Over the next little while, I’m going to be posting a number of diaries on the problems that have been created for American society because the moderate majority has given extremism a pass for too many years. First, though, I’d like to establish the hard and uncomfortable truth that I was, for too many years, a part of that willfully blind moderate majority and am in no way pointing a finger at “them” without acknowledging the other 3 fingers pointing back at me. Church membership is a huge part of many peoples’ identities and social support networks. It is human nature to be protective of institutions that fulfill so many of our essential emotional needs. I mention my own history to illustrate the fact that even people who have grown up in a conservative church environment, or have been active in one throughout much of their adult lives, can and do break away from that influence.
One thing I have heard many people express is frustration with “so-called Christians” who continue to support the amoral, sinful, cruel and corrupt POTUS, not to mention God’s Own Party, the Republicans, who have allowed and abetted 45’s egregious behavior. Those Evangelicals are Christians and it is important to face up to that fact, even if it makes other Christians in more inclusive churches uncomfortable. In order to confront the reality of the sincerity of that support, I think we have to understand the nature of religious fundamentalism and in particular, the reactions of human beings raised inside a powerful belief system. It’s a complicated interaction of many social and financial factors and I think it’s helpful to break the subject down into smaller parts. So, today, I’d like to talk about childhood indoctrination into religious faith. In particular, this post concerns some of the methods that Evangelical Christians use to indoctrinate not only their own children, but also to target other children, sometimes without the informed consent or knowledge of their parents.
Two child-targeting Evangelical Christian initiatives — Vacation Bible School and Good News Club — illustrate how churches use public schools and other secular public venues to gain access to “unchurched” children in order to indoctrinate them into their fundamentalist faith. One would think that the public discussions of one notorious VBS, Jesus Camp, and the disturbing videos which came out about it, would have alerted concerned parents to the danger of letting religion have a free pass to indoctrinate their youngsters, but apparently not. Religion has historically been given that “pass” and awarded the privilege of operating with almost no legal oversight or public accountability. Actually, religion is not only given a pass but is still presumed to be, on the whole, a positive and good thing for children, even by parents who would be horrified if they knew the true intentions of religious proselytizers who have targeted their children for training as warriors for Jesus.
The other, far more insidious and widespread legally and socially-sanctioned method for extremist proselytizing of children is the Good News Club, the explicitly Christian evangelical initiative of a group which calls itself the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), whose number and influence in schools and communities has been growing at an alarming rate. A 2012 article in the Guardian by Katherine Stewart (author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children) told the story of how the clubs, emboldened by the protection of a flawed 2001 Supreme Court decision, are no longer bothering to even pretend that their real agenda is not proselytizing and grooming Christian warriors:
For instance, the CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that "the Amalekites were completely defeated." In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the literal message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one of them:
"You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left."
"That was pretty clear, wasn't it?" the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.
Asking if Saul would "pass the test" of obedience, the text points to Saul's failure to annihilate every last Amalekite, posing the rhetorical question:
"If you are asked to do something, how much of it do you need to do before you can say, 'I did it!'?"
"If only Saul had been willing to seek God for strength to obey!" the lesson concludes.
Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:
"The Amalekites had heard about Israel's true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment." Katherine Stewart, How Christian fundamentalists plan to teach genocide to schoolchildren, The Guardian, 30 May 2012.
Wow, that’s not chilling at all!
These fundamentalist Christian proselytizing vehicles won the right to insert themselves into public schools under the deceptive and insidious ruling in 2001. In that decision (Good News Club vs Milford Central School), the Supreme Court Justice disingenuously agreed with the CEF defense that the clubs were not religious in nature at all, but were merely clubs performing the laudable function of “teaching of morals and character development from a particular viewpoint”. Nothing to worry about there, right? But, wait. Here is the CEF viewpoint, straight from their "About Us" webpage:
"Child Evangelism Fellowship® (CEF®) is a Bible-centered, worldwide organization that is dedicated to seeing every child reached with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, discipled and established in a local church."
Okay, then! That clears that up!
