THE AMERICAN TALIBAN

Republican lawmakers held congressional hearings in 2026 under the title “Sharia-Free America,” warning that political Islam and Sharia law were incompatible with the Constitution. Reuters reported that American Muslim groups condemned the hearings as government weaponization against Muslims, and the same account noted that there was no evidence any mainstream U.S. Muslim group had advocated imposing Sharia on the United States. The panic was aimed at a phantom. The machinery advancing in Washington was real. Trump’s government built a White House Faith Office, an Anti-Christian Bias Task Force, a Religious Liberty Commission, gender decrees, school directives, abortion restrictions, and a federal policy language that treats Christian grievance as a governing category.

The Taliban is the extreme state form of religious patriarchy. In Afghanistan, the regime has excluded women and girls from secondary and university education, blocked broad areas of employment, restricted movement, suppressed public participation, and imposed religious rule through decrees and enforcement. Human Rights Watch described Afghanistan as the only country where girls and women were banned from secondary and university education. UNESCO reported in 2026 that Afghanistan remained the only country in the world where girls were barred from education beyond the primary level, with 1.5 million young girls and women out of school as of 2025. Amnesty International’s 2026 analysis of the Taliban’s marital code described provisions that uphold childhood marriages and restrict women’s ability to challenge or leave forced unions.

The American version uses American instruments. It uses executive orders instead of religious edicts. It uses federal funding conditions instead of vice squads. It uses “parental rights” instead of male guardianship. It uses “religious liberty” instead of clerical rule. It uses “biological truth” instead of formal sex segregation. It uses school-choice policy, anti-LGBTQ directives, abortion restrictions, conscience claims, and Christian grievance offices to push a religious hierarchy through civil power.

Trump created the White House Faith Office inside the Executive Office of the President. The order gave that office lead responsibility in the executive branch to empower faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship to serve families and communities. It directed the office to advise on religious-liberty exceptions, accommodations, exemptions, grant opportunities, federal policy changes, and the administration’s agenda affecting faith-based entities and houses of worship. It folded family, education, adoption, women and children, crime, reentry, substance-use recovery, religious liberty, anti-Christian bias, and government funding into one federal faith channel.

One day before that order, Trump created the Anti-Christian Bias Task Force. The order declared that the policy of the United States was to end the “anti-Christian weaponization of government.” It empowered federal officials to identify policies, practices, and conduct viewed as anti-Christian; recommend revocation or termination of those policies; develop strategies; and advance the stated purpose of the order. In April 2026, the Justice Department announced that the task force had published a report on eradicating anti-Christian bias and restoring religious liberty, with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche chairing the task force.

Trump then created the Religious Liberty Commission. The May 2025 executive order stated that the executive branch would “vigorously enforce” religious-liberty protections and framed religious voices and religious institutions as integral to the public square. The commission reported to the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council. Its advisory structure included religious leaders, lay leaders, legal experts, and federal officials. The order placed the commission’s termination date on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence, unless extended by the president.

The White House later published “President Trump’s Top 100 Victories for People of Faith.” The list claimed Trump had fought anti-Christian bias, expanded school choice, protected parental rights, restored “biological truth,” uplifted families, ended DEI policies, stopped taxpayer funding for abortion, and made himself the most pro-faith and pro-religious-liberty president in American history. The administration grouped education, gender, abortion, civil rights, family policy, religious grievance, and public funding under one triumphal faith banner.

Trump’s gender order supplied the civil vocabulary for religious sex hierarchy. The January 2025 order directed the federal government to recognize only two sexes, male and female, and described gender identity as an attack on biological and scientific terms. It framed the legal category of woman as threatened by “gender ideology” and instructed federal agencies to align documents, policies, programs, and enforcement with that view. The state did not merely announce an opinion. It changed the administrative terms through which people are recognized, classified, protected, excluded, and governed.

Trump’s education orders moved the same program into schools. The January 2025 order on K-12 schooling directed the secretaries of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services, in consultation with the attorney general, to produce a strategy for eliminating federal funding or support tied to “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.” It directed agencies to identify funding streams that supported such instruction, programs, teacher training, certification, employment, or student social transition. Another order, issued the same day, promoted school choice and educational alternatives outside assigned public schools.

