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Ryan Walters bowed his head in prayer at his desk in the Oklahoma state superintendent’s office.
“Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you’ve given our country,” the rising star on the Christian right said in the mid-November video. “I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions. I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change for our country.”
Walters sent the video, in which he announces a new department of religious freedom and patriotism, to all public school superintendents in the state and told them to play the prayer for their students and send it to parents. Schools pushed back, as did the Republican state attorney general, who said Walter had no authority to require students to watch it and that it ran contrary to “parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights”.
Walters’ efforts exemplify attempts to erode the separation of church and state – an increasingly powerful push on the right, with elected officials at the local, state and federal level explicitly stating they don’t believe there is or should be a separation, and that they intend to govern that way.
Oklahoma has become a laboratory for this effort, and Walters, as state superintendent overseeing policy for K-12 schools, one of its most prominent proponents. He has pushed to create the country’s first Catholic public charter school. He bought Trump-branded Bibles that he wants to put them in classrooms. He has installed prominent rightwing figures such as the activist behind the anti-LGBTQ+ group Libs of TikTok and the leader of the Heritage Foundation on state education committees.
This is what Christian nationalism looks like in governance – rejecting church and state separation and installing Christian viewpoints – and it’s on the rise with Trump back in the White House.
“If you support LGBTQ equality, if you are for inclusive and thriving public schools, if you believe science should dominate during a public health crisis, if you are for fighting climate change in necessary ways for human survival, then you are for church-state separation,” said Rachel Laser, the president and CEO at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Oklahoma is not alone in pushing these kinds of policies. Louisiana passed a law that would require the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which is on hold after a legal challenge. Texas lawmakers have signaled they want to pass a similar law. An Idaho lawmaker introduced a bill, written by a Christian lobbying group, to require daily Bible readings. A few states, starting with Texas, have passed laws to allow schools to hire chaplains. Some argue abortion bans passed in states such as Missouri violate church-state separation by imposing the religious view that life begins at conception.
The US supreme court agreed in January to hear a case assessing the ability of the Oklahoma charter school board to create the country’s first public religious charter school, a closely-watched test of church-state separation. Oklahoma’s supreme court ruled against the school.
After the high court decided to take the case, Walters, who did not respond to requests for an interview, told the rightwing Real America’s Voice: “There is no separation of church and state. Good luck finding that in the constitution or declaration of independence.”
Is the US a Christian nation?
Several groups have coalesced to provide an intellectual justification for the erosion of the separation of church and state – but few have found more success than David Barton, the founder of the Christian group Wallbuilders and a longtime proponent of the idea that the founding fathers sought to create a Christian nation.
Through Wallbuilders, which was founded in 1988, Barton offers churches and activists a trove of materials with historical examples of US leaders who were outspoken Christians – evidence, Barton argues, that the US is a rightfully Christian country.
Barton’s claim that the separation of church and state is not a legal guarantee has been widely embraced by the Christian right. Activists like Barton focus on a few historical details to craft their case, like the fact that the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the “free exercise” clause of the first amendment, which prohibits the state from establishing a religion.
But scholars reject that claim and point to the establishment clause in the constitution, which prevents the government from creating a state religion.
“If you go back to the actual constitution, clearly the founding fathers did not want to privilege Christianity – or any religion for that matter,” said John Fea, a professor of American history who focuses on the role of Christianity in the country’s founding.
The 1947 landmark case Everson v Board of Education of Ewing Township established that not only federal but also state and local governments were required to adhere to the establishment clause of the first amendment. “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable,” wrote Justice Hugo Black, siding with the majority. The court eventually adopted a three-part test to determine whether the government had violated the first amendment’s establishment clause.
In doing so, Barton wrote in a 700-word statement to the Guardian, the court had “unilaterally imposed on America a national religion of public secularism”.
A series of recent cases decided by the conservative-controlled supreme court have eroded that standard. In back-to-back rulings in 2022, the court determined that in some cases, state governments are required to fund private religious education and that a Christian football coach at a public school could lead his athletes in prayer.
The story of Christian nationalism in the United States is a story of white Christian conservatives terrified of being replaced by a more secular, non-white population, and scrapping all of their might to make sure that that doesn’t happen
Sam Perry, Christian nationalism professor at the University of Oklahoma
The rising tide against church and state separation
Behind the current effort to erode the separation of church and state is a constellation of lawmakers, activists, thinktanks and wealthy donors pouring funds into initiatives to divert public dollars into private religious education and chip away at abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights.
