Today’s review is on The Good News Club: The Religious Right Stealth Assault on American Children by Katherine Stewart. It is 287 pages long including notes and an index. Cover is a picture of a playground with a cross done in a hopscotch style. The reader is someone who is interested in nonfiction, the religious right, and the continued separation of church and state. There is no foul language, no sexuality and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the back of book- 2009, The Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club bills itself as an after-school Bible study, but Stewart soon discovered its real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity. Astonished to discover that the Supreme Court had deemed this religious activity legal in public schools, Stuart began an investigative journey to dozens of cities across the nation to document the impact.
As Stewart makes chillingly clear, the rapidly expanding network of the Good News Clubs represents just one of the range of initiatives intended to insert religious values into public schools. Although they appear to be spontaneous, local events, they are in fact organized and funded at a national level. Taken together, they represent a new strategy of the Religious Right in its long-running aim to ”take back America,” undermining our public education system and secular democracy itself.
Review- An eye opening and disturbing expose of the religious right's newest way to take away our freedoms. Stewart was sending her children to her local public school when a new club started in the area. Interested in this after school Bible club and what it was really she came to discover that it was teaching exactly what you would expect. Disturbed by the discovery of fundamentalist Christianity in her secular public school Stuart began to investigate the Good News Club, and the people who were running it. In the book that follows her investigation, is an expansive book but terrifying to see how far the religious right will go to get their way. Across the country, Stewart interviews different people both involved with the club and others were are not, and comes to a not surprising conclusion. The conclusion is that the Good News Club is a serious threat to public education and the separation of church and state. I personally did not find that shocking at all but seeing it in black-and-white laid out so clearly and where all the money being funded into the Good News Club is coming from was quite disturbing. If you are at all interested in the continued separation of church and state I highly recommend that you read this book.
I give this book Five out of Five Stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my library.
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