“We will bring God back to schools and prayer back in schools in Oklahoma,” Ryan Walters told an audience at a Family Research Council meeting in September last year. The state’s superintendent for public instruction, Walters was appearing at a panel discussion titled “Strategies for Saving America’s Schools and School Children.” Less than 10 years earlier, it would have been hard to envision his transformation into today’s culture warrior. He had been a finalist for the state’s teacher-of-the-year award, a beloved U.S.-history and Advanced Placement world-history instructor in a public school, one who would tweet about his classroom assignments such as “Re-enacting the Debate on Indian Removal in 1824.” Now, at the F.R.C. panel, he called the constitutional separation of church and state a “myth” and a creation of the United States Supreme Court.
Walters told me that his views have been consistent, but he can pinpoint exactly when his advocacy intensified. At a training lunch less than a decade ago, he heard colleagues voicing discomfort with teaching the Declaration of Independence because Thomas Jefferson was an enslaver. Walters says he told them: “Guys, if you don’t understand that the Declaration of Independence changed the course of human events by acknowledging our rights come from God, and put our country on a new trajectory, and that it had an incredibly positive impact on human nature and humankind, I don’t know why you guys are teaching history. You guys have missed the boat because of an ideology.
Walters has since made such a name for himself trying to push what he considers America’s Judeo-Christian origins into the country’s schools that, despite characterizing Donald Trump as a “charlatan” on social media in 2016, he was floated this fall as a candidate to head the Department of Education in the second Trump administration. In the past year, he has added high-profile, out-of-state conservative figures to Oklahoma’s social-studies-standards executive committee, including Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU, an advocacy group that makes videos to advance “Judeo-Christian values”; and Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a principal architect of Project 2025. Walters also lobbied the State Legislature to fund the purchase of Bibles — favoring the Trump-endorsed “God Bless the U.S.A.” and “We the People” Bibles — for public-school classrooms.
Soon after taking office in January 2023, Walters created the Oklahoma Advisory Committee on Founding Principles. Records obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group that advocates transparency in government, show that his staff circulated a draft document titled “Putting God Back in the Classroom.” One priority the committee settled on to further that ambition could upend the laws and norms not just of Oklahoma but of American education itself: the establishment of the country’s first religious charter school.
In late 2021, Robert Franklin, then chairman of the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, received an unexpected letter from the archdiocese of Oklahoma City stating that it intended to create a virtual charter school. Such schools are independently run but publicly funded — and as a result, a religious charter school has never before been established. Franklin wrote back: “I have an absolute respect for the Catholic Church, but until a legal authority tells us differently, the Constitution” — he meant the state Constitution — “and the Oklahoma charter-school law would not allow us to do this.”
By the following year, however, the Republican state attorney general, John O’Connor, had rendered a conflicting opinion: that the relevant state laws were unconstitutional in this regard, and as a result the archdiocese ought to be able to proceed with its application. But after O’Connor lost his re-election bid in a primary, he was succeeded as attorney general by a fellow Republican, Gentner Drummond, who quickly reversed his predecessor’s guidance. O’Connor, he wrote, had misused “the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion.” He continued: “If allowed to remain in force, I fear the opinion will be used as a basis for taxpayer-funded religious schools.” Later, Drummond warned that this would be a slippery slope: “Tomorrow we may be forced to fund radical Muslim teachings like Shariah law.” Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, condemned Drummond’s conclusions and expressed his support for St. Isidore’s application.
In April 2023, despite the attorney general’s opposition to the school application, the five members of the virtual charter-school board gathered in the state’s capital to vote on whether they would take an official vote to authorize the country’s first religious charter school. Before the vote, public comment was invited. The Christian ministers who spoke all opposed the school’s approval. “This will obliterate the Establishment Clause,” one of them said, referring to the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion by the government.
Then Walters, the schools superintendent, addressed the board, on which he held a seat as a nonvoting member. “You’ve heard from some radical leftists,” he said. “Their hatred for the Catholic Church blinds them in doing what’s best for kids.” If the board members opposed the school, he said, they would be violating “our very foundational religious liberties.”
Many state educators would have recognized Walters’s words as threats, and threats he would keep. In his previous role as the state’s secretary of education — a largely ceremonial position appointed by the governor — he had already wielded his influence in the most powerful way: by pushing to downgrade the accreditation status of Oklahoma’s largest school district, Tulsa, after a teacher complained about required trainings that included a section on implicit bias. In Walters’s view, this was a violation of a state law that restricts the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.
The board agreed to move forward to an official vote on the virtual school, which would be named for St. Isidore of Seville, the proposed patron saint of the internet, and then gave its approval, 3 votes to 2. “Religious Liberty via School Choice,” Walters tweeted triumphantly. He hailed the vote as a “monumental decision” in a news release and said: “Now the U.S.’s first religious charter school will be welcomed by my administration.”
