Child Evangelism Fellowship

AlterNet / By Valerie Tarico

 2 COMMENTS

The Christian Group Recruiting Kids in Public Schools

A fundamentalist Christian organization views children as a market for religious recruiting.

June 6, 2012  |  

 

 

 

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It is 1970, a June afternoon in Phoenix, about 105 degrees. My mother pulls into a dusty parking lot where cars and church vans are dropping off little kids with scruffy suitcases and sleeping bags. At $20 a subsidized head, I am surrounded by other kids like me whose parents can’t afford to send them to a real summer camp. We are headed for Camp Good News where the price we will pay for ordinary camp activities is a routine of daily Bible studies and altar calls. In the mornings we will pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to "the Savior for whose kingdom it stands.” We will be kept up late watching movies of modern martyrs and missionaries. And, sleep-deprived and far from our parents, we will be subjected to repeated urgings to confess our sins before it’s too late.

As weeping children move forward down the aisle and are led away by counselors who can guide them through the sinner’s prayer, the rest of us will sing. What can wash away my sin?/Nothing but the blood of Jesus./What can make me whole again?/Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Child Evangelism Fellowship, the parent organization that ran and owned this camp, is a fundamentalist Christian organization that views children as a market for religious recruiting. With a presence in over 170 countries and the support of 40,000 volunteers in the U.S. and Canada, CEF claims to reach 10 million kids a year. CEF often pursues kids who are vulnerable in some way—impoverished perhaps, with parents who can’t provide the resources or attention they would wish.

My camp-mates in Prescott were drawn primarily from the inner city, and the CEF Web site currently encourages outreach to foster parents and state family service agencies.  But its work in North America has now penetrated middle-class communities in all 50 states, largely through expansion of afterschool programs called Good News Clubs. Since the 1990s it has been driving to establish Good News Clubs at public elementary schools and encouraging churches to “adopt” local schools. Sunday school, vacation Bible school and summer camps don’t provide sufficient access to the most desired targets of their conversion activities: grade-school children whose parents and religious communities aren’t Christian fundamentalists.  

In 2001, a Supreme Court decision, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, forced public elementary schools to open their doors to afterschool clubs run by Child Evangelism Fellowship. Alito and the majority accepted the argument that the Good News Clubs weren’t really teaching religion—they were teaching character, in other words morals, from a religious point of view. Last week investigative journalist Katherine Stewart exposed the fact that those “morals” include biblical justification of genocide.

In actual fact, Child Evangelism Fellowship is not in the business of teaching morals. It is an evangelical organization with a core belief that no amount of morals will get you into heaven. In its fundamentalist theology, all children are born sinful and slated for eternal torture. Only the divine human sacrifice of Jesus and being “born-again” can save them from this fate. To funders and volunteers, Child Evangelism Fellowship is very clear about mission: “CEF is a Bible-centered, worldwide organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, disciple them in the Word of God and establish them in a Bible-believing church for Christian living.” Your child is their mission field.

Since the 2001 court decision forced open the door, CEF has established afterschool clubs on over 3,200 public elementary schools across the country. Its Web site trumpets the opportunity: The Gospel has been taught freely in public schools all over the world for some time. Now children in the U.S. have that opportunity, too!  

Children can’t participate in Good News Clubs without written parental permission, and some fundamentalist parents like the idea of their children receiving religious instruction at school. But say you’re not one of them. Say, also, that you’d rather not have other kids in your son’s first grade class telling your kid he’s going to hell – because that’s what children are being taught at school. What can you do?

One passionate adult can make a difference. In 2009-2010, a north Seattle parent, John Lederer had a rude awakening.

“I was on the playground volunteering, and another parent said, 'Did you know that there was this evangelical group running a program out of the school?' They had sent a flyer home by kid mail. I was surprised. I thought it was illegal. Why were they showing up in my child’s school? When I read their mission statement and values and principles it was clear that this was a very theologically conservative, right-wing and evangelical form of Christian faith. My initial concern wasn’t that they existed but that they had targeted my child’s school and my child is only six years old.”

Lederer is not an anti-theist. He and his family are members of a United Methodist church. But he believes that spiritual instruction should be guided by parents and that religion has no place in public grade schools, even after-hours. “I resent that there is an organization trying to go around me and recruit my child through her peers in her school to forms of belief that we do not share. They are interfering with what that first spiritual learning is going to be, which I believe should be between a parent and child.”

Lederer and other concerned parents began monitoring CEF activities at their school, Loyal Heights Elementary. They found CEF in clear violation of district policy and of the basic assumptions of the Supreme Court decision, for example that children would be able to differentiate CEF activities from those of the school itself:

The leader of the Good News Club began volunteering in a kindergarten classroom four days per week. This person, who didn’t have a child in the school, who was leading the Good News Club on Fridays, was present in the kindergarten classroom, presumably so she could identify students who she might be able to recruit and build relationships with them. A kindergartener can’t tell the difference between a teacher and a volunteer. Both are authority figures who they implicitly trust. 

