On Sunday, Republican presidential candidate and senator Ted Cruz said that Muslim refugees from Syria should not be permitted to enter the United States. Christian refugees, however, are okay, he argued, because there is “no meaningful risk” that Christians will commit terrorist acts.

“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror. If there were a group of radical Christians pledging to murder anyone who had a different religious view than they, we would have a different national security situation,” Cruz told reporters, according to the Washington Post. “But it is precisely the Obama administration’s unwillingness to recognize that or ask those questions that makes them so unable to fight this enemy. Because they pretend as if there is no religious aspect to this.”

In July, former Tennessee congressional candidate, and Christian minister Robert Doggart was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly plotting to burn down a mosque in upstate New York. “We will be cruel to them. And we will burn down their buildings [Referring to their mosque and school.]...and if anybody attempts to harm us in any way...we will take them down,” Doggart, recorded over wiretap, told Texas and South Carolina militia members, according to the Daily Beast.

“Our small group will soon be faced with the fight of our lives. We will offer those lives as collateral to prove our commitment to our God,” he wrote on social media. “We shall be Warriors who inflict horrible numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace.”

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report—later withdrawn by Secretary Janet Napolitano under pressure from conservatives in Congress—on “Rightwing Extremism.” After Anders Behring Breivik, reportedly influenced by right-wing American bloggers, slaughtered 77 people in Oslo and dedicated a 1,500-page manifesto to warning of the threat of Islam, the report’s primary author, Daryl Johnson, told the New York Times that the Hutaree, an extremist Christian militia in Michigan, possessed more weapons than all of the Muslim terrorists charged in the United States since the 9/11 attacks combined.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.