A Muslim man prays. (Photo by Hussain Ali on Unsplash)
Heretic Adjacent | June 17, 2026
The most Christian thing that happened at the Texas GOP convention may have come from the Muslim man sobbing in the back of the room.
And if that sentence makes people mad, they need to take it up with Jesus.
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At the 2026 Texas Republican Party Convention in Houston last weekend, Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor and president of Recover America, an organization dedicated to mobilizing ministers into politics, told a Muslim man named Mohamed Hussein that he should leave the country. Then Scarborough followed Hussein to the chairs where he sat sobbing, put an arm around his shoulder, and offered to pray with him.
You don’t need any other information to puzzle out what happened in Houston at that convention. The cruelty with one hand and the “care” with the other are part of the same paternalistic move.
The irony, of course, is that Mohamed Hussein came to the Texas Republican Party Convention as a delegate, not a protester. Yeah, he was supposed to be there. He’d voted in the Republican primary and describes himself as conservative-leaning on economics and social values. He believes religion has a role in public life, loves the Bill of Rights, and prays five times a day.
None of it was enough.
When the convention’s “Judeo-Christian Caucus” panel claimed that Muslims are required by Sharia law to lie, Hussein stood up from the back of the room and said, plainly, that what the crowd had been hearing about Sharia law was untrue. He explicitly referred to the Bible by explaining to the assembled Christians that it “commands you to be just.”
He was practicing Sharia at that very moment, he told them. Sharia, as he lived it, meant fasting, daily prayer, modest dress, and charity.
Then Dr. Rick Scarborough, the panel’s moderator and former Southern Baptist pastor, told him to leave.
Not the room. The country.
Hussein broke down. He retreated to some chairs in the back of the room and wept alone. Scarborough followed him, sat down beside him, placed an arm on the back of his seat, leaned in, and offered to pray that Hussein would convert to Christianity.
Oh, yes. he. did.
“The pastoral side of me reached out to him in genuine care,” Scarborough later told the Texas Tribune.
This is what religious smugness always looks like when it’s fully ripened. First, it defines the terms of belonging. Then it excludes the person who doesn’t meet them. Then it offers to rescue that person from their own exclusion, provided they become what you’ve already decided they should be.
So, what Scarborough did was the height of condescension. Even though I’m sure he believed he was offering pastoral care, he—let me be careful how I say this—was not.
We call the logic underneath all of this “Christendom.” And, turns out, “convert or leave” is its oldest demand. For a thousand years, Christian empires made the same “generous offer” to Jews, Muslims, indigenous peoples, and anyone who didn’t fit the religious profile of the nation. The content of the faith got co-opted into the project of maintaining power. And the people with power got to decide who belonged inside and who needed to stay behind the rope line.
This isn’t merely ancient history, either. It’s what happens every time Christianity decides it owns a country rather than serves its neighbors.
State Rep. Brent Money, who founded the Sharia-Free Texas Caucus (no, I’m not lying; apparently, somebody thought that was an idea whose time had come), told the panel that the country should be run by Christians and cited the first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, as his authority.
The Constitution’s explicit prohibition on religious tests for public office, it seems, didn’t make the summer reading list. But that’s how this works: the tradition gets selectively mined for whatever makes the sign of the cross over the preferred arrangement of power.
Here’s what I think people who claim to follow Jesus should consider:
Mohamed Hussein quoted the Bible more honestly than the pastor running the panel. He identified what justice requires. Then he stood in a room full of people who claimed the name of Jesus and told them from the back of the room that what they were doing didn’t match the standard their own Scripture set.
Afterward, he forgave the man who told him to leave his country.
That’s the most theologically significant act in the entire story. A Muslim man, sobbing in a convention chair, extended the grace that his persecutor’s own tradition demands and that his persecutor himself failed to offer.
Oh, yes. he. did.
If you follow Jesus and that scene doesn’t kick you in the gut, I’d invite you to take a little time to consider what exactly has been forming your conscience. Because the pain Mohammad Hussein felt in that room is exactly the kind of pain the gospel is supposed to make the rest of us Jesus-people incapable of inflicting.
Jesus said we’d find him among the strangers in the land, not to mention the hungry and the excluded. He didn’t say “except at party conventions.” He didn’t add a footnote about religious minorities who pray differently from us.
What was done to Mohamed Hussein by a man claiming to follow Jesus was done to a person who bears the image of God. The Bible commands us to be just. Mr. Hussein said so himself.
And he was right.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent.