The Good News Club

We have been told, mostly by religious conservatives, that US public schools are devoid of religion. Following the Supreme Court decisions concerning school prayer in the 1960s, the usual story goes, God was kicked out of the classroom. I believe that this story grossly misrepresents reality. In conducting research for this book, I traveled to dozens of cities and towns across the country. I visited regions famous for their piety, like west Texas and Alabama, and others known for the opposite, like Seattle and New York City. Everywhere I found religion-driven programs and initiatives inserting themselves into public school systems with unprecedented force and unexpected consequences. I saw student athletic programs turned into vehicles for religious recruiting. I attended services at a dozen of the hundreds of school facilities that double as taxpayer-financed houses of worship. I heard the stories of children who have been subject to proselytizing in classrooms and school yards, and I spoke with other children who have been instructed to proselytize their friends at school. I met with school board officials who are busy rewriting textbook standards to conform to their own religious agendas. I interviewed the people promoting and attending "Bible Study" courses that turned out to be programs of sectarian indoctrination. And I sat in on training sessions with instructors for the Good News Club, which now operates in nearly 3,500 public elementary schools around the country. Today, there is more religious activity in American public schools than there has been for the past 100 years.

Like the Good News Club that appeared one day in my California town, many of the religious initiatives in public schools present themselves as spontaneous expressions of faith by members of local communities. But they are not. The labor behind the initiatives may be local, but the ideas, the money, and the legal firepower that make them possible are national. The movement is coordinated and given strategic direction by extremely well financed groups whose leaders write the scripts that are followed in classrooms, playgrounds, and courtrooms from New York to California. Some of the most powerful forces in public education today are groups that you may never have heard of—the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), the Liberty Counsel, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), and other conservative legal groups—that, with combined budgets totaling over $100 million per year, have masterminded the religious assault on public education.

Many religions are represented to some degree in initiatives that have inserted themselves in public schools, but evangelical Christianity accounts for the overwhelming majority of the programs. Although the evangelical programs often present themselves as nondenominational, they tend to represent a very conservative, even fundamentalist form of religion. Most of the activists I met believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God; that conversion to their form of faith is the only path to salvation; and that they are engaged in a daily struggle with Satan. They also believe that most people who call themselves Christian are not. Many of them are confident that United Methodists, liberal Congregationalists, US Episcopalians, the "wrong kind" of Presbyterians,¹ and Roman Catholics, for example, will not be among the saved.

The largest and most active programs at work in the public schools are associated with groups that should be called Christian Nationalists. These groups maintain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that it is the right of Christians to take it back. They see their efforts in the schools as a part of a plan to bring the nation's children back to its founding religion and thereby lay the basis for Christian control of all the important parts of government and society. Many of the activists I met believe that the United States has a special role to play in preparing for the imminent end of the world. Of course, many social conservatives who are also Christians are not members of the Christian Right, and many supporters of the Christian Right are not Christian Nationalists; however, to a degree that many social conservatives fail to appreciate, it is the Christian Nationalists who are driving the agenda in the public schools.

In my research, I was surprised to see, over and over again, that one of the distinguishing features of the public school initiatives involving religion—and one of the reasons they have failed to attract the attention they should—is that they rely on misdirection and deceit. Programs that advertise themselves as Bible "study" from a historical or nondenominational perspective, for example, routinely turn out to be thinly disguised sectarian training. Programs presented as initiatives arising from students are instead conceived, coordinated, and funded by adults who may live in a different state. Programs that were described to school administrators and legal staff as entirely independent of the schools in which they operate turn around and seek to convey exactly the opposite message to the children who participate in them. Programs that reassure parents that their aim is to reinforce the religion of their families make it part of their mission to convert children to beliefs that differ from those of their parents. Programs that ostensibly limit their attention to students whose parents have explicitly permitted their participation seek to use those students to reach the children of parents who have not given their consent.

Although the programs aim at all age groups, a surprising number are directed at the very young—children in the first years of school. Among many of the modern missionary groups, it is now accepted wisdom that the most fruitful targets of conversion efforts are children between the ages of four and fourteen—a cohort that they refer to as "the 4/14 Window." Schools are especially attractive because small children are easily swayed by representatives of authority, such as teachers and school officials, and typically can't distinguish between schoolteachers and the people who teach them in school classrooms after hours.

