What the Constitution says — whatever your opinion.
By Jeff Bayard | Constitutional Showdown Series
The Virginia Christian Alliance continues our Constitutional Showdown series, reading the text as written and testing every claim of power against it — so believers can practice faithful, clear-eyed citizenship.
Not long ago, in a broadcast interview, the President was asked whether he would move against Islamic religious law in America. He answered that he would “absolutely” do it. Around the same time, members of Congress launched a caucus with the same goal, and a bill landed in the House with a blunt title: the No Shari’a Act.
The question lands with a lot of people, and it lands differently depending on who you are. Some hear it and think: good, finally. Others hear it and worry. Almost nobody stops to ask the one question that actually settles it.
Can he?
Not should he. Not do you want him to. Just: does a President have the power to ban sharia — under the Constitution as written?
That question has an answer. And here is the surprising part — the answer is more complete, and more settled, than either side of the argument usually assumes. You may have a strong opinion about Islamic law. Hold onto it; you’re entitled to it. But set it beside the text for a few minutes and see whether the two match. This is one of those places where what you feel and what the Constitution says are two different questions — and only one of them is the law.
Let’s take it in order.
First, What Are We Talking About?
The first mistake in this whole debate is treating “sharia” as one thing. It isn’t.
Sharia is Islam’s religious and moral framework, drawn mainly from the Qur’an and the traditions of Muhammad, and understood in very different ways across Muslim schools, countries, and communities. It can cover personal worship and ethics, family life, business dealings — and, in some nations, civil or criminal law. (“Sharia law” is the common English phrase, though it’s a little redundant, since sharia already means Islamic law.)
That range is the whole key, because it means sharia is really two different things wearing one name.
For many Muslims, in ordinary life, it means personal religious practice — the daily prayers, the Ramadan fast, dietary rules, charity, the pilgrimage to Mecca. That is devotion. In American law it sits in the same category as a Jewish family keeping kosher or a Catholic observing Lent.
But sharia can also mean a full body of law — a rival system of rules for marriage, inheritance, contracts, and in some countries, criminal punishment. That is a legal system, a competitor to civil law.
The Constitution does not treat those two the same way. One is protected. The other has no force here at all. To see why, you have to know where American law says the buck stops.
A Law, By the Very Meaning of the Word
Here is the foundation, and it is older than any argument about Islam.
When the Founders built this country, they had just escaped one. They had lived under a distant king who imposed laws on them through a Parliament they had no vote in. The Declaration of Independence names the grievance directly: he had subjected the colonists “to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution,” giving his assent to their “Acts of pretended Legislation.”
Pretended legislation. Law made by someone with no rightful authority over them. That was the wound. And when the Founders wrote the Constitution, they answered it in Article VI, in the words that became known as the Supremacy Clause: this Constitution, and the laws of the United States made under it, “shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”
Alexander Hamilton, defending that clause to a skeptical public, put it in words a child could follow. A law, he wrote, “by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy.” Sit with that. A rule you are free to ignore is not a law — it’s a suggestion. If a rule is really law, it is binding; if it is binding, it is supreme over whatever contradicts it. Supremacy isn’t an extra power grabbed by the government. It is simply what the word law means.
James Madison drew the same line, harder. Picture a country, he said, where the national law had to bow to every competing authority beneath it. You would have built “a monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members” — a body ruled by its own hands and feet, everything upside down.
So the American answer, written in 1787 and ratified in 1788, was this: there is one supreme law here — the Constitution and the laws made under it. Every other code, from any other nation or faith, sits under it, not over it.
Now watch what that does to the question.
It’s Already Handled
Ask it plainly: can a rival body of law — sharia, or any religious or foreign legal code — govern an American, override an American court, bind an American against the laws of the United States?
No. It never could. Not because of any special rule aimed at Islam, but because of the oldest structural rule we have. American law is supreme. A competing legal code has no independent force here. A court may sometimes consult a foreign or religious rule — in a contract dispute, say, where two parties agreed to it — but never where it collides with American law or public policy. The moment they conflict, American law wins. Every time.
Which leads to a conclusion that surprises people on every side of this: the thing most feared — that sharia as a legal system could take over an American courtroom — is something the Constitution already forbids, and has forbidden since 1788. There is nothing to ban, because there is nothing with the power to govern in the first place. The concern is understandable. The legal danger is not. The Supremacy Clause did the work more than two centuries ago.