In October 2023, however, Drummond, the state attorney general, sued before the Oklahoma Supreme Court to stop the school from opening. In the intervening months, Walters tried three times to be recognized as a claimant on behalf of St. Isidore in the Oklahoma Supreme Court, only to be rejected by the court on every occasion. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, meanwhile, in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the Education Law Center and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed an amicus brief arguing against St. Isidore. It was joined by another amicus brief from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This June, just weeks before St. Isidore was scheduled to open its virtual doors to some 160 students across the state, the court ruled against it. “Under Oklahoma law,” Justice James Winchester wrote for the 6-to-2 majority, “a charter school is a public school.”
But if this ruling was a defeat, it was also an opportunity — to advance the fight to the United States Supreme Court. In October, attorneys from two private law firms and the Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic at Notre Dame Law School petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the archdiocese to reverse the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
The stakes are high, and they extend beyond both this one tiny online school and the state where it would operate. “Many contributors were pushing that agenda from afar,” Franklin told me. (The virtual charter-school board, which he led when St. Isidore’s creation was first announced, was folded into the Statewide Charter School Board in July.) Since Walters became state superintendent, his office has worked with right-leaning organizations willing to test, and perhaps even remove altogether, the boundaries between church and state in America’s public schools. It is why Franklin says he was convinced when someone told him: “This is not just your board’s decision.”
If the U.S. Supreme Court is ultimately where Oklahoma’s school fight is settled, it has also been an inspiration for the battle itself. The archdiocese found direction in three previous cases brought before the court when it was considering possible models for a new school, according to Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, a public-policy advocacy group. Farley rattled off the cases to me effortlessly.
In 2017, the court ruled in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer that excluding church-run school playgrounds from a grant program for playground resurfacing was unconstitutional. In 2020, the court found in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that Montana’s exclusion of religious schools from a state scholarship program was unconstitutional. “A State need not subsidize private education,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Two years later, in Carson v. Makin, Roberts again wrote the majority opinion, which held that Maine’s prohibition against using publicly funded tuition assistance for religious schools violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment: “A neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend the Establishment Clause.”
The Carson decision, Farley says, “poured gasoline on the fire of these questions we were already asking” — above all, the question of using tax revenue to support a parochial school, after the pandemic made clear to the archdiocese that there was an opening to serve even more students virtually. Despite relatively poor outcomes when compared with brick-and-mortar schools, Oklahoma’s percentage of students in virtual schools is five times the national average; Farley says that virtual instruction answers the question “What could we do for the kids in largely rural areas where there are not brick-and-mortar Catholic schools?” The Supreme Court seemed to offer an implicit invitation to challenge the Establishment Clause while also challenging Oklahoma’s Constitution and its charter-school law. Here was a chance for St. Isidore to be a test case, a “sort of pilot in Oklahoma,” Farley says.
An archdiocese employee reached out to Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at its Religious Liberty Clinic. The clinic’s director, John Meiser, told me that it has worked on behalf of “an immense array of faith traditions, including Buddhists, Christians, Indigenous groups, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs.” The clinic and Garnett also filed two amicus briefs in the Carson case.
It was, however, a paper Garnett wrote in December 2020 for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, that, she told me, prompted “everybody to start calling me,” including the Oklahoma City archdiocese. Her paper, titled “Religious Charter Schools: Legally Permissible? Constitutionally Required?” noted that so long as religious charter schools are prohibited in every state with a charter-school law, “no amount of expert opinion will change that fact.” Change would need to be pursued on three tracks: legislative, executive and legal.
Though the first two were preferable, everything ends up in litigation anyway, she noted, and once there, she wrote, the path taken is overwhelmingly likely to be a challenge, on Free Exercise grounds, to “laws requiring charter schools to be secular.” The argument is that a school like St. Isidore is not a government school but a private school with a government contract to educate students.
Garnett emphasized to me that the court’s holding in this case, should the U.S. Supreme Court take it up, would be confined to Oklahoma. But to Rachel Laser, the president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the effects would be seismic. “You can be sure that there will be more St. Isidores, fully funded religious public schools that will attempt to open all across this country,” she told me. “And what is at stake is public education, religious freedom and our democracy.”
Laser believes St. Isidore could be the most dangerous part of an ongoing multipronged strategy to breach the wall between church and state. First, she argues, there has already been widespread shifting of public funds from public schools to private Christian schools through voucher programs, which in more than half the states allow parents to use the state’s tax dollars to subsidize their children’s education at private schools. While there’s no direct coordination between all the efforts to promote Christianity in public schools, she points to several states as examples of just how widespread these attempts are. Texas, Florida and Louisiana have enacted laws that allow schools to replace school counselors with chaplains. (The National School Chaplain Association started up in September 2022 with an endorsement video from Governor Stitt of Oklahoma.) “We’ve got laws in Idaho and Kentucky,” Laser continues, “that would make it easier for coaches and teachers to pray with students. We’ve got a West Virginia law that’s paving the way for those schools to teach intelligent-design creationism.”
Garnett, at Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Clinic, said it is wrong to conflate such disparate objectives. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of St. Isidore, she argues, the remit of the court should be narrow: “If it’s a government school, it can’t be Catholic.” She added: “Under the original understanding of the Constitution, it couldn’t be Catholic, couldn’t be Muslim, couldn’t be Jewish, couldn’t be Hindu, because that would be establishing a religion.”
