by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The Jesuits used
to have a saying, “Give us a child until he is seven, and we will have him for
the rest of his life.” But these days, according to activist and author
Katherine Stewart, it’s evangelical Protestant Christians who are putting that
old saying into practice, throwing out a wide net so they can follow St.
Peter’s admonition to be “fishers” not only of adults but children as well.
Stewart originally ran into this effort three years ago in Santa Barbara, where
she and her husband Matthew suddenly encountered an organization called “The
Good News Club” that wanted to set up what a so-called “nondenominational Bible
study” group at their seven-year-old daughter’s grade school.
Using her skills
as an investigative reporter, Stewart checked out the “Good News Clubs” and
found they were far from the “Bible study” groups they claimed to be. They are
actually a program of an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship
(CEF), founded in 1937, whose declared mission, according to Stewart, “is to
produce conversion experiences in very young children and thus equip them to
‘witness’ for other children.” The Good News Clubs started in the 1990’s and in
2001 won a case at the U.S. Supreme Court that, Stewart said, gives them almost
unlimited power and legal authority to function in schools at any level they
want, anywhere they want, and teach whatever they want regardless of the
desires of the school board, administrators or parents.
Stewart found
that the CEF, the parent organization of the Good News Clubs, “has a very
specific and deeply Fundamentalist agenda,” she explained. At a CEF convention
she attended, “the speakers railed against ‘the homosexual agenda’ and attacked
women’s reproductive freedom.” In her book, The Good News Club: The
Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, she described CEF as committed to “the conversion of
schoolchildren … on an industrial scale,” and said that at their convention “I
can’t help but feel that I’m at a conference for a multinational corporation
determined to use every managerial tool available to expand its conversion
operations and maximize efficiency.”
When she spoke
in San Diego March 4, at an event sponsored by the newly reorganized local
chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Stewart
explained, “I don’t have a problem with kids expressing faith in school. I do have a problem with [Good News Club members]
thinking their religious beliefs
are endorsed by the school. The Good News Club’s purpose is to give children
the impression that their school endorses their particular faith. … They make
an effort to present themselves as ‘broadly Christian,’ but the people behind
CEF don’t consider that most people who call themselves ‘Christian’ truly are
Christian.”
Stewart found
that out the hard way when she went to the CEF convention and was asked what
church she and her family attended. “Episcopalian,” she rather shame-facedly
answered — and the person who had asked her the question then said, in a tone
of voice Stewart described as “disparaging,” “Is that a Bible church?” Another
person Stewart met at the convention confided in her, “My son is homosexual,”
in a tone of voice that communicated her own shame, and when she added that her
son was living with a male partner, she said, “It almost put me in the grave!”
The Good News
Clubs are only part of a broad-based effort on the part of CEF and other
organizations like it to win the next generation for their particular brand of
Christianity, Stewart explained. “Another initiative is Campus Alliance, a
coalition of 40 religious groups that relies on ‘peer evangelism’ to get kids
to convert their peers,” she said. “Every Student, Every School, a project set
to debut in 2013, seeks to establish full-fledged evangelical ministries in the
public schools and target the kids. They are encouraged to ‘adopt a school’
[and get children to] hand out religious literature to their classmates. … The
California School Project pairs high-school students with college-age adults.”
One of the
quirkiest aspects of the constellation of radical-Right religious organizations
Stewart described is that some of the groups in it are newly formed, while
others are branches of organizations that have been operating for decades. “The
Lifebook Movement,” she said, “is a project of the Gideons International” —
founded in 1899 and best known for placing Bibles in hotel rooms — “and they’ve
tried to distribute Bibles on school campuses, with mixed success. They hit the
jackpot with tracts that look like teen writing” — dumbed-down versions of the
Bible with printed “handwriting” in the margins, ostensibly the handiwork of
teenagers themselves — “that they get teens to distribute to other students.
Since 2007 they have distributed two million tracts.”
According to
Stewart, the Good News Clubs “have less to do with ‘Bible study’ than with
religious indoctrination. The real purpose of the Clubs is not to teach the
kids who enroll, but to use those kids to recruit their peers.” What the Clubs
are for, Stewart said, is to set up a sort of daisy chain of conversion.
Parents authorize their children to join the clubs, either because they’re
believers themselves or they’re tricked into doing so by the club’s false claim
to be “nondenominational.” The children in the clubs then talk up Jesus and the
Fundamentalist brand of Christianity they learn there to other children in the
school, often so stridently that Stewart calls it “faith-based bullying,” and those children in turn go home and badger their parents to
attend a Fundamentalist church. Despite the radical Right’s rhetorical
commitment to “family values,” Stewart said, the Good News Clubs “aim to
convert many children away from
their parents.”
