memorized hatred at the dinner table. The fruit is a mother afraid to let her daughters walk to the park. Jesus of Nazareth gave us the diagnostic for this exact moment in Matthew 7:16: By their fruit you will recognize them.

There are those in Texas who know this. Dr. Suleman Lalani, one of the state’s two Muslim legislators, is building an interfaith caucus. Representatives like Christian Manuel are calling out the weaponization of ignorance. But the operation — the Maces, the Gills, the “Sharia Free” caucuses — relies on the silence of the people in the pews. And this faith-coded policing is not strictly a one-party sickness in Texas; just as Democrats recently sought to block a candidate for antisemitic views in a primary runoff, the broader political machinery weaponizes identity against Jews, Muslims, and whoever else the next primary demands. They are banking on the fact that when a politician says “Christian country,” the Evangelical will nod along, assuming the politician means what the Evangelical means, rather than asking what Jesus meant.

You cannot preach Christianity and turn away the stranger. You can preach a politics. You cannot preach Christianity and criminalize Sharia in a state with hundreds of thousands of Muslim citizens who love their country and pay their taxes. You can preach a politics. You cannot preach Christianity and warn of daughters in burqas if a particular kind of immigration is not stopped. You can preach a politics. The Texas Republican Party has made its choice. It is preaching a politics, and calling it a Christianity.

If your faith requires you to terrorize the Muslim family at the next table, you are no longer practicing the faith of the carpenter from Nazareth. You are practicing the religion of the grocery store. And he warned us about that, too.