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[Henk Elegeert]

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The Religious Right's Plot To Take Control Of Our Public Schools
The people who brought you "Jesus Camp" are moving into your neighborhood
school. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
*March 6, 2012*  |

*Photo Credit: yamchild*




Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once wrote, “Religion is certainly a
source of positive values, and we need as many positive values in the
school as we can get.” It sounds benign. But what if the particular brand
of religion is coercive, and in conflict with the teachings and values of
the family of the students being targeted? It doesn’t matter. Because under
the law as it stands now, evangelical churches have the right to gather,
teach and proselytize in your neighborhood school.
*The<http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-Club-Christian-Americas/dp/1586488430>
** Good News Club: The Stealth Assault on America’s
Children<http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-Club-Christian-Americas/dp/1586488430>
* by Katherine Stewart uncovers a right-wing conspiracy to infiltrate and
destroy the nation’s public school system, using recent Supreme Court
decisions as a lever. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s seen public school
kids, perhaps their own, targeted for proselytizing by peers, teachers and
adult volunteers. And for those who haven’t, it’s a wake-up call.

*Spiritual Warfare in Your Neighborhood*

How did it come to this? If you haven’t personally observed today’s
aggressive “spiritual warfare,” it may be difficult to imagine that young
children are being taught that their school is a battlefield and they are
the warriors who must save their classmates from themselves. With a
remarkable amount of grace and restraint, Stewart describes the havoc in
communities around the nation as initiatives to evangelize public school
students have increased. The effect is always the same: the polarization
that results when the Good News Club shows up inevitably disrupts the
ability of parents and teachers to work cooperatively as a school
community. And the resulting dissension and loss of trust in the schools,
says Stewart, is exactly the result the right wing has in mind.

The religious right's big break was a 2001 Supreme Court case, *The Good
News Club v. Milford Central School*, which unleashed a new wave of school
evangelization. This decision essentially told schools they could not say
no to church groups that wanted to use their facilities for after-school
gatherings. Stewart describes “the new legal juggernaut of the Christian
Right” —an army of legal advocacy groups, including the Alliance Defense
Fund, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Liberty Counsel, and
others — that raise hundred of millions of dollars each year for the common
goal of injecting stealth evangelism into public schools. They’ve spent the
last 10 years figuring out how to use this decision as a wedge to maximize
church control over school curricula, personnel and even the physical
campus.

The spear point of this effort is the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF),
which was founded in 1937. For decades, CEF has run Good News Clubs —
after-school Bible classes taught by church-trained mothers and pastors’
wives in suburban homes around the country. But the Supreme Court decision
made it legal to bring these classes right into the schools; and the
volunteers who teach them typically also volunteer as classroom aides,
which gives them a mantle of school authority. To a primary-aged child, it
looks as though this indoctrination is simply a part of the school
curriculum.

Stewart cites CEF figures that claim to have set up Good News Clubs “in
3,410 schools -- up 728 percent since the 2001 Supreme Court decision.” The
clubs are sponsored by local churches, which are encouraged to “Adopt a
Public School” by CEF and others. And they are aiming to take the program
to every public elementary school in the country over the next decade or so.

The court case is still celebrated on the CEF Web site with the words, “God
has opened the doors of public schools to the Gospel! CEF is ready and
eager to help churches enter the schools, fully equipped to share the
Gospel and teach the Bible to school children and extend the biblical
influence to families.”

Stewart explains how CEF has used this access to teach children to conduct
“student-initiated” ideological warfare in school. Public schools are
forced to distribute the club’s media and announcements to all students,
and to allow tables with media at all kinds of school events. These tables
are typically laden with balloons and sweets in order to draw kids in. The
coercion extends from the playground to the classroom, so there’s nowhere
non-evangelical kids can go to avoid classmates who are insisting — with
support from adult aides — that they’re doomed to hell unless they join the
club. According to Stewart, it’s hard to overstate the sense of confusion
experienced by young Catholic, Mormon, mainstream Protestant, Jewish, and
non-theist children when adult authority figures in their school promote a
particular sectarian belief, often while actively denigrating and
contradicting the worldview they’re being taught at home.

*The 4/14 Window*

CEF is just one of an array of organizations targeting children in an
international evangelizing effort called the “4/14 Window," aimed at
children from four to 14 years old. Stewart’s book points out that this
infiltration is a well-orchestrated effort conducted by a “small number of
influential actors.” With a few exceptions, noted by the author, the
organizations involved teach a literal interpretation of the Bible, and
“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 a
Christian control of all the important parts of government and society.”

The push to infiltrate social institutions is promoted by a theology called
Dominionism, which originated in Christian Reconstructionism and the New
Apostolic Reformation (NAR), but is now spreading rapidly across the right
wing of the evangelical world. The NAR has simplified the theology into a
campaign to gain Christian control over the "seven mountains" of American
culture: family, business, media, education, religion, goverment, and the
arts. The Good News Club is a leading initiative to achieve domination on
the education front.

As a researcher and writer working to defend religious pluralism and
secular democracy, I often stress the difference between those with
conservative religious beliefs and those who are determined to force those
beliefs on the state and everyone else. Stewart also makes the clear
distinction between Christian conservatives, the Christian Right, and
Christian Nationalists. “All conservatives who are also Christians are not
members of the Christian Right,” she writes. “And many supporters of the
Christian Right are not Christian Nationalist. 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.” The people
Stewart repeatedly encountered in her research often fell into the latter
group, which is the most extreme and dangerous faction of the religious
right.

*“To take over the world, focus on the youth”*

Stewart attended trainings and conferences to learn more about how these
activities are being coordinated. She describes a CEF conference keynoted
by attorney Matthew Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel and one of the
leading forces defending church access to public schools and other publicly
funded venues in the name of “religious freedom.” Staver makes it clear
that he’s on a war footing. Stewart quotes his keynote address: “If you
want to ultimately take over the world, how are you going to do it when you
have limited time and limited resources?...The best way to do it, and
anyone who studies warfare [knows] you focus on the most strategic part of
the human chain link...You focus on youth.”

“Knock down all the doors, all of the barriers, to all of the 65,000-plus
elementary schools in the country and take the gospel to this open mission
field now! Not later, Now!”

The battle to evangelize other people’s children is justified by a dualist
worldview that sees every aspect of life as part of a cosmic battle between
the forces of Jesus and Satan. Staver describes young children as the
“strategic link,” in winning the war. Throughout the book, Stewart
highlights the single-minded focus of those leading these ministries to
children, and their unwavering belief that what they are doing is holy —
despite the deep and lasting damage it will do to the children, families,
schools, and communities they target. If the upshot of this infiltration is
that the community turns its back on the school, that’s considered a bonus.

After all, many CEF teachers and supporters don’t send their kids to public
schools anyway. They prefer to send their own kids to Christian academies,
or homeschool them — even while they’re devoting many hours each week to
infiltrating and undermining their local public schools.

*Targeting the Upper Grades*

While much of the book is dedicated to Stewart’s extensive tracking of
CEF’s work in elementary schools, she also describes other tactics being
used to reach middle and high school students as well. These include
efforts to alter curriculum in public schools to reflect a Christian
Nationalist worldivew, as seen in the recent battles over social studies
guidelines in Texas schools. Other avenues include abstinence-only,
substance abuse and anti-drunk driving educational programs.

One of the movement's big cash cows is “character” or “moral” education
programs, which can include church-written curriculum delivered by
church-trained instructors, motivational assembly speakers with a
Christianized message, or Christian rock bands -- which the schools pay a
hefty sum for. These programs are a commonly used foothold into high
schools, one that’s become so common it has been given a nickname: pizza
evangelism.

*When the School House Becomes a Church*

And it’s not enough just to co-opt the social atmosphere and the
curriculum. The new Supreme Court rulings have forced schools to hand over
their buildings to churches as well. Thousands of churches across the
country now take over public school facilities on weekends, usually without
paying anything more than a custodial fee to the district for the use of
their multi-million dollar campuses. This allows these churches to start
new congregations in communities where they wouldn’t otherwise be viable or
affordable. Liberal, urban schools are hardly exempt: Stewart describes
school-based churches in Seattle and Santa Barbara, and estimates that
one-fifth of all New York City schools now harbor churches as well — almost
all of them conservative and evangelical.

