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

This article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (April 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) The examples and perspective in this article or section might have an extensive bias or disproportional coverage towards one or more specific regions. Please or discuss the issue on the talk page. (April 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children is a book by American journalist Katherine Stewart about the agenda of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, through its primary ministry, the Good News Club, of breaking down jurisprudence on proselytizing in public schools, and of Christian Nationalism more generally, as well as the effects of Good News Clubs on schools and the surrounding communities ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not exclude them.

The book was well-received by reviewers from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Huffington Post, and Kirkus Reviews.

Overview[]

Stewart's two primary themes are that the impact of the Good News Club on schools is to divide students and parents, and that the Good News Club v. Milford Central School case, which ruled that public schools had to allow the clubs, was a bad decision. Stewart begins the book with a brief overview of the Good News Club, and explains what happened when a Good News Club came to Loyal Heights Elementary in Seattle in 2009, where her son was going at the time: "Once vibrant and harmonious, the Loyal Heights Elementary School community was now angrily divided. 'When parents were picking up their kids, you could see that groups divided along faith lines had formed,' says Jeanne. 'Parents weren’t intermingling anymore. Parents who supported the GNC were sticking together, and parents who opposed it stuck together.' The tension within the Loyal Heights community rose to the point at which, at least for some people, it all snapped."^[1] She gives examples of members of the club proselytizing to Jewish and other non-Christian students, which often come with threats of Hell. In addition to targeting non-Christian students, the club has an extensive list of denominations that it does not consider truly Christian, "that is, most Roman Catholics, Unitarians, liberal Congregationalists, United Methodists, Mormons, mainline Episcopalians, and liberal and moderate members of the United Church of Christ and of the Presbyterian Church of the USA, among others too numerous to mention."^[1] In addition, Stewart points out that Good News Clubs only operate in schools with children age 5 to 12, and that children of that age won't be able to easily distinguish between clubs that meet on school grounds and material that is taught by the school. She writes that that is the point of their mission: "As a rule, the Good News Club seeks to convey the impression to students that it is in some way a part of the school."^[1]

To support the second major theme, Stewart gives a summary of the majority's opinion in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, which was that since public schools are a limited public forum, they cannot discriminate against "private speech from a religious point of view." The Milford case was the result, Stewart notes, of a string of decisions that broke the postwar consensus on church-state separation. Stewart cites Byron White's dissent in the case Widmar v. Vincent, which started the precedent that lawyers for the Good News Club took advantage of in the Milford Case. White wrote that the majority's opinion "is founded on the proposition that because religious worship uses speech, it is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment...I believe this proposition is plainly wrong.... Were it right, the Religion Clauses would be emptied of any independent meaning in circumstances in which religious practice took the form of speech."^[1] Stewart elaborates on the point, writing: "Is religion just a form of speech from a religious point of view? One could expend quite of bit of energy looking for a definitive metaphysical answer. And yet in this instance, as Justice White pointed out in the Widmar case, one does not have to look very far at all to see how strange the Court’s reasoning is, since the Constitution itself only makes sense on the supposition that religion is, in an essential and fundamental way, something other than just speech from a particular viewpoint." Further, Stewart explains that with the new "private speech from a religious point of view" precedent, the issues of peer pressure and majority coercion were effectively ignored, and effectively meant that only groups of the majority religion would be able to operate in the public schools: "The Supreme Court may have excluded the coercive effects of peer pressure and majority pressure from its reasoning in the Good News Club case, but those effects haven’t gone away. Children still feel the pressure to conform or 'blend in' with their Christianity-promoting peers, and frequently suffer social ostracism when they resist. In the rare instances that minority religions seek to flex their muscles in public schools as conservative Christians do, it becomes clear that our society has a two-tier system of religious freedom—the top tier for Christians, and a lower tier for just about everyone else. Minority faiths, as it turns out, are often blocked by the majority from exercising the very freedoms that the majority claims to be defending."^[1]

Critical reception[]

Stewart giving a lecture on "The Good News Club" in Monterey, CA, in 2013.

Reviewing the book for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Alexander Heffner praised Stewart for writing "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.'"^[2] The Huffington Post noted that "Stewart cites numerous examples of the impact of Good News Clubs in the public schools, instigating culture clashes between children with different faiths and from different ethnic backgrounds. In many cases, she writes, young children who cannot yet read are fooled into thinking the Bible sessions are official school activities."^[3] Kirkus Reviews called it "compelling investigative journalism about an undercovered phenomenon."^[4]

See also[]

• Separation of church and state

References[]