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This book describes the activities of scary people, engaged in an activity I personally find reprehensible. Their goal is to take over the minds of the young children of America and inject their version of a Jesus-based religion. Anyone not part of their group, including most Christians who are not Christian enough, will go to hell. The really frightening thing is that they’re good at what they’re doing, and the U.S. Supreme Court has said it’s legal.

The Good News Club, a function of the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), already operates in over 3,500 public elementary schools in the U.S. They function ostensibly as an after-school club, hence the legality, but in fact they are ferociously peddling their message in a way that poses a threat to our system of public education and indeed to our concept of America as a secular democracy.

CEF maintains that America was founded as a Christian nation and that it is the right and obligation of Christians (some Christians) to take it back, including conversion of public schools into church schools. Their work is intended to create an “us” and “them” mentality among all Americans, totally opposed to the spirit of inclusion and tolerance that I believe most of us support. The rest of us are out there as a harvest to be converted.

Now I don’t care what people do in their own churches. Catholics, for instance, including former Pope Ratzinger, have clearly stated that it is the mission of the Catholic Church to convert all the Jews. But it is when these purveyors of a particular faith take aim on our young children in public schools that this becomes a menace that calls out for public attention and aggressive response.

One young girl arguing with her Jewish classmate … Jesus is the best, don’t you want to be with Jesus … If not, you’ll go to hell … You’re a bad person if you don’t believe in Jesus. This is not supposed to happen in our public secular schools. Most of us think this kind of proselytizing is forbidden by our Constitution. But the Supreme Court has held otherwise, as regards after-school religious clubs.

If a Good News Club exists in your child’s elementary school, it is not a local effort arising spontaneously from the community. It is part of a national organization, with Plan Books, manuals, procedures, lawyers, and a substantial budget, and with goals that most of us find about as un-American as it can get. They believe in the literal word of the Bible and they won’t be satisfied until all the rest of us accept their extreme religious beliefs. They could never reach that goal by honestly stating it and trying to argue its merits as they see them. Instead, they have deviously focused on the most impressionable – young children aged 4-14 – in the place where they can most easily be influenced, our public elementary schools.