Greg Abbott Hired an Election Denier to Protect Texas Elections. He’s Using the Job to Attack Muslims.

Nate Schatzline, a Christian nationalist pastor who left his state House seat to work in the governor’s office, told a GOP group that “all Islam is radical” and described plans to “crack down” on it.

...the former Texas House member and 2020 election denier has already begun working to bring his hard-line Christian nationalist views into state policy.

Among his goals for the coming year: preventing mosques from serving as polling places; cracking down on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of casting votes on behalf of long-dead relatives; and working with Abbott and right-wing Texas House members to reclassify Islam as a political ideology—a move that the far right has long sought so that it can legally target Muslims without running afoul of religious-liberty protections. In the meantime, Schatzline suggested, mosques could be invalidated as polling places if they were provoked into discriminating against non-Muslims.

As for election issues, Schatzline said he was already assisting the Secretary of State’s ongoing cleanup of voter rolls and that he expects lawmakers will use the 2027 legislative session to drastically increase their ability to intervene in local elections. Neither Schatzline nor Abbott’s office agreed to interview requests for this story. Nor did the governor’s office respond to a list of questions from Texas Monthly.

The revelations come amid a major uptick in anti-Muslim bigotry that has been fomented by GOP leaders. In recent years, Republican lawmakers and officials have accused Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of the state population, of secretly moving to take over Texas and institute sharia—a wide-ranging set of Quranic legal and moral principles not dissimilar to those found in many other religious texts. Driven by these false claims, some Republican lawmakers have sought to ban Islam entirely. Bo French, the nominee for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, has argued that we must “round up” every Muslim. Mayes Middleton, the Republican nominee for attorney general, has claimed that sharia adherents don’t believe Christians “deserve the right to exist.” Ahead of the 2027 legislative session, far-right Texas House members have discussed how they might make life in America inhospitable for the Islamic community. And in June, at the Texas GOP’s convention, delegates openly celebrated the party’s lurch toward overt Islamophobia, pushing for Muslim Republicans to leave the party and branding Islam a “disease.”

Abbott has long courted financial and political support from Muslims and the South Asian community, but amid the party’s lurch to the far right, he has become a central figure in the sustained attacks on them. Last year he declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations—or CAIR, the Muslim civic group—a terrorist organization, a designation that has been used by far-right Republicans, including members of the State Board of Education, to publicly attack members of the group. He has tapped lesser-known government agencies such as the Texas Funeral Service Commission to investigate and legally harass Islamic groups and housing developers. And he has used the governorship as a bully pulpit against even minor accommodations for Muslims—this year, for instance, Abbott called for a federal investigation into “discriminatory” washing stations for Muslims at two Texas airports and threatened to withhold state grants from Grand Prairie after its public water park announced plans to host a private, Muslims-only gathering in celebration of Eid al-Adha.

The shift toward naked anti-Muslim bigotry has corresponded with the normalization in the GOP of Christian nationalism, which claims that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect a hard-line, conservative version of the faith. Schatzline in many ways represents the more extreme edges of that movement. For years he has been a leader at Mercy Culture Church, a fast-expanding, Fort Worth–based church network that often mobilizes congregants on behalf of political candidates. The church’s lead pastor has called critics “witches,” claimed COVID-19 vaccines were preparing people to receive the “mark of the beast,” and bragged that kindergartners at the church’s prep school had the lowest rate of measles vaccination in the state. While serving as a pastor at Mercy Culture, Schatzline spun off a tax-exempt nonprofit, For Liberty & Justice, that operates out of the church, trains political candidates, and claims there is no such thing as the separation of church and state. He is still involved with the nonprofit in a volunteer capacity, Abbott’s office told me earlier this year.

In 2022, with key funding from far-right oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, Schatzline was elected to represent Tarrant County in the Texas House. Over two terms, he pushed for numerous anti-LGBTQ bills, supported legislation in response to conspiracy theories about the theft of the 2020 presidential election, and quickly distinguished himself as perhaps the most zealous member of the Legislature’s right wing. “It’s not a political battle we’re in. We really believe this is a spiritual battle,” Schatzline told me on the first day of the 2025 legislative session. “We’re talking about spiritual forces. We’re not talking about flesh and blood. We’re talking about principalities.”