Stewart’s book
tells a story of how this works “on the ground.” At the Vieja Valley Elementary
School in Hope Ranch, California, a six-year-old Good News Club child named
Ashley approached her first-grade classmate Chloe, whose parents were Jews, and
told her, “You can’t go to heaven.” When Chloe protested, Ashley said, “If you
don’t believe in Jesus, you are going to hell.” Their teacher overheard the
exchange and, when class resumed, used it for a so-called “teachable moment” on
the need for children to accept each other’s (and their families’) differences
in religious beliefs. A hurt Ashley replied, “You mean they lied to me in
school?” Ashley said that she’d learned the lesson that only Christians can go
to heaven right there in school, and “how can they teach me things that aren’t
true?”
Demolishing the “Wall of
Separation”
They can
because, starting in the 1980’s, an increasingly Right-wing majority on the
U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at the “wall of separation” between church
and state famously called for by Thomas Jefferson until it threatens to
collapse into rubble. They did this in a series of rulings in cases brought by
Right-wing organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) —
a deliberate attempt to create a Right alternative to the American Civil Liberties’
Union (ACLU) — the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), Christian Legal Society,
Rutherford Institute and Pacific Justice Institute. Along with the political
arms of the radical religious Right, Stewart said, these legal groups have
pushed a version of the history of America’s public schools so effectively that
even many progressives and other opponents of the radical Right have bought
into it.
According to the
radical Right’s version of history, America’s public schools were bastions of
religious instruction and Bible belief until the early 1960’s, when a series of
decisions by the most liberal U.S. Supreme Court in history banned mandatory
prayer in public schools and therefore supposedly “took God out of the schools”
and replaced Him with what radical-Right activists call “the ‘religion’ of
secular humanism.” The truth, as Stewart explains in a chapter of her book
called “A Wall of Separation,” is that starting in the early 19th
century, as America shifted from a system in which most schools were church-run
to one in which children were guaranteed a free education at public schools,
bitter conflicts arose as to what, if
any, religious beliefs would be taught — and by the end of the 19th
century most everyone had agreed that the only way to stop these wars was to
keep public education resolutely secular and let parents decide what, if any,
religious instruction to give their children.
“By the time the
Supreme Court took up its landmark cases on the subject,” Stewart wrote,
“official, school-sponsored prayers at the start of the school day were really
the last vestige of the once substantial presence of religion in the public
schools. Many schools and indeed many states had in fact abandoned the practice
on their own. Less than half the schools in the country had prayer, and prayer
was in the vast majority of cases limited to five minutes at the beginning of
the school day. Contrary to the Right-wing myth, the Supreme Court cases on
school prayer in 1962 and 1963 were easily decided, receiving the support of eight
of the nine justices, including three of the four conservatives.”
According to
Stewart, the reasoning in the school-prayer cases revolved around three points.
The first was what, in the words of then-Justice Hugo Black, was the clear
meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: “Neither a state
nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid
one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another.” The
second was the belief that school prayers were an especially insidious
“establishment of religion” because they created social pressure on
non-believing children to go along. “Nonconformity is not an outstanding
characteristic of children,” then-Justice Felix Frankfurter noted in one of the
school-prayer opinions.
The third was
the idea that teaching any lesson from a particular religion in the public
schools would effectively discredit children or families who believed
differently. As Justice Frankfurter wrote, any activity that “sharpens the
consciousness of religious differences” among schoolchildren “causes precisely
the consequences against which the Constitution was directed when it prohibited
the government common to all from becoming embroiled, however innocently, in
the destructive religious conflicts of which the history of even this country
records some dark pages.”
The wall of
separation began to crumble, Stewart argued, in 1981, when eight of the nine
Supreme Court justices ruled in a case called Widmar v. Vincent that it was unconstitutional for a school to ban meetings of a
religious group on campus if it allowed secular groups to meet there. The
reasoning behind this decision, Stewart said, was that religion was merely a
form of “speech” and therefore could not be restricted under the First
Amendment guarantee of “freedom of speech.” Stewart quoted the one dissent in
the case, by Justice Byron White, which argued that under the majority’s ruling
“the Religion Clauses would be emptied of any independent meaning in
circumstances in which religious practice took the form of speech.” In other
words, if religion is already protected under the free-speech clause, the First
Amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise” of religion is redundant — and the
Establishment Clause is meaningless.
