Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told a Christian podcast that Jesus "was considered radical in his time too", drawing a parallel to his own campaign that the RNC calls "an insult to millions of Christians."
El-Sayed made the comparison during a May appearance on The Progressive Christians Podcast, where he also cited a verse from the Quran to explain how his Muslim faith shapes his political agenda. Breitbart News reported on the interview in August, noting that El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The remarks land in the middle of a general-election Senate race in Michigan where El-Sayed already faces questions about his political associations, his personal finances, and whether his platform is too far left for a swing state. He is backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a roster that places him squarely on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Asked on the podcast about being labeled "radical," El-Sayed reached for a comparison most politicians would avoid. He told the interviewer:
"Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him, was considered radical in his time too. And there is a radical nature to being willing to stand forthright in a time of corruption."
The statement was not a passing aside. On a separate podcast hosted by Jennifer Welch roughly a week before the Breitbart report, El-Sayed returned to the same theme, describing Jesus's ministry as being "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." He called that "the essential teaching."
In other words, El-Sayed is using the figure of Jesus, on explicitly Christian platforms, to frame his own progressive economic agenda as a continuation of sacred work. That framing deserves scrutiny, not because a candidate's faith is off-limits, but because El-Sayed is selectively packaging religious authority to sell a political product.
During the May podcast, El-Sayed also addressed head-on the suspicion that Muslim political organizing carries an ideological agenda. He cited a Quranic verse, Lā ikrāha fī d-dīn, meaning "there is no compulsion in religion", and used it to argue that his faith compels him to offer "dignity and opportunity to other people," not to impose religious law.
"One of the most frustrating things is there's this notion that somehow when Muslims are trying to organize politically, that there's this effort to push a certain ideology. There's this verse in the Quran, Lā ikrāha fī d-dīn, which literally means there's no compulsion on faith. So if you're not doing a certain thing out of your faith, compelling people to follow a certain set of faith or set of laws out of your faith, like faith is kind of the thing itself."
He continued: "Your job is to live out your faith, and to try to do so in a way where you're offering dignity and opportunity to other people, not to compel them to behave in any sort of way, but to try to create a level freedom where people have the right to choose how they want to live their lives, if they want to pray at all, how they want to pray, who they want to love, how they want to engage in the world."
That is a carefully constructed answer. But it sits uneasily beside a separate report that El-Sayed's own campaign has confirmed he still follows Sharia law in his personal life. Voters can hold both facts at once: a candidate who says faith should never be imposed on others, and a candidate whose personal life is governed by a religious legal code that, in many of its traditional interpretations, restricts the very freedoms he listed. The tension is worth noting, even if El-Sayed's campaign chose not to address it when asked for comment.
Republican National Committee spokesperson Hunter Lovell did not mince words. In a statement to Breitbart News, Lovell said:
"Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed thinks he's the second coming of Jesus Christ, here to save America with an extreme socialist agenda. Jesus isn't a pawn for political games, and El-Sayed's radical terrorist-sympathizing ideology is an insult to millions of Christians."
Lovell's language was sharp, and the "terrorist-sympathizing" charge points to a broader pattern of controversy around El-Sayed's associations. He has refused to cut ties with streamer Hasan Piker, who previously claimed America "deserved 9/11." El-Sayed has campaigned alongside Piker despite that record.
A Fox News report cited an unnamed Senate counterterrorism expert who warned that El-Sayed's candidacy "raises homeland security concerns because of family ties to Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and connections to a Midwest voter-engagement organization" the expert said is tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The specifics of those alleged ties, which family members, which groups, which organization, remain unclear from available reporting.
El-Sayed has claimed publicly that he is "not a socialist," according to a post from the RNC Research account on X. But his platform includes Medicare for All, and his most prominent backers, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib, represent the democratic-socialist and progressive-left factions of the Democratic Party. When a candidate's endorsement list reads like a roster of the party's most left-wing members, the "not a socialist" denial starts to look like a label dodge rather than a policy distinction.
El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, a result that gave Republicans the general-election opponent many of them preferred. His candidacy has also drawn scrutiny over his personal finances, including questions about whether his own LLC appears to use a tax loophole he campaigns against.
Meanwhile, Jewish Democrats in Michigan have signaled defections that could undermine his general-election viability. His associations have compounded those concerns, including being photographed with Nation of Islam figures who have targeted Jews and defended Louis Farrakhan.
Candidates invoke faith all the time. That is not the issue. The issue is what El-Sayed is doing with it, and whether he would extend the same courtesy to a conservative Christian candidate who cited Scripture to justify, say, a traditional-marriage position or a pro-life vote. The progressive framework El-Sayed laid out on The Progressive Christians Podcast treats religion as a personal wellspring for leftist policy goals while insisting it must never "compel" anyone. That formulation works only in one direction. It blesses progressive activism as faith-driven service and treats conservative moral conviction as coercion.
Comparing yourself to Jesus is a bold move for any politician. Doing it while running on a platform shaped by Sanders-style economics, refusing to distance yourself from a figure who said America deserved the worst terrorist attack in its history, and facing unresolved questions about ties to Islamist-linked organizations is something else entirely.
Michigan voters can decide for themselves whether El-Sayed's faith is guiding his politics, or whether his politics are borrowing the authority of faith to avoid the scrutiny they deserve.
