The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children by Katherine Stewart

Author:Katherine Stewart [Stewart, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: General, Political Science, Education, Social Science, Religion, Sociology of Religion, Children & Youth, Administration, Christian Education, Fundamentalism, Organizations & Institutions
ISBN: 1586488430
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2012-01-15T07:17:51+00:00

5

LITTLE RED CHURCH-HOUSE

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

From our apartment you can see the front door of our school. It’s a bright red double door made of solid wood and framed in red-brown brick. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past month looking at that door with anticipation. We moved from Santa Barbara to New York City in August, and we chose this neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for its well-regarded public school.

The second Sunday after classes began, happy and hectic, I glanced out my window and saw a group of people gathered in front of the schoolhouse door. They had a table, brochures, a four-foot-tall sign, and a large tray of lollipops they were handing out to passersby. It turns out that they are members of an evangelical ministry, and that our school is their church.

I decide to visit the “church” and see what they are all about.

This is my first chance to wander inside the building unimpeded. On school days, parents may accompany children into the school yard, but not through the doors of the school. I’m not sure if this is for security reasons or just to keep the helicopter parents out of the airspace. Outside school hours, the school remains locked—unless, of course, you happen to be participating in one of the events held here by the various outside groups such as sports clubs and a children’s theater program.

The silent walls of the auditorium are festooned with the handwritten names of children on colored poster paper: Abigail. Amadou. Luke. Chen. Jose. Next to their names the kids have drawn distinctive swirls, pirate swords, and small happy faces. In the empty hallways, the names come with photos and charming, identifying details. “Hi!” reads the caption over the photo of a perky seven-year-old named Tamar. “I am a girl. I have brown eyes. Brown hair. I like art. I have a little sister. I was born 2003. My birthday is June 4.” Clustered around Tamar are dozens of other photos of children, each advertising likes, dislikes, birthdates, and pet names. In the lunchroom, the names of all the children in the school appear on pieces of paper that have been taped to the wall in bold, colored letters, organized by class, so that every time a child sits down for lunch, he or she feels a sense of belonging.

Outside room 206, my daughter’s new classroom, I find the poster I helped her make to tell her new classmates about herself. There are the photos of her and her brother playing on the beach and a cut-out magazine picture of a bathing suit to let the kids know how much fun she had in our old neighborhood in California. Glancing around at other children’s posters, I can see that the families of our new public elementary school are a cosmopolitan group. They are from Norway, Pakistan, Guatemala, Germany, Iran, and China, and they spend their summers in some enviably interesting places.

In the library, I find Pastor George

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