Organizations such as the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL) are creating model legislation for Christian-based laws, including banning abortion and overturning same-sex marriage, the latter of which Jason Rapert, the group’s founder, thinks the current supreme court could do.
“We’ve allowed the ungodly leaders in this country to go too far,” Rapert said. “They’ve led our nation down an ungodly road that has led to ungodly destructive policies.”
Those wanting to erode church-state separation see Trump as an ally. Trump supports increased use of school vouchers, which allow public money to go to private, often religious institutions. He has sold a Trump-branded bible, including a new version themed around inauguration day. The judges he has appointed have been responsible for overturning precedents on key separation issues.
Trump created a task force in February to “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society” and created a faith office to be headed by the Rev Paula White, a televangelist who said she intends to use the role to “combat discrimination against Christians in federal institutions and ensure religious liberties are upheld across the country”.
His allies on the Christian right also see his victory as a rejection of anti-Christian bias, which they believe is rampant, despite Christians’ demographic majorities in the US and overrepresentation in government.
“‘Christian nationalist’ as a negative concept is literally a creation of the left,” Rapert said. “They tried to redefine Christians and patriotic people somehow to be bad. That didn’t work.”
Sam Perry, a professor at the University of Oklahoma professor who studies Christian nationalism, said the movement is fundamentally about keeping power as the country changes.
“The story of Christian nationalism in the United States is a story of white Christian conservatives terrified of being replaced by a more secular, non-white population, and scrapping all of their might to make sure that that doesn’t happen,” Perry said.
These ideas have taken hold across the country, but few places have been as radically reshaped by the Christian right as Oklahoma.
Oklahoma testing ground
Walters has emerged as a key figure in the Christian right for his efforts to install religion in public schools. His profile has increased in the process – at one point, Libs of TikTok promoted Walters to be Trump’s pick for education secretary.
It is the epitome of Christian nationalism in a very blatant and aggressive way
The Rev Shannon Fleck
“Our kids have to understand the role the Bible played in influencing American history,” he said in November 2024. “We will not stop until we’ve brought the Bible back to every classroom in the state.”
Walters’ efforts to infuse Christian doctrine in the public school system appear to reflect the aims of “dominionists” – Christian activists whose theology calls for the installation of biblical rule over society and government. He has reportedly courted City Elders, a reconstructionist sect based in Tulsa, Oklahoma that, according to its website, aspires to create a “Biblical model of City Governance” and claims to have recruited numerous political “elders” to implement biblical law in local government.
Walters’ rise and the broader movement behind it disturbed the Rev Shannon Fleck, the director of the interfaith group Oklahoma Faith Network.
“It is the epitome of Christian nationalism in a very blatant and aggressive way,” Fleck said. “There’s no attempt at masking it at all. That has gone completely away, and it’s just a full fledged implementation.”
Fleck and a coalition of faith leaders in Oklahoma have launched initiatives to offer religious Oklahomans an alternative to the ultraconservative and anti-LGBTQ+ theology that has come to characterize many churches in the state.
But her battle is an uphill one: Christian dominionism and the far-right ideas have seeped into Oklahoma politics, with a local “Freedom Caucus” rising to prominence within the statehouse and the City Elders group gaining influence within the state Republican party.
And it isn’t only state lawmakers who have come to embrace a radical view of the role of Christianity in government.
“There’s a lot of pressure on clergy,” said Fleck, describing the way the pandemic radicalized people online, congregants moving to the right of their pastors. Believers felt that Trump’s presidency “is a holy war, that he is God’s chosen candidate, that God has his side”, Fleck said.
What could a second Trump term look like? A lot of the clues are in Oklahoma
Aaron Baker, Oklahoma high school teacher
It’s in this environment that Oklahoma has become the “testing ground for Project 2025”, said Oklahoma high school teacher Aaron Baker, referencing the conservative playbook by the Heritage Foundation that calls for an increased role for religion in governing.
A local television station discovered, via records requests, frequent communications between Heritage and the Oklahoma superintendent’s office.
“I think others want to know, what are we in for now? What could a second Trump term look like? A lot of the clues are in Oklahoma,” Baker said.
Baker, who teaches government in the Oklahoma City metro area, hasn’t received a Bible from Walters’ office yet. Baker wouldn’t teach from it, he said, but would add it to the classroom library.
