The trend of Democratic Senate candidates who openly talk about religion continues to spread, reaching from Texas to Kansas and all the way to Michigan. But the schtick may prove no less successful than Tim Walz and Graham Platner (as examples of rugged masculinity) at connecting with Middle America. A leftist with a Christian accent is still a leftist.

The latest candidate to embrace the religious routine is Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim candidate in Michigan whose policies largely align with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), fresh off his Democratic primary victory for U.S. Senate on August 4. El-Sayed is making headlines for a podcast interview earlier this summer in which he allegedly compared himself to Jesus.

In a May 29 episode of “The Progressive Christians” podcast, El-Sayed was asked to respond to critics who called his ideas too radical. “Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him, was considered radical in his time too,” he replied. “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.”

The candidate doubled down on this declaration in an August 10, 2026 podcast with leftist host Jennifer Welch. “Clearly, you know, if you followed the teachings of Jesus Christ, it was about upending the system against the richest and most powerful and the ways that they used their power and their money to subjugate other people. Like, that was the essential teaching,” El-Sayed said.

The fault in these remarks does not primarily lie in the comparison to Jesus. El-Sayed did not express a Messiah complex or similar blasphemy that would put in an equal footing with Jesus. Instead, he simply appeals to Jesus as a worthy model for imitation. This is just “WWJD,” albeit with a severe leftward limp.

The actual fault in El-Sayed’s reasoning is that he attempts to claim Jesus as a revolutionary. Jesus was radical, he claims, so we should be radical, too. Although such reasoning is popular in progressive circles, it relies more on projection than truth. Christians are specifically exhorted to imitate Jesus in his suffering (1 Peter 2:21), in love (Ephesians 5:1-2), and in seeking God’s glory in everything (1 Corinthians 10:31; 11:1). But, as for overthrowing earthly powers, Jesus said, “If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” (John 18:36).

It’s true that Jesus did flip the money changers’ tables once, perhaps twice (Matthew 21:12; John 2:15). But Jesus then turned around and preached, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you” (Matthew 23:2-3). He did stand against corruption, but only by warning his followers, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). Jesus never undermined God’s law because he was its author and therefore its preeminent authority (Matthew 7:29).

Yet it would be misleading to treat El-Sayed as just another progressive Christian candidate for the simple reason that he does not profess to be Christian at all. El-Sayed is a Muslim, and a very committed one at that.

In college, El-Sayed went the extra mile to obtain a Sharia-compliant home loan (Sharia law prohibits interest on loans, so Muslims use long-term payment plans on an increased home value as an alternative). “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 Sharia-compliant way,” he explained in a 2009 New York Times interview. “Not because of fear but because of obligation.” If only American Christians were as sincerely aware of the final judgment!

To return to the point, because he is a Muslim, El-Sayed naturally rejects Jesus’s claims to divinity. The first pillar of Islam is the daily recitation of its creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” But Jesus claims to be God all over the place. In fact, it was precisely this claim that led the monotheistic Jews to condemn Jesus, after he said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62), using language only used of God in Exodus 3:14, Psalm 110:1, and Daniel 7:13.

Jesus’s claim to divinity was his basis for critiquing the elites of his day, his most radical teaching. But if El-Sayed rejects Jesus’s most radical teaching, how can he use him as a model of radicalism?

Here, context is key. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was speaking on a progressive Christian podcast, so he used Jesus as an example. But he also quoted the Koran to Christians because that is where his true allegiance lies.

“One of the most frustrating things is that there’s this notion that somehow, when Muslims are trying to organize politically, that there is this effort to push a certain ideology. There’s this verse in the Koran that … literally means ‘There is no compulsion in faith,’” he argued. “Faith is kind of the thing itself. So there is no compulsion in in religion. Your job is to live out your faith and to try to do so in a way where you’re offering dignity and opportunity for other people, not to compel them to behave in any sort of way, but to try and create a level of freedom where people have the right to choose how they want to live their lives.”

Given how much Islam borrowed from Christianity, it’s no surprise that the Koran contains a statement like this one. And, given America’s current religious pluralism and official policy of religious freedom, it’s no surprise that Muslim candidates in the U.S. want to stress lines like these. But Muslims often act far differently when they have control, from laws forbidding conversion or blasphemy to the forced-conversion policies that wiped out the flourishing Christian communities of North Africa in the 600s.

It’s almost refreshing to see political candidates on the Left hold a view different from the tired cookie-cutter of secularism. But Christians should be aware that those other viewpoints have their own theological convictions. Instead of forced analogies about Jesus Christ, the questions El-Sayed really should be facing and answering are about how much Sharia law will influence his decisions as a U.S. senator.

And, not unrelated, what does he think about the Jews?