U.S. states don't have sharia law. But bills to ban it are still spiking.

I analyzed text from social media, TV news broadcasts, political ads, and state and federal legislation to track the spread of the right-wing anti-Sharia backlash in the US from its emergence in 2025 to the introduction of real legislation to ban the religious doctrine in state legislatures. This analysis found that, after initially emerging on social media and in other online discourse, lawmakers began introducing bills to make it illegal to apply sharia law in official government proceedings, despite scant evidence that such applications of sharia actually occurred.