Culture warrior, MAGA champion, Church of Christ member: Who is Ryan Walters?

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

OKLAHOMA CITY — Ryan Walters wasn’t always known as Oklahoma’s culture-warrior-in-chief.

Neither was the 39-year-old Republican always a high-profile MAGA champion, denouncing liberal indoctrination; illegal immigration; LGBTQ-themed school library books; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and the “Woke Olympics.”

Decades before winning election as Oklahoma’s top education official in 2022 — and before igniting a national furor on religion in public schools by requiring a Bible in every classroom — Walters was a schoolchild in a small town in eastern Oklahoma.

Baptized at an early age at the Main and Oklahoma Church of Christ in his hometown of McAlester, Walters traces his love for the Bible and history to his late grandfather Franklin “Dee” Delano Ball. 

Ball, a U.S. Navy veteran, served in Korea and Vietnam. After retiring from the military, he opened a barbecue restaurant with his brothers and raised cattle outside of McAlester, which is known as the home of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and the nearby McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. An elder of the North Town Church of Christ in McAlester, Ball died in 2020 at age 86.

“I’d go out there and help my grandfather with the cattle, and we’d be hours and hours on the tractor,” said Walters, who grew up to become an award-winning high school history teacher before his political career. “We’d talk about the Bible. We’d talk about history. He was kind of the history guru who really got me going down that route.

“And frankly,” added the grandson, who was a finalist for 2016 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, “my grandfather was the one where we really started having these conversations about what happened when they took the Bible out of school. … And so that was a big part of my growing up.”

Roots of his faith

Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, spoke to The Christian Chronicle in the Board of Education conference room at the state Capitol complex in Oklahoma City.

The 45-minute interview came amid national debate on Walters’ recent order that every teacher in Oklahoma must be provided with physical copies of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Ten Commandments.

“These documents are mandatory for the holistic education of students in Oklahoma,” according to instructional support guidelines issued by Walters.

Asked if the roots of his faith were planted early, Walters replied, “Yes, sir. My mom and dad are very devout. My mother was very, very engaged with us kids growing up. There was a lot of reading the Bible. … We spent a lot of time together as a family, a lot of time in church.”

Like his parents, Randy and Debbie, Walters attended Harding University in Searcy, Ark., which is associated with Churches of Christ. Today, Randy serves as the minister and Debbie as the elementary education director for the North Town church.

“We spent a lot of time together as a family, a lot of time in church.”

Walters met Katie, his wife of nearly 12 years, at Harding. They have four children: Violet, 10; Ella, 7; Benjamin, 5; and Samuel, 3. 

Harding honored Walters, a 2010 graduate, as its 2021 Outstanding Young Alumnus.

“I love Harding University,” Walters told the Chronicle. “It was truly an experience that has had a major impact on me.”

‘My favorite teacher’

Before entering the political arena, Walters taught Advanced Placement courses in world history, U.S. history and U.S. government for eight years at his hometown McAlester High School.

“He was my favorite teacher, and I think that goes for quite a lot of us,” said Starla Edge, a 2020 graduate who describes herself as queer and served as president of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance her junior year.

Edge remembers Walters letting her and her girlfriend leave his homeroom class to go get coffee as long as Edge brought him back a cappuccino.

Walters engaged students in thoughtful studies on subjects such as Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, and never revealed his personal feelings, Edge said.

That’s why, she said, she’s so shocked by the right-wing policies he has pushed as Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction — an elected role overseeing a $4 billion-a-year educational system with 700,000 students.

“I want to believe that he is a better person than that,” said Edge, who joined a protest against Walters’ policies at a recent state Board of Education meeting.

Walters, who praises former President Donald Trump’s appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, said students didn’t need to know about his conservative political leanings. 

The former teacher said he did incorporate the Bible into his history lessons when appropriate.

“I was trying to do the best I could do to have a true academic setting for those kids,” Walters said.

“I was trying to do the best I could do to have a true academic setting for those kids.”

He advocates that approach for history teachers using the Bible as a primary source.