Laser regards this sort of argument — that a Supreme Court decision in favor of St. Isidore won’t lead to the destruction of the Establishment Clause — as “gaslighting by religious extremists.” As a matter of law, she reminds me, “in Oklahoma, by statute, charter schools are public schools.”
The debate that they are having can become confusing. But put most simply, Laser believes that a charter school — which in a state like Oklahoma may be authorized by a nonprofit — is a public school because its funding comes from the government, and it is subject to the oversight of local and statewide government entities. Garnett contends that a charter school isn’t a government school; it is a nonprofit itself that receives permission and funding. Preventing St. Isidore from operating, according to Garnett, would be a violation of the Free Exercise clause — that is, discrimination on the basis of religion.
Walters, as schools superintendent, is not interested in a legal debate over what is or is not a government school. He wants the country to get back to what he sees as its founding principles, which he believes prioritized religious expression in public life. The 1960s, he says, were when America lost its way, starting with the 1962 decision in Engel v. Vitale, in which the Supreme Court ruled that prayer in schools violated the Establishment Clause. Then, he says, the government’s role in education grew bigger. With the result, he told me, that “schools function more like state-sponsored atheist centers.”
Now that he has control over Oklahoma’s schools, Walters has made it a goal to shrink the state’s management of education. An atrophied Department of Education makes it much easier to support religious, especially church-run, schooling as a way to supply needed services. Seen this way, there is a moral imperative to disempowering a godless state and an education system that has become too large. “We don’t need 500 people at the Department of Education,” Walters told me. “So I decided to go in and try to remove over 100 employees.”
Over a five-year period ending in 2023, Oklahoma’s education department received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants. But under Walters’s leadership, according to one former state employee, who requested anonymity because they feared retaliation, “Nothing’s happening. Not only is nothing happening, but the grants that we had, they’ve let them lapse.”
This summer, the U.S. Department of Education issued a 98-page report that criticized Walters’s handling of federal grants. The State Legislature found that Walters had let $1.4 million worth of federal grants sit unused. Drummond, the state’s attorney general, has reprimanded Walters for not properly distributing some $50 million of state funding dedicated to critical services like school security.
The former state employee says they were told by someone in Walters’s office that it wouldn’t be funding anything that had to do with L.G.B.T.Q. issues, or with diversity, social-emotional learning or trauma-informed care. “Nothing could get approved” under Walters, this person says. Instead, they complain, Walters was “gallivanting all over the country — you know, spouting about wokeness.”
Walters has indeed been connecting with those making broader efforts at a national level. According to records obtained by American Oversight, he was invited last year to serve on the Heritage Foundation Advisory Council on Education Reform. “If we are going to save America — which Heritage fully intends to do — we must save our institutions of education,” Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president, wrote to Walters.
Walters shared some of his experiences in Oklahoma with his counterparts from other states at a Heritage gathering. He had, for example, asked right-wing groups, including the Oklahoma chapters of Moms for Liberty, to submit names to serve on committees responsible for standards on textbooks and teaching. At the keynote panel for the group’s Joyful Warriors National Summit, in 2023, he spoke of their shared existential fight: “The forces that you all are fighting — these are folks that want to destroy our society. They want to destroy your family, and they want to destroy America as we know it.”
On Nov. 7, as Walters’s name gained prominence among possible Trump appointees to be education secretary, he published a memo titled “Regarding the Elimination of U.S. Department of Education.” It included talking points about why the department should be abolished. A week later, after it had become clear that he was unlikely to get the State Legislature’s approval to spend millions on “Trump Bibles,” Walters used money from his own budget to pay for 532 of them, to be placed in A.P. government classrooms.
Around the same time, Walters announced the creation of an Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, which “paves the way to align Oklahoma education priorities with the Trump administration.” Though details were scant, he emphasized in a news release that this office would “also oversee the investigation of abuses to individual religious freedom or displays of patriotism.” As the blitz of nominees emerged from Trump’s transition team, Walters drew the bemusement and scorn of his opponents and fellow conservatives alike when he recorded a prayer for Trump — which he required to be shown in Oklahoma’s schools. The pushback to Walters’s recorded prayer and Bible mandates even included political confederates like Markwayne Mullin, a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma.
As early as this month, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear the St. Isidore case. In the meantime, though the education-secretary nomination did not go to Walters, his crusading zeal is unlikely to flag. Recently, when a Republican legislator led more than two dozen colleagues in a short-lived effort to look into whether Walters’s withholding of funds from school districts amounted to impeachable offenses, Walters took them on, holding a news conference on their turf, at the state capitol building. “Let’s start the impeachment proceedings,” he said. “I will never apologize for ending woke-indoctrination in our schools. I will never apologize for bringing the Bible back to the classroom.”
Caleb Gayle is a contributing writer and a professor at Northeastern University. He grew up in Oklahoma and has written extensively about the state. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State.” Javier Jaén is an illustrator and designer based in Barcelona known for his translation of complex ideas into simple images, often with a playful tone.
The post Could This Tiny School Break Down the Wall Between Church and State? appeared first on New York Times.
