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Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault On America's Children (2014)

by Katherine Stewart(Favorite Author)

4.18 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1280588012 (ISBN13: 9781280588013)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

PublicAffairs

review 1: The Good News Club – by Katherine Stewart – a sort of book reviewThis is a book about the Christian Rights attempt to influence America’s children using the public school system.I heard the author speak at an event and felt intrigued enough, in spite of my long list of pending reading, to buy and read the book.It is the story of a concerted effort to try to make evangelical Christianity dominant in the American school systems. It is not all Christianity (they seem to say Catholics are going to hell.)Their target group is children from 4 to 14 years of age. Their strategies include getting children to proselytize to other children and to form group pressure to children to conform. There is a graph that indicates that over 80% of people who convert to Christianity d... moreo so between ages 4 & 14.Groups like the CEF (Child Evangelism Fellowship), the SFK (Success for Kids) and others are a small part of the New Deal assortment of alphabet soup abbreviations for many many active groups trying to accomplish this.They are even having ministries working with children of prisoners. Children likely more vulnerable than others.They are trying to influence schools in many ways - including textbooks – with strong efforts in Texas as this is such a big state and the ability to influence publishers for a national distribution for Christian oriented books is a possibility. The explanation of the Texas “editing” of some textbooks reminded me of what I learned about the Japanese (when reading the Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang) having written their history books to say that the Japanese were “forced” to attack America- Pearl Harbor because we had cut them off from oil and steel.One can get the impression, or I did anyway, that this proselytizing effort was focused more in states such as Alabama and Mississippi (nothing against these states just my view of their Protestant Christian majorities and beliefs) – but I was surprised to learn that in New York City on the upper east side (prosperous for those who don’t know that) there are programs at PS 6 a school that draws parents with enough assets to want to send their kids to school there.They managed to achieve up to over $200 million a year for federally funded sex abstinence programs for teaching in public schools during the Geo. W. Bush years. This was in effect until May 2009 when Obama killed it but by September of that year $50 million was restored.The book addresses the public school visible praying of school athletic teams – pressure non- believes to participate or face social pressure.They seem to motivate much of their volunteer unpaid help with the threat that the “unsaved” children would “go to hell”.I believe the author is honest and even if her observations and conclusions are off this is still something we all should be aware of. This is an attack on the separation of church and state, similar in my mind to similar efforts going on in our military (but that is another question.)It is a book worth the time to read and think about.
review 2: UPDATE 5/8/13This book describes the activities of scary people, engaged in an activity I personally find reprehensible. Their goal is to take over the minds of the young children of America and inject their version of a Jesus-based religion. Anyone not part of their group, including most Christians who are not Christian enough, will go to hell. The really frightening thing is that they’re good at what they’re doing, and the U.S. Supreme Court has said it’s legal.The Good News Club, a function of the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), already operates in over 3,500 public elementary schools in the U.S. They function ostensibly as an after-school club, hence the legality, but in fact they are ferociously peddling their message in a way that poses a threat to our system of public education and indeed to our concept of America as a secular democracy.CEF maintains that America was founded as a Christian nation and that it is the right and obligation of Christians (some Christians) to take it back, including conversion of public schools into church schools. Their work is intended to create an “us” and “them” mentality among all Americans, totally opposed to the spirit of inclusion and tolerance that I believe most of us support. The rest of us are out there as a harvest to be converted.Now I don’t care what people do in their own churches. Catholics, for instance, including former Pope Ratzinger, have clearly stated that it is the mission of the Catholic Church to convert all the Jews. But it is when these purveyors of a particular faith take aim on our young children in public schools that this becomes a menace that calls out for public attention and aggressive response.One young girl arguing with her Jewish classmate … Jesus is the best, don’t you want to be with Jesus ... If not, you’ll go to hell ... You’re a bad person if you don’t believe in Jesus. This is not supposed to happen in our public secular schools. Most of us think this kind of proselytizing is forbidden by our Constitution. But the Supreme Court has held otherwise, as regards after-school religious clubs.If a Good News Club exists in your child’s elementary school, it is not a local effort arising spontaneously from the community. It is part of a national organization, with Plan Books, manuals, procedures, lawyers, and a substantial budget, and with goals that most of us find about as un-American as it can get. They believe in the literal word of the Bible and they won’t be satisfied until all the rest of us accept their extreme religious beliefs. They could never reach that goal by honestly stating it and trying to argue its merits as they see them. Instead, they have deviously focused on the most impressionable - young children aged 4-14 - in the place where they can most easily be influenced, our public elementary schools.MORE TO COME … less

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