“I’ve had people criticize (the mandate) and say, ‘What if a teacher pushes this or that on kids?’” he said. “And I go, ‘Well, you’re not supposed to do that as a teacher.’” 

Walters’ office issued professional guidelines for school districts statewide to incorporate the Bible into their curriculum. 

Bottom line, he said: “It’s to be done in its academic setting. It’s to be done in its historical context.”

From teacher to politician 

Walters’ rise to statewide educational leadership came after he met future Gov. Kevin Stitt, a fellow Republican, at a tennis tournament where Stitt’s daughter competed in 2018.

“We kind of struck up a friendship, and his passion for education was apparent from the very beginning,” Stitt said in a video produced by Harding when Walters won the alumni award. 

In 2020, Stitt appointed Walters to his cabinet as secretary of education. Two years later, Walters campaigned for the state schools superintendent post and won the general election by 15 percentage points.

Oklahoma, known as one of the “reddest of the red states,” hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Trump won all 77 counties in 2016 and again in 2020. 

Still, controversy has marked Walters’ tenure at the state Education Department — ranging from criticism over spending state funds to book national media appearances for himself to alleged skirting of open records and open meetings laws to his ongoing clash with state Attorney General Gentner Drummond over a proposed Catholic charter school. Like Walters, Drummond is a Republican.

The state Supreme Court has ruled that the school, which Walters supports, is unconstitutional, and Drummond agrees. But the Statewide Charter School Board, on which Walters serves by virtue of his office, voted to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

One school district sued Walters — and won — after he sought to remove books he deemed pornographic from its library shelves. 

At least a dozen of the state’s largest school districts have said they won’t comply with his directive on teaching the Bible, according to The Oklahoman (a newspaper Walters labels “The Woklahoman”), prompting Walters to threaten to hold “rogue” administrators accountable. 

Asked if any of the criticism he has received is legitimate, Walters replied, “No.”

“What you see,” he said, “are folks who are lying to attack the agenda for the people of Oklahoma. You see, this is what the left does. … They lie about me, and they sue me, and they try to stop the agenda from moving forward. They’ve done the same thing with President Trump.”

---

Related: Culture wars turn classrooms into battlefields

---

But the criticism of Walters is not limited to the left.

State Rep. Mark McBride, a Republican from Moore, south of Oklahoma City, chairs a House education subcommittee.

McBride, a Southern Baptist who has done mission work around the world, said he found Walters “very well spoken” when they first met during the superintendent’s teaching days. 

But since his election, Walters has seemed to take extreme right-wing positions aimed at seeking higher office, McBride said.

“I don’t know who his handlers are … telling him to be this way,” the state representative said.

Trey Orndorff, a political scientist at Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, said it seems clear that Walters’ “whole goal has been to be a national figure.”

“You can see that because that’s where he spends his time and his effort,” Orndorff said of Walters, who has appeared on cable TV networks such as Fox News and CNN to promote his Bible mandate.

During the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Walters posted a photo and videos of himself sporting a red “Make America Great Again” hat as Trump spoke on stage.

But Walters insists he’s focused on his job — making sure Oklahoma’s educational system “is as good as it can possibly be and that it reflects the values of the people of Oklahoma.”

‘Whose faith are you going to teach?’

Despite his own faith, Rep. McBride voices concerns about forcing the Bible and the Ten Commandments into the state’s classrooms. 

Oklahoma law already explicitly allows teachers to use the Bible when appropriate for instruction, according to the attorney general’s office.

---

Related: Teaching the Bible during public school hours? It’s totally constitutional?

---

“Once you allow this (new mandate) in, whose faith are you going to teach?” asked McBride, who said he believes in the separation of church and state. “The Church of Christ is a little bit different than the Southern Baptists, and the Southern Baptists are different from the Mormons. So where do you draw the line?”

As McBride sees it, classrooms have become battlefields.

“I want people to go to school and learn reading, writing and arithmetic and not have the distraction of having to be taught the Bible in school,” he said. “But I don’t want the gay pride flag in the classroom either.”

“The Church of Christ is a little bit different than the Southern Baptists, and the Southern Baptists are different from the Mormons. So where do you draw the line?”

