An Afterschool Program That Is Causing A Lot of Talk

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.

As a counterpoint, here is how the Child Evangelism Fellowship sees it's GNC mission:

Joel says:

"The Good News Club is a recently-published book about the burgeoning infiltration of evangelical religious groups into the sphere of public education and the many legal and political sources of this new trend. Jane Michaels, a free-lance writer and journalist, primarily focuses on the recent growth of a national after-hours school program called the Good News Club, a Christian ministry run by a multi-million dollar organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship. On the surface, the GNC presents itself as a program that offers free after school childcare while teaching young students about community values and moral character 'from a Christian perspective.'  According to Michaels, however, the GNC is actually part of a large-scale national agenda orchestrated and sponsored by a wealthy and well-connected network of evangelical Christian lawyers, educators, businesspeople, politicians, and organizations. She argues that this Christian juggernaut aims to indoctrinate young children into evangelical Christianity, infiltrate public education with religious dogma, and rewrite US history in order to frame the Constitution and beliefs of the founding fathers as grounded in 'Christian values.' And to top it all off, the Supreme Court endorsed the GNC's right to pursue these ends in the 2001 decision Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

The Good News Club is an original and thought provoking work of journalism that anyone, regardless of political or religious background, should be concerned about. Jane Michaels intends to speak most directly to parents whose children's education is at stake, but this work is equally important for educators, anyone with a stake in law and politics, and anyone who values religious freedom and diversity. This is a fine work of journalism written about a largely ignored topic in the US political sphere."