AOF Activities & Events
"Give us a child until he is seven," the Jesuits famously said, "and we will have him for the rest of his life." According to author Katherine Stewart, evangelical Protestents have torn this leaf from the Jesuit book, focusing their missionary efforts on children who are easy to intimidate and who yet lack critical thinking skills. In 2009, she and her husband Matthew had personal experience with this, when a group called “The Good News Club” tried to set up a so-called “nondenominational Bible study” group at their seven-year-old daughter’s grade school.
It turned out that the Good News Club was actually a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), founded in 1937 with a very specific and deeply fundamentalist agenda. Its self-declared mission “is to produce conversion experiences in very young children and thus equip them to ‘witness’ for other children.” Good News Clubs are established in public schools across the nation, and few children are spared their attention, not even Christian children who fail to share their particular shade of religious ideology. Sophisticated stealth tactics bamboozle the children (and parents) into thinking the Clubs operate under color of the school's authority -- but in fact, their ultimate goal is to shut down the public school system.
In the aftermath, Katherine wrote The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Assault on America's Children, a hair-raising account and exposee of this mostly under-the-radar effort to evangalize children in public schools.
—Jerry Fallwell, 1979
“The modern, public education system was begun in an effort to deliver children from the Christian religion…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.”
—D. James Kennedy, founder of Truth in Action Ministries
“Knock down all of 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!”
—Mathew Staver, President and Founder of Liberty Counsel, 2010
Note, this will be a joint meeting with Americans United Sacramento, with sponsorships from the Humanist Association of the Greater Sacramento Area, the Sac County ACLU, the American Constitution Society, the California Council of Churches and California Church IMPACT, and possibly other groups. A book-signing and reception will follow the presentation; Katherine will have copies book to sign & sell.