Pete Hegseth brings patriarchal Christian nationalism into Trump’s Cabinet. Hegseth said he was proud to be part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, an archconservative Christian network co-founded by Doug Wilson. Hegseth shared a video showing CREC pastors arguing women should not have the right to vote. He attends a CREC member church in Tennessee, and his pastor prayed at a Pentagon service Hegseth hosted. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed Hegseth’s CREC affiliation and said Hegseth appreciates many of Wilson’s writings and teachings.

CREC’s theology supplies the content. AP documented that Wilson’s church and denomination practice complementarianism, that women cannot hold church leadership positions, and that married women are expected to submit to their husbands. Wilson told AP that the Nineteenth Amendment was “a bad idea” and described church voting around household headship, with the husband and father ordinarily casting the vote because the church is patriarchal and not egalitarian. Wilson wants the United States to be a Christian nation and accepts the label Christian nationalist. His network is influenced by Christian Reconstructionism, a movement tied to biblical law and dominion over society.

Wilson’s movement has entered Trump’s Washington. CREC opened Christ Church DC near the capital, and Hegseth attended its first Sunday service. Wilson told AP the church began as a way to serve members who had relocated to work in the Trump administration. He also said his movement had more connections with people in national government than before. That is not a distant cultural echo. That is a patriarchal Christian nationalist network with a Cabinet-level adherent, a Pentagon connection, a Washington outpost, and members serving in Trump’s government.

Russell Vought gives the project administrative muscle. The Senate confirmed Vought as White House budget director in February 2025. AP described him as a Project 2025 architect and stated that OMB acts as a nerve center for the White House, developing the budget, policy priorities, and agency rule-making. Vought’s Center for Renewing America describes its mission as renewing “a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Christian nationalism is not only a sermon when the budget office, agency rule-making, federal staffing, and executive implementation sit in the same policy orbit.

The anti-Sharia panic exposes the fraud. The Republican message warns that Muslims are trying to replace American law with religious authority, while Trump’s coalition builds Christian authority into federal offices, agency directives, education policy, gender classifications, reproductive policy, and civil-rights enforcement. The fear is selectively assigned. Islamic religious rule is treated as a constitutional emergency. Christian religious rule is treated as restoration.

The Taliban forces women out of public life through direct religious rule. Trump’s Christian nationalist coalition narrows public life through the language of family, faith, biology, parental control, and religious liberty. The Taliban restricts education when education threatens obedience. Trump’s education orders attack schools that teach gender identity, equity, pluralism, or history outside the approved ideological frame. The Taliban enforces male authority as social order. CREC teaches male headship, female submission, opposition to women’s church authority, and hostility to women’s political equality, while one of its adherents leads the Department of Defense.

America still has courts, elections, state governments, civil society, federalism, protest, journalism, and constitutional litigation. Those institutions remain barriers against theocratic capture. They are also the targets. The project advances by weakening neutral public authority and replacing it with loyal religious authority: loyal courts, loyal agencies, loyal schools, loyal churches, loyal families, loyal women, loyal citizens.

The American Taliban wears a cross instead of a turban. It quotes Paul instead of the Quran. It says Christendom instead of caliphate. It says headship instead of guardianship. It says religious liberty while demanding religious privilege. It says parental rights while redirecting public education toward sectarian control. It says biological truth while using federal power to mark disfavored people out of civic protection. It says family order while reducing women’s autonomy to a problem for men, pastors, judges, agencies, and presidents to solve.

Trump did not import the Taliban. He empowered the domestic version of the same authoritarian impulse. One favored religion is placed above civic equality. One moral code is pushed toward public rule. Women’s independence is treated as rebellion. Education is treated as danger when it produces free people. Sexuality is treated as a state concern. Minority faiths are treated as suspect. Public power is used to protect hierarchy and call it freedom.

The name is harsh because the record is harsh. The machinery is no longer outside the gates.