When I was a kid, 3rd or 4th grade, one of the other kids invited me to his place after school to attend a Good News Club meeting hosted by his mother. I went, not willingly but at the insistence of my own mother. What I encountered there, in essence, was a religious cult.
I was informed that I was evil, that I had been evil from before I even hit the sheets at birth. I was instructed that the only way to redeem myself was to accept Christ as my yadda-yadda. My friend's mom said by not doing that I would condemn myself to hell. In addition to being “saved,” one had to earn favor by telling schoolmates the “good news” and recruiting them to come to meetings. Keep in mind, then and today, Good News Clubs are teaching this to children as young as four.
A child of four can easily be made to accept that they are evil. The malleability of young children is a primary reason Good News Clubs exist. There are about 3,500 active GNCs in the U.S. today. Please step below the fold with me …
I’m not sure why, but my BS detector, even at that age, went off after the first line and never shut down. Maybe my instincts had developed to a point where I could sense it, don’t know. Thing is, she could tell me I was evil, but I did not feel it. I did not feel the heat of the hellfire, and I couldn’t smell the brimstone. So, I lied and said the words to get out of the spotlight.
Good News Clubs and their parent organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship, are part of a comprehensive assault on public education in the United States. CEF refers to pubic elementary schools as “mission fields” and to the children in them as the “harvest.” They also use terms like “kicking in the doors” when opening new chapters in resistant schools. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Good News Club vs. Milford Central School that the club could not be excluded from school property under the first amendment. CEF has used this ruling to enter school after school and pose as a school program.
Their aim, if they cannot convert public schools to religious indoctrination academies, is to destroy them completely, running zealots for local school board positions to that end. Republican governors are rigidly in line with the idea, actively destroying public education in their states from preschool to PhD by slashing education funds while accelerating the tax money pipeline to charter and online school profiteers.
See, a secular education is essential to a secular democracy. If the ghouls can destroy pubic schools, the government will follow, eventually. Et voila: theocracy.
The CEF brand of fundamentalism is an end-times philosophy which holds that either you accept their faith, or you are damned. If they can gain control of the government, only members of their chosen will be worthy of anything from them. In short, they don’t need to give a damn; the rest of us are all going to die. Assuming, I guess, that God doesn’t care about anybody else.