A quarter of American voters aged 18 to 35 say they would support a community adopting Sharia law as its governing legal code if the majority of residents there wanted it, according to a set of surveys released this week by Our Republic and Rasmussen Reports. The finding is the most striking among a collection of results that suggest younger Americans hold markedly more favorable views of Islamist governance than their older counterparts — an attitude one of the poll’s architects attributes to how young people are taught to view marginalized groups.
According to the Our Republic poll, 21 percent of likely voters overall said they hold a mostly or somewhat positive opinion of sharia, compared with 57 percent who view it negatively. But the numbers shift sharply by age. Positive views were far higher among younger respondents — 43 percent of voters ages 18–24 and 39 percent of those ages 25–29 reported a favorable impression of the system, roughly double the national figure.
Justin Haskins, president of Our Republic, told The Federalist that the results reflect a generation raised with less grounding in the Constitution and the protections it provides. “Too many have been taught to see constitutional limits as obstacles to progress, especially when those limits stand in the way of policies they believe would help groups they view as oppressed,” Haskins said.
A Sympathy Gap, Not a Theology Gap
Haskins argued that the dynamic is less about religious commitment than about a reflex to side with groups perceived as marginalized. Because Muslims are widely viewed by young people as an oppressed group, he said, many default to a sympathetic stance on policies associated with Islam without seriously weighing whether those policies are compatible with constitutionally protected freedoms. “The irony is that, in doing so, they may be undermining the very rights they claim to care about,” he said.
He was careful not to characterize young respondents as committed Islamists, nor to suggest they see sharia primarily as an extension of religious liberty. Instead, he pointed to what he called an oppressor-versus-oppressed framework — one he associates with Critical Theory — in which “groups perceived as marginalized are often treated sympathetically without much scrutiny of what those groups or their belief systems actually teach.”
That distinction matters to Haskins because sharia, as he described it, is not a narrow devotional practice but “a comprehensive religious and legal system.” U.S. Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, who has partnered with Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, on the Sharia-Free America Caucus, has argued that the system is “incompatible with the Constitution,” chiefly because it would establish “a parallel legal system” that overrides the single standard applying to all citizens. Sharia, Self has noted, differentiates between Muslims and non-Muslims, men and women, and believers and dissenters — distinctions that conflict with American guarantees of freedom and equality under one constitutional standard.
Israel Question Draws Similar Age Divide
The same set of polls turned up another generational split on a related question. Forty-six percent of voters ages 18–24 and 60 percent of those ages 25–29 said they would support a proposal to “completely dismantle Israel and replace it with a Palestinian-led nation in exchange for ending the war with Iran and providing the United States with lower oil and gas prices,” according to the survey results.
Taken together, the findings indicate a cohort of young voters willing to trade away legal protections and longstanding alliances in exchange for outcomes framed as correcting historic wrongs.
France as a Cautionary Case
The Federalist, which obtained and reported on the polling, situates the results against the unrest that has gripped France in recent days. Student protesters there have clashed with police, set fires, and posed for selfies beside burning trash bins, school buildings, and police barricades — demonstrations ostensibly sparked by failing schools and budget cuts. But the presence of Palestinian and Communist flags at the now-nationwide protests has led commentators to describe something more organized: what the Center for Renewing America calls a Red-Green Alliance, an alignment of “two seemingly conflicting ideologies — Marxism and Islamism — bound together by a common mission to tear down the traditional American way of life.”
The Federalist also pointed to State Department figures showing refugee admissions from 45 majority-Muslim countries stood at 21,096 in December 2024, President Joe Biden’s final month in office, and raised the question of whether support for sharia could be imported alongside immigration from Muslim-majority nations in the same way it has grown in parts of France.
The Our Republic polling data does not, on its own, establish that young Americans are poised to embrace radical Islam. Haskins himself said he is optimistic that is not the case. But the numbers do suggest that a growing share of young voters approach questions of religious law, national sovereignty, and individual rights through a lens that prioritizes redress for perceived oppression over the constitutional architecture that guarantees those rights to everyone — including the dissenters and minorities such systems would expose to unequal treatment.
Whether that shift is corrected, Haskins and Self argue, will depend partly on legislators who are already drafting responses such as the Sharia-Free America Caucus. But both the polling and the French example point to a deeper front: the classrooms where, as The Federalist put it, Americans’ children are learning how to weigh the Constitution against the causes they are taught to care about.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/10/06/poll-4-in-10-young-americans-support-sharia-law/