Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Michigan votes on Tuesday, and Abdul El-Sayed could leave election night as the first Muslim senator in the 250-year history of the United States.
The weekend did him few favors. On Sunday, Rep. Haley Stevens, whom El-Sayed beat by a sliver of a point in the August primary, endorsed his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers. That same night, 60 Minutes aired Ross Douthat’s interviews with both men.
Douthat, a Catholic and a conservative, asked El-Sayed a question most reporters never put to a candidate. Plenty of people raised in a religion drift away from it, he said, so why did faith stick for him?
“I think anybody of faith has on-again, off-again relationships with one’s own faith,” El-Sayed told him. “In my younger years, I certainly rebelled, and it was something that kind of came back to me in college.” His politics, he added, rest on a teaching to “speak the truth, even if it be against yourself.”
His faith has been on trial for months.
Rallying with Rogers in Port Huron last week, President Trump said he had come “to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” and he has taken to calling the candidate “Mohammed.” El-Sayed disavows the Brotherhood. When a voter in Michigan’s Thumb demanded last month that he prove his loyalty, El-Sayed answered with John F. Kennedy’s 1960 defense of his Catholicism, as I reported at the time.
The Brotherhood question has a real paper trail, and it deserves a straight account. In 2012, as a medical student, El-Sayed was one of 46 Egyptian Americans who signed a letter to Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a senior Brotherhood leader, urging him to “purge the media and police.”
That same year, his half-sister wrote online that their family had “long been MB,” pointing to the mother who did not raise him. El-Sayed calls that hearsay, and a Bridge Michigan review found no evidence of personal ties to the group. He has disavowed the Brotherhood more than once, and voters should weigh that alongside the 2012 letter.
On Oct. 19, his campaign released a 30-second ad called “Prayer.” El-Sayed sits in an armchair in a quiet living room and speaks to the camera. “My name is Abdul,” he says. “It means servant. I pray every day.” Near the end, he tells voters, “So yeah, we need a few more people of faith in Washington.”
The 60 Minutes interview also showed why so many people I love find this race painful. Asked whether Palestine has a right to exist, El-Sayed said yes in one word. When Douthat asked the same about Israel, the answer came with a condition: “Yes, if there is a shared understanding.” He went on to say he believes “in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”
That condition lands on top of March. On March 12, a man named Ayman Ghazali attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield (a synagogue with a preschool inside it). El-Sayed condemned the attack, saying there is “never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship.” Then he added, “Hurt people hurt people.” He apologized to Jewish Democrats in late August.
I’ll be blunt about where I come down. Abdul El-Sayed is, I believe, a good man. Much of his rhetoric about the Jewish people went way too far, with the “hurt people hurt people” line worst of all.
This race has also been personal for me. My Jewish friends have challenged me, time and again, to reconsider, and those conversations have strained friendships both old and new.
A pro-El-Sayed ad made the final week harder. On Oct. 24, Rebellion PAC, the group co-founded by commentator Cenk Uygur, released a spot in which a couple in a grocery store blame aid to Israel for what they pay at the register, before a narrator declares that Rogers “is for they/them” over photos of Benjamin Netanyahu and two of his far-right ministers.
The Anti-Defamation League called it “a case study in antisemitism.” His campaign correctly said the ad was “not affiliated in any way” with it, and on Friday El-Sayed told NBC News, “I do not agree with the contents.”
I think El-Sayed must get better at separating his disapproval of Israel’s war in Gaza from anything that sounds like contempt for the Jewish people.
On the war itself, he has company: Pope Leo XIV, like Pope Francis before him, has condemned the Netanyahu government’s conduct of it. The line between that criticism and antisemitism has to be bright, and I’m confident he will draw it going forward (we will hold him to account if he doesn’t). What we all want is peace abroad, along with a Michigan where working families can finally get ahead.
Douthat asked El-Sayed whether he was saying enough to reassure Michigan’s roughly 100,000 Jewish voters. “When it comes to standing up for Jewish Americans,” he said, “I will be right there.”
A longer exchange, which CBS cut from the broadcast but posted in the extended interview on YouTube, gets at how El-Sayed squares his religion with his party.
Douthat noted that many Muslims, like many Christians, hold traditional views on abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender, and he asked whether El-Sayed felt any tension. El-Sayed called himself a constitutionalist: “Even though somebody might use rights that you don’t understand, you never mean to use yourself, you still got to show up and fight for those rights.”
Many Jewish voters in Michigan have done the same hard math I have.
In September, more than 500 Jewish Michiganders signed an open letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed, a story The New York Times covered when it launched. Former Reps. Sander and Andy Levin signed it, as did Alicia Chandler, a former president of the American Jewish Committee’s Detroit chapter. It now carries more than 1,000 names.
The signers don’t pretend to agree with him on everything. Some are enthusiasts, and others admit to reservations about his approach to Israel. “We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move,” they wrote.
That is where I stand.
His faith strikes me as sincere, and there is real Islamophobia in this campaign. Nobody is sending Abdul El-Sayed a valentine on Tuesday; they are playing chess, with a Senate seat on the board. Republicans once knew better than to make a man’s mosque the issue; six days after 9/11, George W. Bush walked into a Washington mosque and said “Islam is peace.”
The Church gave Catholics language for this moment 61 years ago.
Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on non-Christian religions, says plainly that “the Church regards with esteem also the Moslems,” who “adore the one God.” One section later, the council “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
Pope Leo XIV kept both commitments when he marked the declaration’s 60th anniversary last fall. Speaking in St. Peter’s Square, he said that “the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.” Catholics who vote in Michigan this week carry the council’s two sentences into the booth together.
There is a father behind the candidate, too. On Oct. 29, El-Sayed posted a short video called “Bedtime duties,” which follows him home from the campaign trail to put his two daughters to bed.
If Michigan sends El-Sayed to Washington, it will be a monumental occasion, and I will rejoice. The first Muslim senator in our nation’s history would be a man of prayer who believes in God, one who told a national television audience that his faith came back to him in college and stayed.
My Jewish friends will hold him to his promise that he “will be right there” for them. So will I.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with every Michigander who refuses to turn a man’s prayers into a loyalty test, and with every Jewish family that deserves to drop a child at the Temple Israel preschool without fear.
The Gospel does not let us choose between our Muslim neighbors and our Jewish ones. Nostra Aetate asked Catholics to hold both in esteem in 1965, and Pope Leo XIV is asking us again, in an election season that has tried hard to make us forget.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that refuses both bigotries at once, and for honest talk about what that costs us in our own friendships.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every believer against fear and scapegoating, I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Paid subscribers get the full series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, along with our exclusive investigations and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.
Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Wishing him good luck. Hoping everyone sees that people of faith have no choice but to back him. These Republicans have to go. We can work with men and women of real faith, whatever their faith, even if it's not in God. All human beings. All different. But hypocrites, blasphemers, predators, bullies, liars, and conmen- we should not have at the helm. Period.
Please please make him win 🥇