When Christian nationalist Ryan Walters chaired his final Oklahoma Board of Education meeting on September 24, 2025, he offered no farewell, no explanation, and brushed past reporters who’d come to hear him explain himself to constituents who had elected him with 56 percent of the vote.
The same day, Walters appeared on Fox News to announce his resignation and tout his next mission. “We’re going to destroy the teachers’ unions,” he said. “This fight’s going national.”
The 40-year-old former history teacher from McAlester left behind a disastrous state education system ranked 50th in the nation. But by his own measure, Walters had accomplished precisely what he came to do: transform Oklahoma’s public schools into a proving ground for Christian nationalism where government and public institutions should enforce Christian values and biblical teachings.
His tenure was marked by apocalyptic rhetoric and aggressive politics: mandatory Bibles in classrooms, prayers for Trump broadcast on state channels, and rewriting American history through a biblical lens.
“Putting God Back in the Classroom”
Three months into his term, Walters established the Oklahoma Advisory Committee on Founding Principles with an explicit mandate to align school curriculum with Christian ideology.
American Oversight obtained records through public records litigation. Among them: a draft document circulated by Walters’ staff in October 2023 titled “Putting God Back in the Classroom.” The document celebrated new rules limiting discussions of sexuality and gender, and Oklahoma’s partnership with PragerU, a far-right media organization that produces educational videos downplaying slavery.
Governor Kevin Stitt approved regulations allowing prayer in schools and adding acknowledgment of a “Creator” to the state Education Department’s official “foundational values.”
The committee proposed creating the nation’s first religious public charter school funded with taxpayer dollars. Oklahoma’s Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School in 2023. The state Supreme Court struck it down in 2024. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling with a 4-4 split earlier this year.
On November 12, 2024, Walters announced the creation of the Office of Religious Freedom and Patriotism to probe “abuses” of religious or patriotic expression. He then led a prayer for Donald Trump.
Days before his resignation, Walters announced plans to establish Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapters in each of Oklahoma’s 451 public high schools, conceived after the assassination of TPUSA co-founder, Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk.
The Project 2025 Connection
In 2023, Walters hired a public relations firm at $200 per hour to boost his national profile. The firm was run by Mary Vought, wife of Russell Vought, White House budget director and key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for reshaping the federal government along conservative Christian and authoritarian lines.
Records show Walters maintained frequent contact with Heritage Foundation officials, including Lindsey Burke, lead author of Project 2025’s education chapter. The Heritage Foundation invited Walters to serve on its Advisory Council on Education Reform.
Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Department of Education entirely. It proposes revoking the National Education Association’s century-old charter, arguing “the union promotes radical racial and gender ideologies in schools.” The document claims that K-12 and higher education unions “have leveraged the agency to continuously expand federal expenditures.” Walters championed both goals publicly.
His alliances revealed the movement’s edge. After unsuccessfully courting podcast host Joe Rogan, Walters appointed Chaya Raichik, creator of the anti-LGBTQ+ account LibsofTikTok, to the state’s Library Media Advisory Committee, giving her power to decide what children could read.
Walters called teachers’ unions a “terrorist organization” and later intimated they were responsible for a New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans.
The Trump Bible Mandate
In June 2024, Walters issued the order that would define his legacy: Every Oklahoma school district must place a Bible in every fifth through twelfth-grade classroom and adopt a curriculum teaching the Bible, effective immediately.
Five organizations filed suit on behalf of 32 Oklahoma teachers, families, and religious leaders.
“Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools,” said Megan Lambert, ACLU Oklahoma’s legal director. “The Constitution does not permit misguided politicians to undermine our religious freedom in exchange for political clout.”
In October 2024, Walters issued a request for 55,000 Bibles with precise specifications: must include the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
One Bible met those specifications: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA Bible, sold for $60. Trump receives a portion of each sale.
Records show Oklahoma officials wrote that the RFP was “drafted narrowly and in a way that potentially restricts competition.” Following backlash, the state canceled the request on Election Day without explanation.
Despite ongoing legal battles, Walters placed the order. Teachers received the Trump Bibles shortly before he resigned.
Aaron Baker, a history teacher in Oklahoma City, discovered the Constitution was 160 years out of date, missing Amendments 11 through 27.
