The obscure documentary fueling Islamophobia in Texas
· Vox
The Great American Conflict, a 75-minute documentary produced by a Texas-based organization dedicated to converting Iran to Christianity, declares its goal right at the beginning: “to reveal the true Islam to all people, especially in the West,” Iran Alive Ministries’s founder Hormoz Shariat says. “This film is also meant to be a warning to America. There is a serious threat of Islam in our nation.”
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Released at the start of summer and having premiered at a gathering of the Dallas County Republican Party, it’s an obscure film — you’ve probably never heard of it — but it has so far had a surprising political influence. It’s been shown at gatherings of local Republicans and conservative activists in Texas, where Islamophobic rhetoric and policy proposals have played a key role in activating the Republican base, candidates, and party leaders over the course of this year’s elections. The documentary is both a symptom and a cause of a larger trend unfolding in American politics in 2026 that is picking up steam now: the rise of a new iteration of blatant Islamophobia paired with Christian nationalist sentiment on the American right.
Iran Alive Ministries did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s no surprise who some of the backers and voices of this documentary are: Some members of this collection of right-wing, conservative, and evangelical activists are a throwback to early-2000s and 2010s Islamophobia, when some of the same figures spoke out against “radical Islamism” and “radical Islamic terror.” One of them, for instance, is the activist Brigitte Gabriel, the controversial founder of ACT for America, an early-2000s anti-Islamic extremism group. As the film makes clear, this latest version of Islamophobia in America has its roots in this post-9/11 era and borrows heavily from it, while making some modern-day tweaks.
What’s different now is how mainstream this stance is becoming in politics and how it appears to be getting only more mainstream.
“Islamophobia has passed the dinner table test. You can say things about Muslims with basic impunity today,” Nathan Lean, a researcher, assistant professor at North Carolina State University and author of the book The Islamophobia Industry, told me. “And it’s institutionalized in the way that prejudice that targets other marginalized communities is not.” He pointed to the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress, which is composed of 68 elected members of Congress representing 25 states. He also pointed to efforts in Texas to make eliminating “sharia” law an official stance of the Texas GOP, and then the subsequent vote to recommend Gov. Greg Abbott “ban” it on the Texas 2026 primary ballot.
Now, politicians, content creators, and politically connected advocacy groups are using films like The Great American Conflict, selectively edited clips spread on social media, and investigative-style pseudo-documentaries to spread this sentiment further and wider, power more wins of right-wing candidates, and take aim in particular at Muslim candidates and politicians.
This is all playing out as antisemitism and Islamophobia are peaking during the 2026 midterm cycle, accelerated by demographic change across America, increased Muslim visibility and engagement in politics, including elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the Senate campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and more Republican politicians feeling comfortable using Islam as a scapegoat and cudgel, particularly in Texas. It all paints a worrying picture of what’s to come.
What The Great American Conflict argues is coming
As a cinematic project, The Great American Conflict isn’t much of an accomplishment; it can broadly be described as a collection of testimonials from evangelical Christians and former Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity who each make a case against Islam. Though poorly organized, it starts with some rough accounting of the rise of Islam in world history, lays out the case through interviews that Islam is an ideology and not a religion, then zooms in on specific Texan communities and examples of how Muslim politicians and activists are using democratic processes to achieve “domination.”
There are broadly three core themes that these speakers come back to:
- Islam is inherently violent and imperialistic: the documentary’s interview subjects argue that true believers seek to expand the faith and establish a cross-national Islamic state. They rely on some sketchy history of the prophet Muhammed and the contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran as examples of this “violence.”
- Islam is incompatible with the American Constitution and Western liberalism: speakers also argue that, as opposed to other religions, Islam does not tolerate diversity of thought and seeks to enforce its rules and guidelines on nonbelievers. They claim that Islam rejects the separation between church and state, and that mosques can function as political or military centers.
- There is an ongoing effort by Muslims to infiltrate American politics and replace “Judeo-Christian” America: the rise of Muslim American politicians in Congress, in New York City, and at the state and local government level are all part of an effort to whittle away religious liberty and replace American values with “Islamic” values. Liberal and progressive allies are enabling this takeover. And they interpret public calls to prayer, halal food, school prayer rooms, Ramadan accommodations, mosque construction, and Muslim residential developments as evidence that American institutions are yielding to Islamic demands.
Interspersed throughout these testimonials are fear-mongering compilations of social media clips of Muslim prayers and veiled women, and short selections of purportedly Muslim speakers making inflammatory comments about 9/11, about Jews and Christians, and about Islamic domination in the West, and violent clips of terrorist actions abroad.
And though the film’s main backer, Hormoz Shariat, says at the beginning of the film that his goal is not to inspire fear or hate, that’s precisely what the speakers seem to do for an hour.