Congress seems to know it, too. That new bill — the No Shari’a Act, introduced in the House in September 2025 — opens its own findings by citing the Supremacy Clause, noting that it “requires State and Federal courts to apply United States law above Shari’a or any foreign law.” Read that again. The bill’s argument for itself is that the Constitution already puts American law on top. Its operative rule would bar a court from enforcing a judgment or decision that relies on Shari’a or foreign law in violation of a party’s constitutional rights — and its defined term, “foreign law,” is written to be religion-neutral, even as the bill’s title and provisions name Shari’a directly. At its enforceable core, in other words, it mostly restates what Article VI has said since the founding. (It was introduced by a single member and referred to committee, where it remains.)
That covers the legal code half of sharia. Now the other half.
The Half No President Can Touch
The prayers, the fast, the dietary rules, the pilgrimage — the devotional practice of a faith — sit on the far side of a different line, and that line is drawn to protect everyone, including us.
The First Amendment forbids the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court has held the line both ways. A person’s religious belief is absolutely protected; the government may not touch it. Religious conduct can be regulated by neutral laws that apply to everybody — you can’t break a general criminal law and call it worship. But the government may never write a law that targets a religion. It may not single out one faith’s practice for a burden it places on no one else.
That last principle is not a technicality. In one case, a city tried to shut down a specific religion’s worship rituals while leaving nearly identical conduct alone. The Supreme Court struck it down flat, and the language it used should be read slowly: the Free Exercise Clause “commits government itself to religious tolerance,” and officials may not “devise mechanisms, overt or disguised, designed to persecute or oppress a religion or its practices.”
So a President who tried to ban the practice of Islam — the prayer, the fast, the pilgrimage — would be doing the one thing the First Amendment most clearly forbids: targeting a faith. He cannot. Not because anyone signs off on every idea inside that faith, but because the same clause that would stop him is the clause that guards your own church tomorrow. The rule that protects a Muslim’s prayer is the identical rule that protects a Christian’s. You cannot weaken one without weakening the other — they are the same sentence.
The Case Nobody Mentions
Here is where the honest answer complicates the easy one — and this is the part worth staying for.
A state already tried to ban sharia. In 2010, Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment, by more than seventy percent, forbidding state courts from considering or using sharia law. The people had spoken, loudly. And a federal appeals court blocked it.
Why? Not because the court loved sharia. Because the amendment named one religion — it singled out sharia by name for disfavored treatment while leaving every other religious tradition untouched. Under the First Amendment, government must stay neutral between faiths, and a law that targets one by name fails that test. Naming the religion is what sank it.
And there’s a second detail from that case worth reading at every kitchen table where this gets argued. When the state was asked, in court, to point to the actual problem it was solving — to name a single instance where an Oklahoma court had actually applied sharia law — it could not. Not one case. The whole danger the amendment was built to stop turned out to be, in the court’s own word, speculative.
Sit with that. A ban that named a religion was struck down, and the emergency that justified it could not produce one real example when a court asked for it. That is not an argument that Islam is harmless. It is a lesson in how the Constitution works: it will not let the government target a faith by name, and it will not burden a First Amendment right to solve a problem no one can actually show. It’s also, notice, the shadow hanging over that new federal bill — the part that does honest legal work runs through a religion-neutral definition, while the part that names a religion in its title could invite a challenge similar to the one that sank Oklahoma.
The Strongest Objection — Answered Honestly
Now the hardest pushback, and it deserves a straight answer, not a dodge.
Someone will say: but sharia, as practiced in parts of the world, brings real horrors — honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, the punishment of those who leave the faith. Those things are real. They are barbaric by any Christian or constitutional standard. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and this series does not deal in dishonesty.
But look closely at what that objection actually proves. Every one of those horrors is already illegal in the United States — and illegal precisely because American law is supreme over any code that would permit them.
An honor killing is murder; we prosecute murder. Female genital mutilation of a minor is a federal crime. Forced marriage can implicate our laws against kidnapping, coercion, trafficking, and sexual abuse. Punishing someone for leaving a religion is impossible here, because the First Amendment guarantees the right to adopt, reject, or change religious belief. There is no corner of that list the law hasn’t already reached.
So the objection, followed to its end, does not argue for a new ban. It argues for the thing we already have. A competing legal code cannot impose any of those horrors on an American, because American law overrides it — which is exactly what the Supremacy Clause guarantees. The strongest case against sharia-as-law turns out to be the strongest case for the Constitution we already possess. The murder statute already on the books does more, and does it more surely, than any headline “ban” ever could.