The version included the three-fifths compromise — a provision that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. It omitted the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth guaranteeing equal protection, the Fifteenth prohibiting denial of voting rights based on race, and the Nineteenth granting women the right to vote. Also missing: the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment banning poll taxes used to prevent Black Americans from voting.
The publisher explained it chose to “only include the original Founding Fathers’ documents, as Amendments 11-27 were added at later dates.”
“The Constitution is a living document,” Baker said. “It is something that has grown and changed over the years, and the way we teach it, and the way we present it, must reflect that reality. It was created to be changed.”
The defective Bibles represented the version of America that many Christian nationalists want to restore — one where white supremacy was acknowledged, women had fewer rights and couldn’t vote, and equal protection under the law didn’t exist. This isn’t education — it’s historical revisionism in service of white Christian supremacy.
Enforcing Trump’s Agenda
After Trump’s November 2024 victory, Walters moved quickly. He created a plan to collect children’s immigration statuses at school registration. He introduced curriculum standards requiring high school students to be taught that Trump won the 2020 election and that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab. Americans United and Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice filed suit.
He recorded a video of himself praying for Trump and emailed school districts, requiring them to show it to students. Several districts refused.
Oklahoma partnered with PragerU, which produces videos that reframe American history. One cartoon shows Christopher Columbus justifying slavery: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed.”
The partnership produced a test Walters said would weed out “woke” teachers from California and New York. Oklahoma Voice editor Janelle Stecklein discovered it was impossible to fail. “You can get every answer wrong and still receive a ‘Certificate of Completion,'” she wrote. To take it, applicants must provide PragerU with their personal information and agree to let PragerU “view, monitor, and record” their activity.
The Record
While Walters cultivated his national profile, Oklahoma’s education system collapsed. Test scores and reading proficiency reached “historic lows,” and in August, he eliminated statewide testing.
“Gov. Stitt used to say he would make us Top Ten, but after seven years we are ranked 50th in education,” said Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond.
Walters’ job performance was controversial from the get-go. In 2023, he emailed state legislators pornography, claiming without evidence that it showed what was in schools. On February 8, 2024, sixteen-year-old Nex Benedict died one day after being bullied and beaten in an Owasso High School bathroom. Walters accused LGBTQ+ advocacy groups of exploiting ‘a child’s death’ for political gain.
Drummond warned Walters about “alarming” failures to respond to public records requests and launched investigations into potential violations of the Open Meeting Act. Drummond called for a financial audit of Walters’ tenure on October 1, 2025.
The Holy War Goes National
On October 1, 2025, his first day out of office, Walters spoke at the Original Constitutional Principles Affecting Culture Foundation (OCPAC) just across the street from the Oliver Hodge Building, which houses the Oklahoma State Department of Education. OCPAC promotes meshing faith and politics.
The crowd gave him two standing ovations. He attacked journalists present: “Guys, they hate you. They hate you. They lie to you. They gaslight you.”
Walters is now CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an anti-union organization that boasts 2,800 members, founded by the Freedom Foundation and funded by billionaires Charles Koch, Lynne and Harry Bradley, Adolph Coors, Ed Uihlein, and Daniel Searle.
“We as conservatives want certain things — we want education reform and we want pension reform and we want less taxes and we want smaller government, and you’re never going to get those things with unions in the way,” Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe said in 2014.
In four months, the Teacher Freedom Alliance led more than 20,000 teachers nationwide to opt out of their unions.
Bob Linn, OCPAC’s president, told the crowd he believed Walters’ “anointed role” is “to eviscerate the teachers’ unions” in the United States.
Walters leaves behind children taught from Bibles with defective Constitutions, a curriculum mandating lies about elections, more than 20 lawsuits, a state education system ranked last, and a teacher shortage.
“At every turn, Walters attempted to instill Christian nationalism and false information into the classroom,” said Mitch Randall, a Baptist pastor and plaintiff in the lawsuit against Walters.
Oklahoma was the laboratory. On his first day in his new role, standing before his union-busting Christian nationalist supporters, Walters made clear what comes next:
“I will destroy that teachers’ union. President Trump is going to destroy the Department of Education. And you destroy the teachers’ union, folks, you have taken out the two biggest weapons against parents and American exceptionalism in the classroom.”