I was surprised to discover that the damage caused by these initiatives did not always take the form one might expect. In the usual narratives about religion in the schools, the unstated premise is that the religious activity in question represents the will of a majority, and minorities within the community are harmed. But in many instances, the programs enter the schools from outside the community altogether, and are at odds with it from the beginning. And, while minorities frequently bear a special burden, the greatest harm often falls on the school and its populace in general. The insertion of programs with blatantly sectarian agendas into public schools causes intense conflict among formerly harmonious groups of parents, students, and school staff. It imposes a substantial and inappropriate burden on school administrators and teachers. Communities that once rallied around the school begin to withdraw their support. And representatives of all religious groups—including those that sought to insert themselves in the schools in the first place—feel unfairly treated. In short, these initiatives produce precisely the kind of undesirable outcomes that always result when individual sects within pluralistic societies attempt to commandeer common resources for their own purposes.

It would be nice to believe that this cost to the community and to public education is an unintended by-product of efforts by religious groups to express their views. With respect to the Christian Nationalist groups most closely and intensively involved in school programs, however, such a comforting assumption would be inaccurate. Here was perhaps the greatest surprise for me in my research, and the most important reason for writing this book. The activists with whom I met, by and large, see the weakening of support for public education as a desirable side effect or even a goal of their work. Indeed, the national groups most active in supporting religious initiatives in public schools see our system of public education as a bad thing. These are the same groups that sponsor efforts to undermine, defund, and perhaps ultimately destroy the system altogether. If they can't "break down the doors" to the public schools, as some of them describe their efforts, they will be happy just to break the schools.

It is often difficult for people who are not close to this movement to accept that its aims with respect to public education are so destructive. And yet if one simply listens to what the leaders of the movement say and take them at their word, that is clearly the case. In 1979, Jerry Falwell made the agenda transparent: "I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we don't have public schools," he said. "The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them."² Robert Thoburn, a member of the Council for National Policy—a "little-known group of the most powerful conservatives in the country" according to the New Yorker—repeated the message a few years later: "I imagine every Christian would agree that we need to remove the humanism from the public schools. There is only one way to accomplish this: to abolish the public schools." He urged Christians to run for school boards wherever possible, explaining that "Your goal must be to sink the ship."³ The founder of the influential and deeply conservative megachurch, Coral Ridge Ministries (recently renamed Truth in Action Ministries), D. James Kennedy, continued the drumbeat of hostilities against public schools, asserting that "the modern, public education system was begun in an effort to deliver children from the Christian religion," and alleging that "our public education system has been engaged in a virtual act of war on America and has placed the very survival of this nation at risk."⁴

As my research progressed, I found myself asking how the present level of involvement of religion in public schools is possible in the United States, given our vaunted separation of church and state. There are many complicated answers that stretch back through history and across contemporary society, politics, and culture. And then there is one simple answer that covers much of the same ground: the Supreme Court. We have been told for a long time, mostly by conservatives, that activist judges are necessarily liberals, and that these activist liberal judges took God out of the schools. In fact, it was the collective wisdom of the American people, not the arbitrary mandates of judges, that secularized US schools, mainly because we discovered over long and bitter experience that introducing sectarian agendas into public schools is divisive and unsustainable. Conversely, it has been activist judges of a conservative stripe who are in large measure responsible for, in effect, legislating the mandatory inclusion of religious programming in the schools. The Good News Club was a comparatively small operation until 2001, when the Supreme Court all but made it law that every school should have one. There were few churches operating rent-free in New York City's public schools until the courts handed down a related set of decisions that all but required that every school building in the city should become a house of worship on Sunday.

Religious nationalism has now become part of American political theater, and we take notice of it mostly during election campaigns. When it shows up in our backyard, in our schools and local communities, we reach instinctively for our First Amendment, interpreting the whole matter in terms of whose rights are being respected and whose feelings are being hurt. The most important issue before us, however, is not just a question of the rights or feelings of individuals. The fact is that there is a movement in our midst that rejects the values of inclusivity and diversity, a movement that seeks to undermine the foundations of modern secular democracy. It has set its sights on destroying the system of public education—and it is succeeding. Unless we confront that fact directly, we may well keep our rights but lose the system of education that has long served as the silent pillar of our democracy.