In the end, this issue may need to be re-litigated. Someone will have to demonstrate that CEF does not abide by core assertions and assumptions of the Milford case and, in fact, is unable to do so because that would violate their mission. But in the meantime, there are steps that school districts, administrators and parents can take to minimize the harm done. 

The Loyal Heights parents got advice from a local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Through meetings with school administrators they were able to create a clearer boundary between the Good News Club and the school. This impaired the ability of the CEF volunteers to recruit, and in recent years the Loyal Heights Good News Club has failed to grow and has been moved into a “portable” further from the main school building. The Loyal Heights parents compiled suggestions for other communities facing similar incursions. Here is their list:

What can parents do?

• Learn more so you are able to educate other parents about CEF’s beliefs and strategy for courting children. Read CEF’s statement of faith and Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club. Stewart’s investigative journalism took her deep inside the organization.
• Don’t be intimidated by the Child Evangelism Fellowship and its legal partners.
• Review the CEF curriculum. This allows parents who may be thinking of participating in CEF’s activity to make an informed decision about whether the program comprises the initial religious and moral indoctrination they want for their children.
• Review and understand those school district policies and procedures that can help ensure CEF’s religious activities are separated from the school administration, operations and instructional program. If necessary, push for revision of those policies and procedures.
• Take the time to sit in on a club meeting or two. Document any concerns you want to discuss with school officials.
• Head off faith-based bullying in your school. If your child’s school has an anti-bullying program, make sure it covers religious bullying. If not, create an anti-bullying program.
• Be watchful and ensure that students are not subjected to pressure or harassment with regard to their religious beliefs and practices while at school. Report incidents to the school administration.
• Try to convince other parents that while CEF may have a legal right to rent space at a public elementary school, its activity is best suited for a neighborhood church or similar location. Offer to assist CEF in moving its activity to a nearby location.
• Speak up and make your concerns known to other parents, school staff and CEF leadership.
  

What can the school district do about this?

• Establish policies prohibiting participation by teachers, volunteers and staff in the CEF activity at the same school where they work.
• Educate school staff and volunteers about policies that prevent them, when on the job, from speaking or acting in a manner that can be easily perceived as promoting or endorsing religious instruction or practice.
• Prohibit CEF from using school and PTA communication vehicles to promote its activity, or from sponsoring school activities.
• Enforce student anti-harassment policies that protect students from aggressive proselytizing.
• Assure that CEF, as a religious organization, will pay for the use of the space it occupies and that Good News Club meetings occur well after the end of the school day.
• Obtain a written commitment that interested parents will have access to the CEF curriculum for inspection and that their meetings will be open to all students and parents.

What can concerned citizens do about this?

• Reach out to your local chapter of American United to find out about CEF activity in your community’s elementary schools.
• Open up conversations in your community about religious recruiting of children.
• Support and volunteer for non-sectarian afterschool activities for children in your community.
•  Throw your weight behind Americans United or the ACLU or another church-state watchdog and support them in whatever way you can.

Like John Lederer, journalist Katherine Stewart got involved in this issue when CEF launched a Good News Club at her children’s school. After two years of research, Stewart doesn’t mince words: 

Good News Clubs have as their aim the destruction of public education as we know it, and public school officials, as well as parents, should be concerned. They say their goal is "Bible Study" from a "nondenominational standpoint." In fact, their aim is to "knock down all the doors, all the barriers, to all 65,000 public schools in America and take the gospel to this open mission field now! Not later, now!" in the words of one of their leaders. Most activists I met with the CEF believe that most Americans who call themselves Christians aren't really Christians, or aren't the "right kind" of Christians. That includes United Methodists, U.S. Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, liberal Congregationalists...this list goes on. Keynote speakers at their national conventions promote creationism, rail against the so-called "homosexual agenda," and think that public education is evil because "they removed Christ as the foundation."

As they teach kids as young as six or seven about original sin and blood atonement and divinely sanctioned genocide, CEF staff and volunteers believe they are on a mission from God. They are well-financed and have a seasoned team of legal advocates at their disposal. Any community that doesn’t stand up for its children can expect to have fundamentalist recruiters in its public grade schools. 

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder ofWisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Why Young People Are Fleeing Conservative Evangelicalism

By Eleanor J. Bader

[REPRINT]

 

Some leave because they oppose the church's doctrinal stance. Others are turned off by its hostility to science. Others reject the limitations placed on sex.

 

February 9, 2012  |  

 

The results of a five-year study of the Millennial Generation—people born between 1982 and 1993—are in. Thanks to the Barna Group, a 28-year-old, California-based, Christian research firm, we now know that conservative evangelical churches are losing formerly–affiliated “young creatives:” Actors, artists, biologists, designers, mathematicians, medical students, musicians, and writers.

