UPDATE (12:03 pm ET on 8/20/24): This piece has been updated to include information on a recently released undercover video. – eds
“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.
Local investigative journalism has blown the lid off of his vanity project—which, as it happens, is directly connected to Project 2025. Walters had the state contract with Vought Strategies for his public relations campaign. The president of Vought Strategies (whose name bears an eerie resemblance to the evil corporation in the popular TV show The Boys) is Mary Vought, who’s also VP of Strategic Communications at the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 handbook.
That’s right. Vought is in charge of the Heritage Foundation’s communications and in charge of Walters’ image and speaking.
This is not a minor coincidence. Walters appears to have bent the rules and gone out of his way to contract with Vought’s group. Mary Vought previously recognized her husband Russ Vought on the Vought Strategies website (that has since changed, though it’s unclear whether the relationship has changed or simply their public acknowledgement of it). Russ Vought, one of the masterminds behind Project 2025 (he wrote a big part of their playbook), is a self-described Christian nationalist who runs the Center for Renewing America, whose top issues include “Christian nationalism.” Russ also ran the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump administration.
In undercover video that rocketed around the internet this past weekend, Russ Vought assured journalists (whom he believed to be donors) that Trump was still committed to the people and policies that make up Project 2025 (though not the “branding”) and that Vought was going to “rehabilitate Christian Nationalism.” In addition, Vought’s allies discussed how “Vought is running the secretive second phase of Project 2025,” which was described as implementation.
First Liberty Institute, a Christian nationalist legal outfit based in Texas, is among Project 2025’s “advisory partners” and represents Walters in the religious public school case mentioned above. Walters has advocated mandatory “patriotic training” for teachers from Hillsdale College, another Project 2025 advisory partner. Walters appointed a team to completely rewrite Oklahoma’s social studies standards that includes David Barton of Wallbuilders, Dennis Prager of PragerU, and Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and the man who literally wrote the foreword to the Project 2025 playbook.
This overlap in personnel between Oklahoma and Project 2025 is more striking given Project 2025’s emphasis on personnel, even quoting the axiom “personnel is policy” in the first substantive note in the 900+ page playbook.
Project 2025’s plan for public education includes “sunsetting the U.S. Department of Education altogether” (a goal Trump echoed during his August 12 Twitter conversation with Elon Musk, when he vowed to “close the Department of Education”). That would pave the way to make every state’s public education as woeful as Oklahoma’s. This is expressed in the playbook as the “bright” future of education when states are in full control; and by giving states that control, Project 2025 means Oklahoma.
Most Americans can’t comprehend education policy that actively undermines and destroys public education. But that has been a conservative goal since public schools were desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which I’ve written about here on RD, and which I detail in American Crusade. The end goal is to funnel students and public money (via vouchers or other schemes) into private Christian schools that can inculcate religion and turn away students that don’t fit the “biblically based” family, as the Project 2025 playbook refers to it. Students and families that don’t fit that biblical mold—LGBTQ+, non-White, non-Christian—are left out.
Walters isn’t really hiding the ball or his connections to Project 2025. When Heritage president Kevin Roberts hosted Walters on his podcast, Walters gushed over Roberts, saying “the Heritage Foundation has been an incredible partner to help us develop what the plans are for the state, for our schools, for our education system.”
Roberts himself seems to agree, and seems to think most of the media and country are failing to notice that Project 2025 has put boots on the ground in Oklahoma. “We are winning. There are a lot of victories that have been secured. Some of them are partial. Some of them, in ways that the other side doesn’t yet know, are foundations for what’s coming. And that’s just the beginning,” said Roberts.
“And we’re not going to tell you everything that’s coming. … [The conservative movement] is ready to fight,” he added. (A full viewing of those remarks shows that Roberts, who sees his Heritage presidency as part of “God’s plan,” believes himself to be on a divine mission.)
That Project 2025 is already winning in some states is only news to those fortunate enough not to suffer under such regimes. Oklahoma State Rep. Mickey Dollens (D-Oklahoma City) echoed the sentiments of Rev. Fleck: “It’s clear that we are already living in a Project 2025 world right here in Oklahoma. The laws and policies being implemented are part of a broader agenda that seeks to reshape our state into a model for Christian nationalism.” Dollens added that “Extremist politicians view Oklahoma as a testing ground for Christian nationalism, implementing policies directly from the Project 2025 playbook.”
One of the leading scholars of Christian nationalism is Sam Perry, whose books, The Flag and the Cross and Taking America Back for God, are indispensable for understanding the modern Christian nationalist movement. Perry, who also happens to be an Oklahoman, a parent with kids in the public school system, and a professor, comments: “Ryan Walters’ tenure as superintendent of public instruction has been catastrophic for Oklahoma students and families in ways that go beyond the overt Christian nationalism, which itself has been second to none in the nation.”
Christian nationalism is on the march in Oklahoma, and Project 2025 is the plan to bring that dystopia to the rest of the country. Yet Perry remains hopeful about the future, especially because Americans—from legislators like Rep. Dollens to religious leaders like Rev. Fleck—are coming together across religious beliefs to turn back the tide. Later, reflecting on an event organized by a coalition of local and national entities, Perry told me:
Whether someone is religious or not, Christian or not, Christian nationalist grifters like Walters are a danger to Oklahoma students’ quality of education and religious liberty. Confronting [them] requires coalitions of Oklahomans who value both and are willing to send a message that we want public institutions that work, and state officials who care more about concrete education outcomes than getting famous on Fox News.
The Project 2025 vision isn’t inevitable, but you can count on the fact that they won’t give up without a fight.
