A Michigan Democrat running for Senate just reached for the most politically convenient shield he could find.
His socialist-aligned platform got called radical — so he invoked Jesus.
And the Republican Party is not letting it go quietly.
What El-Sayed Actually Said
Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed appeared on the Progressive Christians Podcast earlier this year and was asked how his Muslim faith shapes his campaign positions.
The podcast host, Rev Blair Stowe, framed El-Sayed’s platform — Medicare for All, an anti-war posture, and opposition to corporate money in politics — as policies that, “from the Christian lens,” appeared to be “very similar to the teachings of Jesus.”
El-Sayed took the opening.
“Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him, was considered radical in his time too,” El-Sayed said. “And there is a radical nature to being willing to stand forthright in a time of corruption, and I think it’s important for all of us to realize that popularity and zeitgeist don’t make truth.”
That was the Progressive Christians Podcast appearance. But El-Sayed wasn’t done reaching for Scripture as a political instrument.
During a separate appearance on the “I’ve Had It” podcast, host Jennifer Welch pressed El-Sayed about Republican opponent Mike Rogers going after him over his Muslim faith. Welch accused Rogers of being a “complete Christian hypocrite” over reported ties between members of his faith coalition and the Living Word Church franchise.
El-Sayed used the moment to turn the tables on Rogers’ Christianity directly.
“He’s going to hide behind this simulacrum of faith, which clearly, you know, if you followed the teachings of Jesus Christ, it was about upending the system against the richest and most powerful in the ways that they used their power and their money to subjugate other people,” El-Sayed said. “Like, that was the essential teaching.”
So a Muslim candidate running on a platform of government-run healthcare, abolishing ICE, and resisting corporate money in politics has now appointed himself the authority on what Jesus actually taught — and used that authority to dismiss a Christian opponent’s faith as a hollow imitation.
Republicans Push Back Hard
Michigan Republican Party spokesperson Ted Goodman told Fox News Digital that El-Sayed had no standing to dismiss Rogers’ faith while lecturing Christians about their own religion.
“It’s quite something for Mr El-Sayed to lecture Christians on the teachings of Jesus while dismissing a man’s sincere faith as somehow, ‘simulacrum,'” Goodman said.
Goodman added that “whether one is a practicing Christian or not, no serious person can minimize the profound contributions of Christian teaching, morality, and philosophy to the founding principles and enduring greatness of America, or to the character of public servants like Mike Rogers who live them out.”
RNC national spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre went further, questioning El-Sayed’s compatibility with American values altogether.
“He’s fundamentally incompatible with Western values and invoking Jesus’ name isn’t going to change that,” Baldassarre said.
National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Bernadette Breslin tied the Jesus comparison to a broader pattern the NRSC says defines El-Sayed’s campaign.
“A radical Muslim with a self-proclaimed ‘obligation’ to Sharia law has gone from excusing violent attacks on Jewish Michiganders to comparing himself to Jesus Christ,” Breslin told Fox News Digital. “Abdul El-Sayed is unfit to represent Michigan, and he proves it every time he attacks other faiths.”
Rogers himself broadened the dispute during an appearance on Hannity, framing the race in terms of Michigan values El-Sayed has reportedly criticized in past videos and blog posts.
“When I go back, I want to, you know, make sure we’re protecting our faith, and our families, and our factories, while he’s advocating… doing away with our fireworks, football, the 4th of July,” Rogers said. “This guy spent hours hating on what most Michiganders would enjoy in their pastimes, and he should be held into account for that.”
The Selective Scripture Problem
El-Sayed’s Jesus comparison deserves more than a political rebuttal. It deserves an honest theological one.
Democrats who reach for Scripture to baptize their policy agenda do so selectively — and the selectivity is the tell. The Bible does not call for government-run healthcare systems, centralized redistribution of wealth, or the abolition of immigration enforcement. Those are 21st-century progressive policy preferences dressed in ancient language to make them sound timeless.
And the policy record cuts in the other direction entirely.
El-Sayed supports Medicare for All — a government takeover of the healthcare system that would eliminate private insurance, strip patients of provider choice, and put federal bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions for every American. Scripture does not prescribe that arrangement. It prescribes voluntary charity, freely given, not coerced redistribution administered through Washington, DC.
He also supports abortion rights — a position that places him in direct contradiction to the biblical teaching that human life in the womb carries inherent worth and dignity. The same Jesus whose name El-Sayed invoked is the Jesus whose followers have consistently understood to affirm the sanctity of life from conception. There’s no reconciling that with a candidate who backs abortion-on-demand as a political platform.
Beyond the policy contradictions, there’s a standing problem. El-Sayed is not a Christian. He follows Sharia law in his personal life — a fact he confirmed in a 2009 New York Times interview, telling the paper, “Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation.”
His campaign confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that El-Sayed continues to comply with Sharia law in his personal life.
None of that disqualifies him from running for Senate. But it does raise a pointed question about the credibility of a candidate who cites Sharia law as a personal religious obligation in one interview and then turns around in another to lecture Christians about what Jesus really meant.
That’s not interfaith dialogue. That’s political opportunism wearing a theological costume.
The broader pattern here has a name. Democrats who claim their socialist policy agenda reflects the teachings of Jesus have been running this play for years. The comparison functions as a conversation-ender — if your platform is what Jesus would have wanted, then opposition to it becomes not just wrong but ungodly. It’s a way of putting a moral halo over Medicare for All and ICE abolition that neither policy could earn on its own merits.
But the argument collapses under scrutiny. Jesus healed the sick through direct, personal ministry — not through a federal agency with a budget deficit and a prior authorization requirement. He called individuals to give freely — not governments to tax citizens and redistribute the proceeds. The left’s habit of drafting Jesus as a co-signer for big-government programs says more about the weakness of those programs’ secular arguments than it does about Scripture.
El-Sayed is running on a platform backed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). That coalition supports Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending US military aid to Israel. These are not positions that flow from a careful reading of the Gospels. They are positions that flow from the Democratic Socialists of America’s ideological wish list, and wrapping them in the language of Jesus does not change what they are.
And the history of socialist governance — the economic decline, the authoritarian drift, the destruction of the middle class — does not disappear because a candidate quotes a verse. Millions of Americans who have watched government-run systems fail in other countries, who watched the COVID-era public health apparatus collapse under the weight of its own mandates, are not going to be persuaded that the solution is more federal control over their lives and their healthcare.
El-Sayed will face Republican nominee Mike Rogers this fall for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Gary Peters. Michigan is a battleground state, and the race is already one of the most closely watched in the country. But the Jesus comparison is not going to age well as voters learn more about what El-Sayed actually believes — and what he has said when he thought fewer people were listening.
Sources: Fox News Digital; Washington Free Beacon