For example, the Christian pastor Shahram Hadian, the founder of Truth in Love Ministry in Tennessee, repeatedly argues that America is at a turning point. “Western societies are right now at a critical decision point. Either they’re going to maintain, preserve, [and] fight for their Judeo-Christian values, or they’re succumbing,” he says.
And he takes a natalist turn, arguing that Muslims in the US are happy to continue to raise families as Western birth rates drop. “We continue to see the demise of Christianity, of our Judeo-Christian values, family values, family ethics, marriage — one man, one woman,” he says. “They’re just waiting us out. They’ll just wait us out. They’ll aid us in our own demise and destruction.”
To drill down on this, various speakers point to demographic change in Michigan and Texas as early signs of what they see as the capitulation of the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Islam. They point to self-segregating Muslim communities in Europe being mirrored in the US, particularly focusing on a housing development project in East Plano, Texas, centered around a mosque and Islamic center, that has been a focal point for Republican politicians.
Other speakers argue against accepting Islam as a religion at all, instead casting it as a political ideology that is seeking to take over American institutions. Some, like Gabriel, allege a coordinated strategy to “infiltrate” and “dominate the West and establish an Islamic government,” tracing this back to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a supposed decades-long plan to infiltrate political parties, schools, media, and churches to use democratic institutions to establish Islamic law. She points to Mamdani as an example of this, and ropes in Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as being loyal to a foreign Islamic identity rather than to the United States.
And they contrast this all with an idealized “Judeo-Christian” America defined by constitutional government, traditional marriage, Christianity, and cultural assimilation. The final call to arms is to preserve and promote this Christian vision of America, on top of defending the Constitution, religious liberty, and “American” culture against what is a coming ideological and demographic conflict.
The danger of rising Islamophobia
Iran Alive Ministries itself doesn’t seem primarily dedicated to anti-Muslim American advocacy and activism. Most of its YouTube and internet presence is focused on digital Christian evangelism, particularly in Iran. It’s not entirely hard to see how a group focused on conversions would drift into Islamophobic preaching, but it does seem like a peculiar move, Lean told me.
“There is a group of people who form a faction of this sort of anti-Muslim movement in the United States who are, by their own description, evangelical Christians,” Lean said. “And it’s no surprise that a group like Iran Alive Ministries, that is formed on the basis of, as they say, transforming Iran into a Christian nation, one soul at a time, would go there.”
Emphasizing that Christian proselytism and evangelism are not inherently Islamophobic, Lean told me that there has been a more overt merging of religious convictions with Republican politics in recent years.
“The…driving mission of the group leads to a marriage of, we want a Christian world on the one hand, versus there are active agents in the world that are potentially preventing that. And who represents that biggest threat to that right now? Well, in the eyes of these people, Muslims do,” Lean said.
Lean told me that he expects to see this momentum build as midterms approach. At the local level, it’s most visible in Texas, where the New York Times recently reported on the stunning rise in Islamophobia and fear-mongering across the state, and in Michigan, where cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck have seen white nationalist and anti-Islam demonstrations.
Lean said many of these lines of Islamophobic thinking sound like familiar tropes, smears, and lies of the last couple of waves of fear-mongering around Muslims. Still, as opposed to the post-9/11 era, he noted a worrying difference: the scale of Islamophobia, given its increasing presence on both social and traditional media.
Much of the growth of these sentiments is happening online, too. Since Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York, and especially since El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, these kinds of views have surged online and in conservative media, while conservative activists and influencers have been pushing similar narratives of infiltration and under-the-radar Muslim “encroachment.”
A recent survey of internet discourse and activity by the research group Magnitude Media found something similar, centered around Dearborn, Michigan: “Since the beginning of the month, there have been 690 posts mentioning Dearborn, generating 5.1 million engagements. Right-leaning accounts drove 88% of that engagement, compared to just 7% from left-leaning accounts,” the authors write. “The broader anti-Muslim conversation online has been substantial for months. Over the past six months, 68% of posts that either mentioned Islamophobia or contained common Islamophobic language came from right-leaning accounts. Dearborn appears less like the cause of a new Islamophobia conversation than the right’s newest focal point.”
So the documentary certainly isn’t the only cause for concern — but the fact that Texas Republicans have used it in official events, on top of strategists saying they are pivoting to “sharia” and fear-mongering, suggests just how politically useful the party thinks these messages can be.
Which all suggests more ugliness to come. And as Lean told me, talking about a coming conflict and a threat to survival indicates an existential threat that should be fought by any means.
“Where does the logic of all of this take us? What’s the solution?” he said. “You can’t help but wonder when they’re issuing statements about fertility rates and these overtures are being kind of taken over, that this could very easily go to a dark place.”