The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children

by Katherine Stewart

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586488437
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	01/24/2012
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Katherine Stewart was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She started her career in journalism working for investigative reporter Wayne Barrett at The Village Voice, and contributed to Newsweek International, the New York Observer, and Rolling Stone among others. She cowrote the book about the musical Rent and, after moving to Santa Barbara in 2005, published two novels about 21st century parenting. She is the author of The Good News Club (PublicAffairs, 2012), an investigative book about public education and religious fundamentalism in America. Most recently she has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Guardian.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Good News Club Comes to Town 9

2 All Part of the Plan 37

3 A Wall of Separation 67

4 The Originalists' New Theory 81

5 Little Red Church-House 103

6 Thy Neighbor's Children: The 4/14 Window 127

7 Don't Know Much About History: The Texas Textbook Wars 149

8 Bible "Literacy" Wars 173

9 Packaging Proselytizing as Education 193

10 The Peer-to-Peer Evangelism Loophole 215

11 Enlisting in the Army: How to Join the Good News Club 227

12 If You Can't Own It, Break It The Plan to Undermine Publlic Education 245

Conclusion 257

Acknowledgments 261

Notes 265

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

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.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Stewart is a gracious narrator, respectful of the religious and nonreligious participants she came across during her quite vast research. In sum, the book is an important work that reveals a movement little discussed in the mainstream media, one Stewart worries is poised to damage "a society as open and pluralistic as ours.”
 
DBC reads
“The reason the world perked up and paid attention to Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906 is the same reason that the world should now, 105 years later, snap to attention and read Katherine Stewart’s latest nonfiction book, The Good News Club: it awakens us to something we may previously have known nothing about, but which is under our noses every day, is active in our communities nonstop, and is potentially damaging to us all, and well into the future, too, if gone unnoticed. Stewart’s findings can’t afford to be ignored, for the same simple fact that made Sinclair’s expose crucial: whether the book calls you to action or not, you are inarguably worse off not knowing what’s detailed within it.”
 
The Friendly Atheist

From the Publisher

Investigation of Christian fundamentalist groups introducing religious doctrine into public schools across the United States. Freelance journalist and novelist Stewart (Class Mothers, 2006, etc.) became aware of the fundamentalist campaign when it entered her daughter's elementary school in California, and later, the school district in their new home in New York City. Stewart not only interviewed school officials, classroom teachers, constitutional-law experts and students, but she also attended training sessions sponsored by Christian fundamentalists. Despite what she assumed was an inviolable separation between church and state, Stewart discovered that the U.S. Supreme Court, led by justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, has been interpreting the Constitution to mandate taxpayer-financed public schools to open their buildings to evangelical missionaries. The author explains some of the court's rulings, including the leading case Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001). Although Stewart treats the missionaries fairly, the book is advocacy journalism at its strongest. The author does not mask her dismay at the success of the movement, and she is especially concerned that the evangelicals are laboring to skew textbooks so that all lessons revolve around the virtues of a Christian nation, and are pushing for the defunding of public education in favor of church-affiliated schools. At times Stewart's phrasing borders on alarmist, but she usually backs up the alarm with solid reporting. Some of the most poignant sections move away from policy debates to demonstrate how many evangelists have ripped the formerly positive fabric of student-teacher-administrator-parent cooperation, replacing it with warring camps--those who oppose the introduction of fundamentalist religion, those who favor it and those uncertain what to think. Compelling investigative journalism about an undercovered phenomenon.

Kirkus Reviews

Read More