It’s Republican primary season in Texas, so the ritual scapegoating of a demonized minority has begun. This time the threat to Texas, leading Republican candidates tell us, comes from the enemy within: 300,000 neighbors in my home state who happen to be Muslim by religion or descent.

According to Politico, ads in half a dozen races since the start of 2025 warn of a growing Sharia threat, with conservative candidates competing to outdo one another in how forcefully they denounce it.

Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, now seeking a fifth term in Washington, is fending off a primary challenge from the hard-Right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. In that context, Cornyn — until recently one of the more statesmanlike conservatives in Washington — last October joined Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama in introducing the No Sharia Act. “Sharia law is an affront to our Constitution and the values Texans hold close,” Cornyn declared. “It has no place in Texas or America, and this bill would make sure of that.”

Others have gone further. Representative Chip Roy has argued that Texas faces an internal ideological threat, declaring: “We’ve got to tweak the Texas Constitution. Whatever’s necessary to protect Texas from being Islamified by the radical Marxists.” To thwart the sinister Marxo-Muslim conspiracy, Roy and Keith Self, another Republican member of the Texas delegation, have launched a Sharia-Free Caucus in the US House of Representatives.

Sharia law is Muslim religious law, similar to Jewish Halachic law. It is true that there are Sharia law courts of arbitration which Muslims in the US may voluntarily choose as an alternative to the US court system, mostly in matters such as divorce and contract disputes. There are also Jewish rabbinical courts in the US called Beth Din courts, which are allowed to handle similar cases with the consent of all parties.

Both Jewish and Muslim religious law courts are governed by the Federal Arbitration Act, and their authority is strictly limited under state and federal law. Jewish Beth din courts cannot order stonings and Muslim courts cannot order beheadings or amputations.

What is behind all this fearmongering? Muslims only make up an estimated 1.68% of Texas’s population, but that figure has been rising. The growth has been concentrated in Houston, which now has the largest Muslim population in the American South — roughly 200,000 people — and an expanding network of mosques. This demographic shift has fed into fears that the state is somehow under assault.

For example, plans by the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) to build a residential neighborhood along with a mosque have led to claims that the development will discriminate against non-Muslims and impose Sharia law. Even though Trump’s Justice Department concluded that the development met all requirements, the Texas legislature passed a law that, according to the bill’s sponsor, Republican state representative Jeff Leach, “blocks radical foreign influence from taking root in our communities”.

The Right’s anti-Sharia law demagogy is similar to anti-Catholic rhetoric in the past. In the 19th century, fearing that parochial schools were part of a conspiracy by the Vatican to Catholicize America, many states amended their constitutions to ban state governments from funding private religious schools. Notably, 37 states have such provisions today, including Texas.

Texas Republicans have sought to legalize state funding for religious schools to serve their evangelical Protestant base. However, Paxton has declared that school voucher money can be denied to Muslim schools in the state, saying: “Let me be crystal clear. Texans’ tax dollars should never fund Islamic terrorists or America’s enemies.”

The portrayal of all Muslim Americans as jihadists seeking to subvert our society is not the only culture-war hysteria that Texan conservatives have manipulated. Over three terms, Governor Greg Abbott has repeatedly leaned into various conspiracy theories: in 2015 he ordered the State Guard to monitor a military exercise following claims that Texans were about to be interned in Walmarts, and in March 2025 he backed the F.U.R.R.I.E.S. Act after debunked rumors that schools were providing litter boxes for children identifying as animals. That bill, which would have outlawed barking or meowing in classrooms, never made it out of committee.

Moral panics and conspiracy theories like these are cynically deployed as “boob bait for Bubba”: a way of panicking voters into line. By denouncing a phantom Marxo-Muslim menace, Chip Roy has effectively licensed an endless parade of imaginary hybrid threats. If nothing else, it is almost tempting, on entertainment grounds alone, to welcome the next Right-wing crusade to save Texas from the Muslim-Marxist-furry conspiracy.