Many parents uncritically accept these clubs as being harmlessly what their deliberately kid-friendly name implies: a club for fun and belonging. They either do not realize or do not want to realize that the raison d'être of Good News Clubs is to convert children and turn them into Christian evangelicals. These clubs are designed to pull in children under false pretenses (in many cases offering after-school care which is almost irresistible to parents who are struggling with poorly paid jobs and a lack of affordable child-care that is becoming a national crisis) and then convert them to fundamentalist Christianity. The benign-sounding name, the lure of a fun-sounding "club" and the fact that the children are often strongly encouraged to join by respected authorities (their schools) are all part of an insidious strategy to gain access to children without the truly informed consent of their parents and, obviously, of the children themselves. School acceptance of these clubs, mandated by the Supreme Court, means that both children and their parents are deceived into thinking that their secular, public schools endorse these religious clubs - and that there is no deeper agenda - which is one of the main reasons why the CEF fought so hard and so dishonestly to get them into public schools in the first place.
Christian churches have long used childhood indoctrination to ensure that obedient and thoroughly cowed legions of believers continue to swell their ranks, providing them with the power of numbers, financial wealth and, of course, warriors willing to die for their god/church/divinely appointed rulers. It has always been in the interest of those who hold power to have a large faith following, and religion has provided both the means and the ends.
There is solid empirical evidence behind the oft-quoted assertion of St. Francis Xavier (one of the first Jesuits, a Catholic order of priests famed as educators): "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” (alternatively: "and I care not who has him thereafter"). The well-educated, observant and intelligent Jesuits had noticed that people who are thoroughly indoctrinated in religious dogma in early childhood retain those beliefs throughout life, while people in whom religious belief has not been inculcated early are more difficult to convert - and more resistant to control. They realized, though they did not have the language to describe it yet, that the psychological impact of early indoctrination - particularly indoctrination based upon fear, confusion and intermittent psychological rewards and punishments - usually lasts a lifetime.
Young children have no defenses against deliberate indoctrination. When they are taught to fear a god through stories which illustrate the god's relentlessly violent and implacably unforgiving reaction - not to lying, stealing and murdering which the Biblical god often condones and even orders, but to disbelief and disobedience - they learn the lesson through fear and they learn it well. The Biblical god is a terrifyingly powerful "awesome" god and the one "sin" He will never forgive is lack of belief. The children are primed first with the "fun" and then the stories are told, gradually leading to the point when the children are tearfully, fearfully professing "belief".
Research has shown that one of the most powerful human motivators is fear, and one of the most difficult psychological challenges to overcome is irrational fear, especially fear that has taken root in the mind at an early age. Religious proselytizers know this, and this is why they are so insistent upon childhood indoctrination. Children are vulnerable to lifelong damage — traumatic bonding — from the powerful emotional appeal of fear and guilt-based religious proselytizing. They cannot "unthink" terrible thoughts which have been planted in their minds early. They cannot "unfeel" the horror and the fear that is elicited in their psyches through early Bible instruction.
Christian eschatology - and the terrifying images it evokes - is nothing less than psychological abuse of children. Yet, not only are parents permitted to subject their own children to these horrors, but religious groups are being permitted to sneak their fundamentalist religious indoctrination into public and private schools where they can prey on other peoples' children as well. In fact, gaining access to the children of parents who would not voluntarily subject their children to this violent, misanthropic and destructive theology is precisely the purpose of the Good News Club.
The CEF is an explicitly evangelical, explicitly fundamentalist, explicitly and unapologetically Christian group and by continuing to be willfully blind to their purpose, parents are participating in the indoctrination of their children into extremist religion, whether they want to admit it to themselves or not. It is vital that more people speak out about this strategy of the religious right. They have already insinuated themselves into thousands of public schools in the USA and around the world, and they do not intend to stop until they have converted everyone.
Telling ourselves that one powerful religious group really cannot take over like that; kidding ourselves that the first amendment will protect people from religious tyranny is being willfully blind, deaf and dumb. As we have seen with the concurrent (and not coincidental) strategy of powerful groups to get issues affecting peoples' constitutional rights onto ballot measures so that they can be put to a majority vote, the longterm objectives of the conservative right wing have been carefully and patiently planned. There is a real danger that the majority can use its power and clout to force their view on the minority until the power is so nearly total that complete annihilation of opposing viewpoints is achieved. That is where the freedom from religion part should come in – if the court is not swayed by the power of the Christian majority. With the Republican-controlled congress now confirming radical right wing ideologues to lifetime appointments in federal courts, and even to the Supreme Court, the issue is now red alert urgent.
We’ve got to go to the root of the problem and figure out how it is that Evangelicals continue to support and vote for a corrupt and immoral party which shows no Christlike agenda. That means we must address the realities of spiritual abuse and taxpayer-funded childhood indoctrination before it is too late.