Jesse Watters and the Michigan Republican apparatus are running coded religious-ethnic appeals against Abdul El-Sayed. The twenty-five-minute interview that aired on Fox News in late August — twenty-five minutes in which Watters asked about Shariah law, immigration enforcement, and transgender athletes — is the operation’s signature piece. It is also a precise violation of what the Bible the operation claims to follow plainly says.
I sat in Sunday-school classrooms for thirty years where we read Leviticus 19 aloud and did not hear it. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” That is the verse. We taught around it. We preached around it. When someone asked what it meant, we said it was about Old Testament Israel, which is the Sunday-school way of saying the verse does not apply to us, which is the Sunday-school way of saying the verse does not apply.
The verse applies. Let me show you what is on the record.
El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open United States Senate seat. He would be the nation’s first Muslim senator if elected. His Republican opponent is Mike Rogers, a former congressman who turned sixty-three this year and who, on the same Fox program, “won’t come on your show and won’t debate me” — El-Sayed’s line, Watters laughing as he said it. The candidate’s opponent will not appear with him in public. That is the first documented fact.
The second is the Republican strategy of “coded language” — the Republican strategist Richard Czuba’s word, in the Wall Street Journal — about El-Sayed’s name and his faith. “Republicans are using a lot of language that is coded, not very subtly, about his name and his religion,” Czuba told the Journal. “They want to make him look and sound different.” Subtle is not the operation’s strong suit. The interview with Watters is the operation without the code: twenty-five minutes of questions about whether a Muslim candidate is going to impose Shariah law on the state of Michigan, about immigration enforcement, about transgender athletes, while the host laughs along with the candidate when he calls his opponent a “beta.”
The third is the candidate’s counter-move. El-Sayed is not moderate. He supports Medicare for All. He supports abolishing ICE. He calls Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide. He won his primary against Representative Haley Stevens by less than one percentage point, which is the margin in which Democratic insurgents have been losing general elections for a decade, and the party’s old consensus would tell him to soften. He has not softened it. He has spent roughly two-thirds of his post-primary ad dollars — per AdImpact — on a single spot featuring his white Presbyterian step-grandparents, his suburban high-school football footage, and his step-grandmother’s deadpan: “Where did Abdul El-Sayed come from? … Here. We’re his grandparents!”
The ad is the operation’s coded attack turned inside out. The right wants the candidate to look and sound foreign. The ad shows him with his grandparents in a small town in Michigan. The right wants him to be a cultural outsider. The ad makes him the grandson. The right’s case against him is the candidate’s case for himself, and the campaign has bet two-thirds of its post-primary television money on that bet.
Now read Leviticus 19:33-34 next to it. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” The verse is the plainest thing in the chapter. It is not metaphorical. It is not allegorical. It is not about Old Testament Israel in the sense the Sunday-school dodge means. It is a covenant-law obligation on the people of God to treat the resident foreigner as a native-born, with the memory of their own bondage in Egypt as the reason. The chattel-slavery-defending, foreigner-excluding reading of Leviticus is a late and interested one. The plain reading is in verse 34. The plain reading is love the foreigner as yourself. The plain reading is what the Michigan Republican apparatus’s coded operation is breaking.
The captured operation has a counter-text for this — Romans 13, “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities” — and the operation’s preachers will tell you that the question of how a Christian treats a Muslim candidate is settled by Paul’s submission language. Read the chapter. Romans 12:9 begins the unit: “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” Romans 13:1-7 is bracketed by Romans 12:9-21 on one side and Romans 14:1-15:13 on the other. The governing authorities in Romans 13:4 are themselves “God’s servants” — diakonos theou — for your good, and they bear the sword “not in vain.” The captured operation stops reading at verse 1. The text keeps going. The text says the authorities’ work is for your good. Coded religious-ethnic appeals against a Muslim candidate are not for anyone’s good. They are for the operation’s good. The text is plain.
So is Matthew 25. “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The captured operation reads “brothers and sisters of mine” as a theological category that restricts the criterion to fellow believers. The Greek does not do that work. The Good Samaritan is a despised religious outsider who is the moral exemplar in the parable Jesus tells to settle the question “Who is my neighbor?” — and the priest and the Levite walk past. The text says “Go and do likewise.” The captured operation has spent a generation explaining why it does not have to.
Here is what is on the record. Jesse Watters asked a Muslim candidate about Shariah law on national television for twenty-five minutes. The Michigan Republican apparatus has, in the words of the Republican strategist Richard Czuba, used language “coded, not very subtly” about the candidate’s name and his faith. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, will not appear with El-Sayed in public. AdImpact documents that El-Sayed’s campaign has spent two-thirds of its post-primary television money on a single ad that turns the right’s loudest attack into the candidate’s most-watched defense. The candidate has not softened his platform to win the general. The candidate is not hiding his faith. The candidate has been on the Fox program, has taken the questions, and has walked out of the studio with the host calling him “compelling” on air the next morning and adding, “I don’t trust him.”
The harm is to the Muslim voters of Michigan — a community the right’s coded operation treats as suspect, a community whose adult children are running for the United States Senate for the first time in this nation’s history, a community the right’s operation would rather not name in public. The harm is also to the voters of Michigan who are being denied a debate between the two candidates who will appear on their ballot in November.
The remedy is concrete. Mike Rogers should appear on the same stage with Abdul El-Sayed before November and defend, on the record, what his operation is doing. Jesse Watters and Fox News should retract the framing of the August interview as a substantive policy exchange; it was a coded religious-ethnic appeal dressed in twenty-five minutes of questions. And the Michigan Republican Party should disavow, by name, the “coded, not very subtly” language its own strategist identified, on the record, in the Wall Street Journal.
The Bible the operation claims to follow is plain. Love the foreigner as yourself. The stranger at the gate is the criterion of the last judgment. The Good Samaritan is the moral exemplar and not the threat. The verses are not what the operation is doing. The verses are still there. The tradition is still mine.