Rep. Mike Osburn, a Republican from Edmond, north of Oklahoma City, attends The Springs Church of Christ in Edmond. 

Osburn and two other lawmakers were refused entry into a recent state Board of Education executive session. The attorney general’s office called the denial a “willful violation” of the Oklahoma Open Meeting Act.

Osburn said he sought to attend the closed session related to a teacher certification case in his district. Osburn and Walters haven’t discussed their shared faith specifically, the lawmaker said, but they have talked about mutual acquaintances in Churches of Christ.

Like McBride, Osburn questions the Bible mandate.

“My view is, aside from the constitutional issues, treating the Bible as only a historical document trivializes what I believe is a sacred text and the inspired word of God,” said Osburn, an attorney who began his political career as former Gov. Frank Keating’s campaign manager in 1994. “The risk of this sacred text being further compromised by mandating that all teachers, including believers and nonbelievers, explain the Bible is another concern.”

Moreover, Osburn argued, “Current law is that statewide curriculum changes require legislative approval. Textbooks are chosen by local school boards. Without legislative and local school board approval and because of the questionable constitutionality, I don’t believe the mandate is legitimate, and I disagree with it.”

Two churches’ approaches

On the Sunday after announcing his Bible mandate, Walters appeared on stage at Sheridan.Church, an evangelical church in Tulsa, with his three younger children.

The family received a standing ovation, and Jackson Lahmeyer, founder of Pastors for Trump, praised Walters’ courage in pushing to teach about the Bible’s role in American history.

“The media has lost their minds over this,” Walters told the crowd. “And you know what I told them? I said, ‘Listen, you can be offended. You can be mad. You can be upset. But here’s what you can’t do: You can’t rewrite our history.’”

“Amen!” Lahmeyer and the church agreed.

“And it is crystal clear in American history,” Walters continued. “You can go back to the Declaration of Independence — our rights are endowed by our Creator. … You can listen to Abraham Lincoln mention God and the Bible almost in every speech, every letter he wrote. You can go all the way up to, by the way, Martin Luther King Jr. referencing in the Civil Rights Movement — in the ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail’ — what God intended, and he’s quoting the Bible.

“So how do you teach history without the Bible?” Walters added. “You can’t. It is academic malpractice, so we are incredibly proud to be the first state in the country to put the Bible back in the classroom.”

---

Related: ‘Overhyped’ Christian nationalism label draws political backlash

---

On the same Sunday that the Sheridan.Church prayed over Walters and his children, the family’s home congregation in Oklahoma City — the North MacArthur Church of Christ — made no mention of the Bible mandate or partisan politics. Minister Tim Lewis preached a sermon on peace and reconciliation in the Christian life, focusing on Jesus — not politics — as is the congregation’s general practice.

“Each church is different, right?” Walters said when asked about the varying approaches.

His family first connected with North MacArthur when his children attended the church’s Vacation Bible School a few years ago.

“They’ve embraced our family rather well, and the kids love the Bible classes there,” he said of the congregation. “We’ve loved our time there, and there are truly salt-of-the-earth people there. … It’s a really great congregation.”

“They’ve embraced our family rather well, and the kids love the Bible classes there. We’ve loved our time there, and there are truly salt-of-the-earth people there.”

The three older children attend Deer Creek public schools — a district that includes parts of Oklahoma City and Edmond. The children have great teachers, Walters said, and the girls enjoy playing school even after they get home.

Before rushing to another meeting, Walters emphasized that his faith is what drives him.

“At the beginning of the day and the end of the day, that’s what I look at as where I get my sense of right and wrong, my direction,” he said. “I am in the Bible every day. I try to read it very much openly and try to share it with my kids as much as I can. My wife and I have a very close relationship, and we read it together.”

BOBBY ROSS JR. is Editor-in-Chief of The Christian Chronicle. Reach him at [email protected].

Filed under: Bible Bible in schools Church and state Education National News Oklahoma People politics public schools Ryan Walters Ten Commandments Top Stories Trump U.S. history