The Good News Club
The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children
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- HUF899.00
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- HUF899.00
Publisher Description
In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, bills itself as an after-school program of "Bible study." But Stewart soon discovered that the Club's real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their "unchurched" peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school.
Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed this -- and other forms of religious activity in public schools -- legal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey to dozens of cities and towns across the nation to document the impact. In this book she demonstrates that there is more religion in America's public schools today than there has been for the past 100 years. The movement driving this agenda is stealthy. It is aggressive. It has our children in its sights. And its ultimate aim is to destroy the system of public education as we know it.
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Journalist Stewart (Class Mothers) examines how Christian right groups infiltrate public schools with supposedly innocuous extracurricular Bible study clubs and other groups that have a fundamentalist approach, and whose leaders engage in proselytizing. Focusing on the Good News Club a group sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) she shows how its leaders see themselves as fighting for children's souls and against the secular humanist forces of "Satan." Currently in thousands of schools, the groups are protected under the mantle of "free speech" thanks to a 2001 Supreme Court decision. While evangelical proponents claim communities often welcome their entry into schools, Stewart argues that such activities are "the handiwork of well-funded and very well-connected Christian legal groups, and is imposed rather than demanded by communities." Stewart introduces readers to CEF and other groups' leaders, as well as volunteers, many of whom are proudly antigay, antichoice, and opposed to sex before marriage. While the research is thoughtful, the claims can seem hyperbolic, such as when Stewart writes, "the CEF moves with industrial precision over great swaths of the country like a multinational corporation homing in on a new market opportunity."
