When and how was the U.S. law barring Muslims from office challenged or overturned?
Executive summary
There never was a federal statute that explicitly barred Muslims from holding public office in the United States; the viral claim tying that fiction to the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act is a debunked misreading of immigration law and of later congressional activity (FactCheck.org; PolitiFact; Snopes) [1] [2] [3]. Separate legal fights over travel restrictions on citizens of majority-Muslim countries — the so‑called “Muslim ban” — were litigated and partially struck down in courts, but those cases addressed immigration and executive authority, not an outright ban on Muslims holding office (Brennan Center; ACLU; Wikipedia) [4] [5] [6].
1. The claim and its origin: a McCarthy‑era immigration law misread as a religious bar
The persistent story misstates the McCarran‑Walter Act (Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952) as a law “banning Muslims from holding public office,” yet the statute codified immigration policy, controlled admissions and naturalization, and did not impose religious qualifications for officeholders — it contains no text barring Muslims from office and such a ban would conflict with the Constitution’s protections (FactCheck.org; PolitiFact; Snopes; FactCheck.org) [1] [2] [3] [7].
2. Congress did repeal a provision, but it wasn’t a repeal of a “ban on Muslims”
What Congress did vote on years later was the repeal of an ideological‑exclusion provision tied to admitting foreigners — a McCarthy‑era tool that could bar entry to aliens for political beliefs — not a clause disqualifying American Muslims from elected office; fact‑checkers and historical summaries make clear the 1990 congressional action removed a visitor/ideological exclusion, not an explicit religious test for public office (Snopes; LawShun; PolitiFact) [3] [8] [9].
3. Why the myth spread: civic ignorance, partisan incentives and social media mechanics
The myth circulated widely after the election of Muslim members of Congress and resurfaced around controversies over immigration policy, amplified by social posts claiming a “quiet repeal” in 1990; fact‑checking organizations trace the story to misinterpretation and amplification rather than to a discrete legal overturning of a religious ban (Texas Standard; FactCheck.org; PolitiFact) [10] [7] [2].
4. Separate but related litigation: the Trump “Muslim Ban” cases
Legal challenges to President Trump’s travel restrictions targeted executive orders that barred or limited entry from several predominantly Muslim countries; those challenges argued the orders were motivated by religious animus and breached immigration law and constitutional protections, producing a patchwork of rulings — some courts blocked early iterations, and the Supreme Court in 2018 upheld the administration’s third version 5–4 while lower courts continued to find violations in other contexts (Brennan Center; Wikipedia; ACLU) [4] [6] [5].
5. Constitutional backdrop and legal reality: no legal religious test for office
The U.S. Constitution disallows religious tests for federal office and guarantees freedom of religion, meaning any statutory or administrative attempt to bar people from office on the basis of faith would face immediate constitutional challenge; fact‑check reporting underscores that a nationwide ban on Muslims serving in government would be both unsupported by the McCarran‑Walter text and unconstitutional under longstanding doctrine (FactCheck.org; FactCheck.org) [7] [1].
6. Competing narratives and political uses of the myth
Advocates for immigration reform and civil‑rights groups emphasize that the myth distracts from real, litigated harms of discriminatory immigration policies, while some political actors weaponize the claim to delegitimize Muslim officeholders or to inflame distrust of the courts; fact‑checkers and civil‑liberties groups have explicit agendas — accuracy and protection of rights respectively — which explains their focused rebuttals of the false “Muslim‑ban‑from‑office” story (PolitiFact; Brennan Center; Oxfam) [2] [4] [11].
Conclusion: what was challenged or overturned, and when
In short, there was no U.S. law barring Muslims from holding public office to be overturned; the closest legislative act was Congress’s 1990 repeal of an ideological exclusion provision of the McCarran‑Walter framework that pertained to foreign visitors, not the qualification of American officeholders, and the larger public legal battles involving anti‑Muslim policy related to travel bans were litigated in federal courts throughout 2017–2018 and thereafter (Snopes; LawShun; Brennan Center; ACLU) [3] [8] [4] [5].