Constitutional attorney Andrew Seidel points to Oklahoma as a prediction of what education would look like under Project 2025. Published at Religion Dispatches.
“Project 2025 is not some far off possibility for Oklahomans, it has been our reality for some time now,” the Rev. Dr. Shannon Fleck, the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Faith Network, told me as we discussed public education in Oklahoma. The state has become a testing ground for conservative policies and now ranks “as the 50th worst state” for public education. US News & World Report puts it at #49. That’s by design. That’s what it looks like when Project 2025 takes over public education. Project 2025 is Christian nationalism. If Project 2025 becomes a reality, your state will look like Oklahoma.
Oklahomans have been living under the rule of Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State superintendent of public instruction, since 2022. Throughout his tenure, he’s been abusing his power and using the machinery of the state to advance Christian nationalism in the public schools.
Walters worked to approve the nation’s first public religious school. Both the state and the school—St. Isidore, a virtual Catholic charter school—have been mired in litigation ever since, though the Oklahoma Supreme Court recently struck down this absurd overreach. Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (and, full disclosure, my organization), called the court’s decision “a win for church-state separation and religious freedom” at a recent event at the Mayflower Congregational UCC Church in Oklahoma City—including “for everyone here in Oklahoma who objected to their tax dollars funding a school that proposes to discriminate and indoctrinate.”
Walters appointed the hate monger who runs the notorious Libs of TikTok social media accounts to oversee school libraries, adding to the toxic anti-LGBTQ+ atmosphere he’s cultivated, which has almost certainly cost students their lives. After Louisiana was sued for requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments (by some of the same groups that sued Oklahoma for the religious public school), Walters, suffering from one of the worst cases of Christian nationalist FOMO I’ve ever seen, rushed to announce that, “effective immediately,” he would force “all Oklahoma schools … to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum.”
When not imposing his religious beliefs on other people’s children, Walters appears far more concerned with grabbing microphones and hopping in front of the nearest television camera than actually providing students with a quality education. His staunchest supporters are turning on him because he has simply failed to do his job, avoiding any meetings with teachers and administrators, and apparently barricading himself behind locked doors and armed guards. Walters is so extreme that 17 state legislators—all from his own party—have called for an investigation and possible impeachment.
Despite failing students, teachers, and schools, Walters has nevertheless tapped the state coffers to pay a Washington, DC-based media firm up to $5,000 a month to project a cartoonish image of a macho Christian culture warrior by writing his op-eds and speeches and booking him for media appearances.