This trend has some unanticipated consequences that might not occur to the
casual observer. The “ex-gay” Exodus International Church set up shop in
one of Manhattan’s “most liberal and gay-friendly neighborhoods.“ Another
church plant installed a complete communications network — including a
satellite dish on the roof — in open defiance of the principal, who had
repeatedly denied them permission to do this. And there’s no legal way the
principal can throw them out for this.

*From Cult Leaders to Theocrats*

The church planted across the street from Stewart’s house in Manhattan —
the school her daughter attends — was a part of the Every Nation network,
formerly called Morning Star. Every Nation is a New Apostolic network of
ministries founded by former leaders of Maranatha Campus Ministries, an
international ministry disbanded after years of bad press about its
authoritarian and cult-like practices. Maranatha's founder, Bob Weiner,
later became one of the elite “apostles” in C. Peter Wagner’s International
Coalition of Apostles.

Wagner was a key player in well-orchestrated efforts to evangelize as much
of the world as possible prior to the year 2000. Many current sophisticated
initiatives and coordinated efforts to access specific populations around
the world are a continuation of that global effort, part of which survived
as a movement dubbed by Wagner as the “New Apostolic Reformation.” (Sarah
Palin is perhaps the movement’s most famous protoge.)

NAR’s mission is to break down denominational divides and unite all of the
world’s evangelical churches under the dictatorial authority of their
chosen “apostles” and “prophets.” The goal is to take full Christian
“dominion” over society in order to bring about Jesus’ return. Although NAR
is only a part of the American Christian Dominionist scene, it provides a
large and important window into the dualistic and aggressive nature of
today’s Christian Nationalism.

A glimpse of NAR’s approach to the indoctrination of children could be seen
in the 2006 documentary *Jesus Camp*, nominated for an Academy Award. The
movie was widely criticized by evangelical leaders for using scare tactics
and focusing on a “fringe” children’s camp.  However, the featured leaders
in the film, Becky Fischer and Lou Engle, are both part of the same
apostolic network (Harvest International Ministries of Che Ahn), and Engle
has since become one of the most powerful and politically well-connected
leaders in today’s Religious Right. So it’s not an understatement to say
that the people who brought you*Jesus Camp *are now trying to take over
your neighborhood school.

In regards to NAR, there is one minor correction to the book that should be
noted. Every Nation is indeed a New Apostolic network, but another church
mentioned later in the book as part of NAR is not. Life Challenge Church in
Odessa is a United Pentecostal Church and belongs to a Pentecostal
denomination. I point this out because Stewart mentions that the women of
the church favored long skirts and had very long hair. Typically, NAR
leaders do not dress in a particularly conservative manner, and in fact
defy common stereotypes of the Religious Right. They usually preach in
casual attire, including worn blue jeans, and youth leaders are often
heavily tattooed and pierced.

But that quibble aside, Stewart has written a powerful and compelling book
that should be read by anyone who doubts the current threat to separation
of church and state. She leaves no doubt that the religious right is on a
long-term crusade to undermine secular public education — and the cruel
irony is that those ideologically opposed to public education are using the
very openness and democratic nature of these public facilities to advance
their own agendas.

Stewart writes: “Back home, I glance out the window at the bright red door
across the street. Henceforth, I realize, I will have to accept that on
Sunday’s my daughter’s public school, the furniture that the PTA
contributions helped buy, and my daughter’s smiling photograph will be
turned over to a group that is dedicated at its core to destroying public
education in America. I remind myself that the school will be ours again on
Monday. But the truth is, I don’t really believe in that door anymore.”
Rachel Tabachnick is an independent researcher who writes and speaks about
the political and societal impact of the Religious Right. She can be
reached at Protectpluralism[at]gmail.com."

Kerk en school gescheiden?

Henk Elegeert
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