Katherine Stewart, “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children” (PublicAffairs, 2012)

In her shocking new book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (Public Affairs, 2012), Katherine Stewart describes how factions of the Christian Right, through groups such as the Good News Club, are seeking to indoctrinate children in public schools with their brand of fundamentalism. When a Good News Club came to a public school in her community, Stewart decided to investigate. The Club, under the umbrella of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, manages to find loopholes in state/church separation and find their way into public schools under the guise of being a non-denominational Bible studies program. Once there, they seek to build roots in order to reach as many children as possible. In her research, Stewart visited communities all over the United States where Good News Clubs had been present, and found that they had caused nothing but strife and divisiveness among kids, teachers and parents. She also followed the missionaries of the Good News Club on their training sessions and found that far from promoting a non-denominational view of the Bible, their real mission was to get kids “saved” (meaning converting kids to their brand of fundamentalism). She also discovered that the club promoted and pushed peer-to-peer proselytizing, usually targeting very small children. Most shocking of all, she found that beyond wanting to grow their church, the Club’s ultimate goal was the erosion of the public secular school system altogether. This eye-opening book urges us to wake up and pay attention to what is happening in America’s public schools.

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