In the next 30
years, according to Stewart, three people would work to widen the crack in the
wall opened by Widmar into a giant
gateway for inserting religion into the public schools. One was Jay Sekulow, a
Right-wing legal strategist and co-founder of the ACLJ. The other two were
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who joined the Supreme Court in 1986 and
1991, respectively, and gave Sekulow and his colleagues two virtually certain
votes for any case expanding the reach of religion into the schools. In 1987,
Sekulow won a Supreme Court ruling that the Jews for Jesus organization had a
constitutional right to pass out tracts in airport terminals.
Stewart
describes a succession of cases — Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches School District, Rosenberger v. University of Virginia
and the 2001 decision that specifically legitimized the Good News Clubs, Good
News Club v. Milford Central
School District — that expanded the idea
that religion is just another form of speech and extended it to schools. In his
majority opinion in Milford,
Stewart wrote, Justice Clarence Thomas “essentially destroyed the postwar
consensus on the separation of church and state.” A concurring opinion by
Antonin Scalia took special aim on the idea that religious activity in the
schools would put peer pressure on students with minority religious views to go
along with their classmates in the majority; religious peer pressure, Scalia
wrote, “when it arises from private activities … [is] one of the attendant
consequences of freedom of association.”
According to
Stewart, the stated intent of Thomas’s and Scalia’s opinions in Milford “was to place religious programs on a par with
non-religious programs in the competition for after-school resources. In
reality, and as a direct result of the illogical structure of their thinking,
the effect of the decision has been to elevate religious groups to a
supercategory that enjoys a substantially greater degree of access than any
other kind of group.” The Good News Clubs and their sponsor, CEF, have
essentially used Milford as a
legal bludgeon against any school district that dares to offer resistance,
Stewart said, and their success — according to a fact sheet from CEF’s Web
site, in 2010 Good News Clubs met in over 3,000 public schools in the U.S. and
reached over 133,000 children — has led to further efforts by the radical Right
to foment peer-to-peer evangelism at America’s public schools.
“The idea that
‘it’s O.K. if kids do it’ is so accepted that religious leaders are publishing
books with titles like Reclaim Your Schools,”
Stewart said. “Many people think religion in schools is restricted to certain
areas of the country, but religion pervades public schools in all areas of the country.” Stewart learned that when she
and her family moved to New York City and enrolled their children in the local
public school — which on Sundays actually became a church, under a program that
made school facilities available to religious organizations for out-and-out
worship services, and what’s more offered them virtually rent-free.
“I decided to
attend the church at my school,” Stewart recalled, “and the pastor said, ‘Pray
for the children that they come to know Jesus.’ I learned that the church was
occupying our school four times a week and they were paying no rent [just the
cost of janitors to clean up afterwards]. Ours was one of over 150 schools in
New York City that also existed as houses of worship. In public-school
classrooms I heard the pastor promote an anti-Gay ministry run by his church
and a prayer that America’s government would be taken under God’s dominion and
control.”
Destroying Public
Education
Stewart sees the
Good News Clubs and the other organizations in the radical Right’s dizzying
array of groups pushing religious agendas in schools as merely the opening
wedge in a campaign to destroy public education altogether. She noted that in
many cases where a Good News Club has installed itself in a school, the result
has been a divisive community conflict that pits parent against parent, family
against family, and church against church — and, she argued, rather than trying
to avoid these conflicts the organizers of the Good News Clubs seem to be
pushing them deliberately and reveling in them when they occur. She also
pointed to the irony that many of the religious-Right activists pushing a
religious agenda on the public schools don’t send their own children there;
instead, they send them to private schools or homeschool them.
A quote in
Stewart’s book exposes the two-track assault of the religious Right against the
public-school system and their fundamental disbelief in the whole idea of
offering non-religious education to children. The writer is Reverend Andrew
Sandlin, and the article Stewart quoted was published in 1994 in the newsletter
of the Chalcedon Foundation — a group of so-called “Christian
Reconstructionists” who, among other things, believe democracy is un-Christian
and monarchy is the only Biblically sanctioned form of government.
“The attitude
and approach of Christians should be that they never expose their children to
public education, but that they should work increasingly to expose public
education to the claims of Christ,” Rev. Sandlin wrote. “Certain specially
selected Christians, in fact, should pray and work tirelessly to obtain
teaching and school board and even administrative posts within public
education. The penultimate goal of these Christians should be the privatization
of these larcenous institutions, and the ultimate aim the bringing of them
under the authority of Christ and His word.”