Last year he announced that he would not seek reelection to the Texas House. Instead, he said, he would depart for Washington for a senior role in “pastoral engagement” at the National Faith Advisory Board, the primary conduit between President Donald Trump and evangelical leaders who support him. Like Mercy Culture, NFAB has close ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose group of Pentecostal and independent charismatic leaders and self-described prophets who claim God has called them to control society to usher in the return of Jesus Christ. (NAR prophets were major figures in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement, mobilizing followers and providing theological justification for the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.)

Then, in July, Schatzline was suddenly announced as the new adviser to Abbott on election security, a position in which he makes $275,000 annually and is “responsible for providing policy and strategic direction related to legislative and electoral matters,” according to personnel records obtained by Texas Monthly. His résumé mentioned voting bills that he cosponsored as a legislator but otherwise contained little relevant experience.

In his September speech to the conservative activist group, he said he is playing a key role in an “interstate compact” to make people ineligible to cast ballots in Texas within seven days of registering to vote in another state. And, ahead of the 2027 legislative session, he said he is pushing for an expansion of Senate Bill 1933, which gives the Secretary of State administrative oversight over local elections if certain voting issues are reported. (The bill was passed in 2023 but only applies to Texas counties with more than 4 million people—a move that Schatzline said was a way of directly targeting Harris County without explicitly saying so.)

Schatzline’s speech only raised more questions about why, exactly, he is in his new role, according to Emily Eby French, a voting-rights expert with the progressive group Common Cause Texas. For instance, she said, the “interstate compact” described by Schatzline seems to mirror the role of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a bipartisan, multistate agreement that the state used to clean its voter rolls before Texas Republicans voted to pull out of it in 2023. (Schatzline acknowledged this in his speech but said ERIC was not reliable.) “There is nothing he said in here with respect to elections that I didn’t hear in 2014,” Eby French, who reviewed a transcript of Schatzline’s speech, said. “And I am having a hard time connecting the dots between the Islamophobia that seems to animate him and his job on election security.”

That may explain why he has been so focused on his religious agenda, she added.

Emails and schedules obtained by Texas Monthly through open-records requests show that in early August, just after he started in the new job, Schatzline began pursuing a new “faith initiative” that would be run out of the governor’s office. It’s unclear what that might entail—Abbott’s office did not respond to Texas Monthly’s question about the initiative or say whether the governor would commit to including Muslim voices in it. But in the emails, Schatzline mentioned “building faith coalitions” and “mobilizing the Church” and said that he had recently met with a representative from the “Florida Faith Office,” an initiative that was started by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and has expanded the role of religious organizations in the foster care system and other state social services.

While elevating religious interests within the governor’s office, Schatzline has continued to condemn Islam. In the speech to conservative activists, he repeatedly portrayed Muslims as a threat to American democracy and election security. Citing right-wing claims about widespread fraud allegedly committed by Somali-led day cares in Minnesota, Schatzline implied that Muslims were culturally predisposed to vote on behalf of dead relatives. “They can continue to vote for generations for people that are a hundred and twenty, a hundred and forty, a hundred and sixty years old,” he said. “My number one goal is to ensure that our Islamic communities cannot do that in the state of Texas.”

Schatzline said he would pursue legislation to prevent mosques from being polling places in the future. “This is a huge red flag for us, and it’s being investigated as we speak,” Schatzline said. “I didn’t even think to offer a bill like that last session, because I’d never thought about it. But that’s on the agenda for the next session.”

He also discussed a recent meeting between Abbott and leaders of the Texas House’s new “Sharia Free Caucus,” whose members have argued that they must overtly discriminate against Muslims. Their goal is to“peel out all of these little infestations of ideas that are contrary to our way of life,” according to Andy Hopper, a state representative who Schatzline said was at the meeting with Abbott. To that end, they have proposed banning the sale of halal food and forbidding women and girls from wearing hijabs in public schools. Schatzline did not detail what was discussed at the meeting, other than that it was about how to “crack down on Islam.” But he said Abbott was clearly on the caucus’s side. “The governor didn’t say no to any bill they had,” Schatzline said.“And [he] wants to support it at the top of his agenda for the next session. And so, absolutely, we’re working on it.”

Until then, he said, he is working on a more nuanced problem: how to craft policies that allow Muslims to be targeted without putting Christians at similar risk. “Anything we set into stone, they will turn around and use it against Christians as well,” he explained. “We want to do it in such a way that it doesn’t put our law enforcement in a difficult position, where they’re cracking down and are going to infringe on religious freedom [in ways] that can then be weaponized against believers and Christians.”

Soon after, an audience member chimed in: “[Islam] is a method of conquest,” he said.

“Yeah,” Schatzline replied. “Agreed
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