Growing up in the heart of “conservative Oklahoma”, Robert O. Smith was not exposed to many schools of thought outside what he was surrounded in. This changed when he got the chance to study in Germany.

North Texas Daily
By Matthew Winter
April 11, 2026

“When I got to the international school [...], my world was truly expanded dramatically,” Smith said. “The Green Party was part of that expansion: understanding that there could be a party that was truly committed to social justice and grassroots democracy, and calling attention to the coming ecological crisis at a time when no one else was talking about.”

Now, after becoming an ordained minister and university assistant history professor, among other things, he announced that he is running to be the official candidate of the Green Party in the November 2026 Senate election.

His campaign promises environmental justice and social equity, along with the core 10 principles the Green Party runs on.

“I've been aware of the party for a very long time, but now especially as I look at the landscape of other major parties in the United States, especially the Democrats and Republicans,” Smith said.“ I feel that those parties simply do not represent the best interests of the people.”

After graduating from his German high school, he returned to the U.S. and got his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Oklahoma State University. Later, he received his master's in the Master of Divinity—the standard degree for getting ordained in many churches.

“Being this native kid who's white, [I thought] maybe I need to take seriously that people disagree about things, and maybe have good reasons for disagreeing,” Smith said. “We also need to get along enough so we can move things forward. [...] So I've always been interested in people who are very different than me.”

Smith later got his PhD in post-holocaust Christian-Jewish relations from Baylor University. He then moved to Jerusalem to teach at the University of Notre Dame, where he headed study abroad programs on the history of the relationship between Christians, Israelis and Palestinians. 

“I certainly wasn't always the best student,” Smith said. “What needed to happen for me was to discover those areas of life that I was most passionate about, and then I suddenly started collecting all this information about it. And then what do you do that for, if not to share it with others?”

Smith said showing his students a world outside of theirs and teaching “in context” allowed him to give them the eye-opening experience he had back in Germany, something he described as a “full circle moment.”

While he studied in Germany, Smith was reintroduced to Christianity through a Lutheran lens, which he said was a very different way from what was fundamentally taught during his upbringing. He would eventually be ordained by this same church.

“[Lutheran] tradition welcomes critical inquiry and that was really important for me,” Smith said. “Lutherans, from the beginning, have been a very critical bunch, and that drew me to a different expression of Christianity that's explicitly not fundamentalist. [...] As soon as I got introduced to that, I wanted to make sure other people were aware of that as well that there was another way of being in the world.” 

After teaching in Jerusalem and returning to the U.S., Smith worked for his church, directed the "Peace, Not Walls" campaign for a just peace in Israel and Palestine and advocated for Christian communities during the Syrian Civil War.

During this time, he visited Capitol Hill, the U.S. State Department, the White House and the U.N. Headquarters as part of this work. 

He also met with bishops in Syria, Lebanon and Geneva to help Americans better understand the situation of Christian communities during the Syrian Civil War, coming back in 2014 to work at the university. 

“It's the joy of teaching, seeing a student grab hold of an idea or a new commitment and [seeing] where it goes,” Smith said. “Just seeing that, that moment of discovery where a student realizes, ‘Wait, this isn't just a textbook, this is going to change my life.’ And when those moments happen, I want to be in the room when that happens.”

Smith has been teaching at the university since. 

“I just wish Dr. Smith could be president,” said Teresa Nguyen, alumna and former student of Smith. “After hearing him say that he decided to come teach at UNT because he believed that middle and working-class kids deserve a world-class education too, at that point, I knew that Dr. Smith acted out of compassion and logic. And that’s why it was no surprise when I saw him running under the Green Party.”

During his time at the university, Smith has taught classes on topics such as the backgrounds of early Christianity, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and more. 

“Professor Smith is one of the most genuine professors I have ever come across,” senior art design major Carsen Laney said. “ He cares deeply about the students he teaches to and about the material he teaches, and makes learning about a topic feel like a conversation rather than a lecture.”

Alongside teaching, Smith wrote a book titled “The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement” with Aja Y. Martinez, his wife.

“She's the storyteller, so this book is really the story of the people who created Critical Race Theory,” Smith said. “And so she's the one with the narrative arc and the interpretation and that sort of thing. I'm the deep dive researcher, so I'm looking under every rock.”

Smith said the book's goal is to “reframe” how we see the origins of Critical Race Theory, changing the context in which we see it today. 

“Everything is history, and history is everything,” Smith said. “We are today, dealing with nothing we haven't dealt with before. We have faced similar challenges, and we have the tools of our grandparents who have been through it before. [...] We need to look back so we can look forward.”

Smith wants the public to know about Green Party alternatives and hopes there is a Green Party option for every seat by the next Senate race to break the “two-party duopoly.” 

“We really, truly don't have any alternative,” Smith said. “Even running to the left, the Democratic Party doesn't even make me a socialist anymore. It just means I'm centrist. So I feel like we're not even trying to be the leftist or the leftist. We're the ones who are trying to bring back a centrist, common sense, basic approach to governance.”

The official candidate for the Green Party will be announced in March 2026.