The Good News Club - 9781586488437

In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, 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 false impression that its activities are endorsed by the school. Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed this legal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey across the nation to document the impact. As she makes chillingly clear in this journey through the history, politics, and landscape of this new culture war, the rapidly expanding network of Good News Clubs represents just one of a range of initiatives intended to insert conservative forms of evangelical Christianity into public schools--and into society at large. In the communities within which they occur, these initiatives often appear to be spontaneous and local events. But in fact they are organized, funded, coordinated, and guided at a national level by a small number of influential actors. Taken all together, they represent an important new strategy on the part of the Christian Right in its long-running aim to "take back America."--From publisher description.