Some leave because they oppose the church’s doctrinal stance. Others are turned off by its hostility to science, and still others reject the limitations placed on permissible sexual activity. The report cites the tension felt by young adults who find it difficult—if not impossible—to remain “sexually pure,” especially since most heterosexuals don’t marry until their mid-to-late twenties. “Young Christians are as sexually active as their non-Christian peers,” Barna concludes. What’s more, the report admits that Millennials see the evangelical church as an exclusive club, open only to those who adhere to every rule. This runs counter to values that rank high on the Millennial playlist—among them, open-mindedness, tolerance, and support for diversity.

These findings, of course, don’t necessarily mean that young evangelicals are becoming progressively engaged, but they do suggest that an opening exists for prochoice, feminist, and pro-LGBTQ activists to touch the hearts and minds of Generation Y. Angela Ferrell-Zabala, director of Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom, a project of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, says that former Evangelicals are hungry for information about alternative faith and lifestyle options. “Technology has given Millennials access to philosophies and people from all over, and they tend to think in ways that are bigger than where they came from or how they were raised,“ she begins.” At the same time, “young folks are not necessarily throwing in the towel on their faith. They’re working to reconcile the pieces of their lives, asking, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is my place in the world?’“

The relationship between seemingly disparate issues, or intersectionality, holds great appeal to Millennials, Ferrell Zabala continues. “When we speak about reproductive justice we’re speaking about the whole person--being able to access jobs and higher education as well as contraception. When we talk about voter suppression or immigration, the conversation leads back to the choices a person is able to make.” And regardless of whether Millennials ultimately join a mainline Protestant church or live as atheists or agnostics, Ferrell-Zabala is adamant that the desire to respect others and be respected is of utmost importance to them.

That said, it is often difficult for ex-evangelicals to break away from family and childhood friends. Carol Hornbeck, an Indianapolis-based Marriage and Family therapist, stresses that when an individual’s worldview begins to unravel they typically feel unsettled. “People’s ideas usually begin to shift when a personal experience runs counter to their expectations,” she begins. “This may be because they’ve learned that a trusted friend or colleague is gay or has had an abortion. As long as the issue is at arm’s length, they can hate it, but it changes the paradigm when it’s your next-door neighbor or your friend’s sister. When the person is one step removed from your inner circle, it’s hard to be judgmental or condemning.”

But it may still be unsettling. “If the young person continues to want a connection to Christianity, he or she will need to find a church that welcomes uncertainty,” Hornbeck concludes.

Writer/activist Brittany Shoot grew up in Anderson, Indiana, the headquarters of the Church of God, in a deeply religious evangelical family. Her move away from the church was gradual. “When I was a child I was told that someone I cared about was HIV-positive. I somehow learned that he was gay and had contracted the virus through sex. There was such shame around the diagnosis. I knew that I shouldn’t tell anyone he was sick because they might shun me. Even as a kid I thought, ‘something is wrong here.’” Later, when Shoot was in high school, a friend disclosed his homosexuality. “You didn’t come out in the Christian culture we lived in,” she says. “He didn’t feel safe; we also knew that no church in the area would love and protect him.”

Now 29, Shoot no longer attends services but frequently writes about religion, feminism, and sexuality. Although she is critical of evangelism, she is also protective of people of faith. “In progressive circles it’s common to trash talk religion. This is damaging,” she says. “Most people who’ve moved away from evangelism still have family members who are religious. Those outside the community need to be sensitive and not make churchgoing people their target.”

Activists should also be open to questions about sexuality, Shoot says. “Despite Internet access, kids raised in the church were told, ‘don’t do anything until marriage,’ so when they finally get to a place where they can talk freely, they need it to be judgment free. Don’t hate on the girl who doesn’t know what a vibrator is or who knows next to nothing about reproduction.”

Writer/activist Mandy Van Deven agrees. Van Deven grew up in small-town Georgia where schools taught nothing but abstinence. “When you grow up in communities where sex outside of marriage is stigmatized, you see the effects of not having access to comprehensive sex education or reproductive health services—high rates of teen pregnancy, abortion, and sexually transmitted infections.”

While outsiders can certainly organize in these locales, Van Deven puts the onus for outreach on former evangelicals. “It’s helpful for the people who have already started to sway to the reproductive justice end of the continuum to preach to those who haven’t yet made the leap,” she says. “They know better than others what it takes to reconcile a more liberal ideology with the conservatism of their upbringing.”

Whether or not former evangelicals will do this remains uncertain. Nonetheless, the Barna report implies that once Millennials abandon evangelism, the barriers to progressive change can begin to crumble. Stay tuned for developments.

 

Eleanor J. Bader is a teacher, freelance writer and activist from Brooklyn, NY. She is also the co-author of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism, St. Martin's Press, 2001.