Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction ignites a national furor with a mandate requiring a Bible in every classroom.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle
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.”
This story appears in the online edition of The Christian Chronicle.
Photo by Audrey Jackson
Faith. Family. Fastballs. 