Two other claims tend to surface here, and both should be set aside for the same reason. One says every Muslim is secretly licensed to lie, so no assurance of loyalty can be believed. The other says Islam is a single, unbreakable bloc. Neither survives contact with the facts — Sunni and Shia have divided for fourteen centuries, the schools of Islamic law disagree sharply, and Muslims worldwide live under a wide range of legal systems. But the deeper problem is what those claims do: they judge a whole class of people by blood and category rather than by their own acts. That is the exact logic once used against Catholics — “they answer to Rome, they can’t be loyal Americans” — and against Jews. The Constitution refuses it on principle. It judges persons, one at a time, by what they have actually done, never by the group a fearful majority has assigned them to.
Who Actually Does What — A Quick Civics Refresher
Step back, because this is where the whole question comes clear.
The Constitution splits the job of government into separate hands, on purpose. Congress writes the law (Article I). The courts resolve legal disputes — including constitutional ones — in the cases before them (Article III). And the President carries the law out — Article II gives him the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Write it, apply it, enforce it. Three different hands, and no one hand does all three.
Here’s a thing most people never learn. When the Supremacy Clause was written in 1788, there was almost no machinery to enforce it. There was no Department of Justice — that came in 1870. No FBI — the bureau that became it started in 1908, and took the name Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. The whole federal enforcement apparatus we now call “the DOJ, the FBI, the alphabet agencies” grew up over the following century and more. By the government’s own telling, the Justice Department “began in 1789 with a staff of two” — the Attorney General and a clerk.
Which means two things are true at once, and holding them together is the key to this entire debate. The supreme law was settled in 1788. The enforcement of it — the muscle, the agencies, the daily work of carrying it out — is a separate matter, handed to the executive branch, and it’s the part that plays out in real time. What the text says and how faithfully it gets enforced are two different questions. The first is closed. The second is the one worth arguing about.
So put the title question through that machine.
Can the President write a new supremacy rule to ban a rival legal code? No — Congress and the Constitution already wrote it, in 1788. Can he declare, against a faith, what the law means? No — that’s the courts, and they’ve said the government can’t target a religion. What can he do? His actual constitutional job: enforce the supreme law we already have. And the supreme law already says no rival code governs Americans.
That reframes the whole thing. “Ban” is the wrong verb. A President cannot create a new ban on his own where Congress hasn’t authorized one; his constitutional role is to enforce the laws Congress has enacted. And what he’d be enforcing here is already on the books. A President serious about this doesn’t need to declare anything new; he needs to faithfully execute the laws that already make American law supreme.
And If You Still Want It Changed
Suppose someone reads all this and says: I don’t care that it’s already handled — I want the Constitution itself to say something different. Maybe stronger. Maybe explicit.
The Founders built a door for exactly that person, and it’s the same door for everyone, whatever they’re pushing for. It’s Article V — the amendment process. If you want the supreme law to say something it doesn’t, you don’t get a President to decree it, or a single judge to invent it. You amend the Constitution: two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. It is deliberately hard, because the Founders did not want the supreme law rewritten by any one official’s pen, or any one court, or any one election. They wanted it changed only when the country itself is genuinely convinced.
That’s not a dead end. It’s the honest road. It’s open, it’s legitimate, and it asks you to persuade your fellow citizens rather than shortcut past them. For a Christian who believes in ordered liberty, that’s not an obstacle — it’s the design working exactly as intended.
What the Citizen Does
So — can a President ban sharia?
Take the word in the two pieces it actually contains. If “ban sharia” means keep a foreign legal code from governing Americans, there’s nothing to ban: American law is already supreme, and has been since 1788. If it means forbid the practice of a faith, no President can do it, because the First Amendment bars the government from targeting any religion — and thank God it does, because that’s the same shield standing over your own worship.
Here’s the citizen’s habit, the one this series keeps returning to. When someone tells you the President should “ban” something, ask two quiet questions. Is the danger already handled by law we’ve got? (Here, it is.) And would the “fix” require the government to target a faith the Constitution protects? (Here, it would.) Ask those two, and you’ll rarely be fooled — whatever your politics.
The Constitution is not nervous about this. It settled whose law is supreme before any of us were born, and it settled the matter of targeting a religion in the same breath. What’s left is enforcement — and, for anyone who wants a different answer, the honest work of Article V. “A false balance is abomination to the LORD,” Scripture says, “but a just weight is his delight” (Proverbs 11:1). The just weight here is an old one, and it still holds: one supreme law over all of us, and no government hand on any man’s faith.
Read the text. Ask the honest question.
Go check.
