The Santa Barbara Independent Reading, Writing, and Original Sin - The Diigo Meta page

• 22 May 09
  

  Clay Burell

  Excellent article, esp. the legal context.

  religiousright religion christianity education

  • The afterschool world at Cold Spring had hitherto consisted of basketball, karate, dance, and other physical fitness activities. In this context, a sectarian religious group that seeks to recruit the very young stuck out like a barstool in a bunny cage. And so, I confess, I became just a little paranoid. Was a group of parents plotting to turn our public school into a religious school? A rumor that a teacher had volunteered her classroom for the group particularly disturbed me. Was she part of the plot?

    
    
    

    I had already discovered that at least some other parents shared my concerns. But the stories I heard back only made things worse. I learned that some kids had exchanged nasty, religious-themed emails, and that others had not been invited to certain birthday parties because they belonged to the “wrong” faith.

  • “Had we rejected [the Good News Club’s] application to use the facilities, we would have exposed ourselves to a potential lawsuit by the sponsoring organization,” he wrote. In subsequent conversations with him and other members of the school board, I found no one willing to say that they had invited the group into the school. Everyone assured me that the sole motivation for the decision to allow them in was, just as our principal indicated, the fear of litigation. But could this really be true? How exactly could things come to such a pass — that a 190-student public elementary school should tread with fear before a group that calls itself the Good News Club?
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  • • Other people drink tea or go jogging; I like to deal with my obsessions through research. In my research, I discovered that Good News Clubs are sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), a worldwide organization founded in Warrenton, Missouri, more than 70 years ago. The declared mission of the CEF is to produce conversion experiences in very young children, and thus to equip them to “witness” for other children. “I was told that a child at five, if properly instructed, can as truly believe as anyone,” said Mr. J. Irvin Overholtzer, who founded CEF in 1937. “I saw that if there was any truth in this statement, there was a door of opportunity lying open before us.” As of 2008, according to CEF Vice President of U.S.A. Ministries Moises Esteves, there were approximately 3,410 Good News Clubs in public K-6 schools around the country.

      
      
      

      The CEF labels the Good News Club program as “Bible Study,” but the term “study” in this context is a euphemism for indoctrination in and practice of a particular religion. Once class begins, there is no pretense of analyzing the bible as a literary, cultural, or historical document. The program moves directly to the CEF’s stated purpose, which 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.”

    • Often, instructors arrive on campus before the bell rings. When young children exit their regular classrooms, they find the instructor outside the door bearing treats and trailing balloons. In Valencia, California, a parent of a kindergartener reported that the Good News Club actually started 15 minutes prior to the end of her child’s school day. The instructor, she said, would enter the classroom as kindergarten was winding down and perform a roll call — effectively segregating the children by religious affiliation.

      
      
      

      The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!”

    • According to the Constitution, however, it is also true that there are only nine people in the world whose interpretation of that document makes any difference. In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion.
    • The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”
    • In order to give the court’s judgment in Milford some semblance of logical coherence, Thomas was compelled to re-imagine the activity of the Good News Club. The club, he said, was best viewed not as a religious group but as a discussion group engaged in speech about moral issues. Its exhortations on behalf of a particular morality, he reasoned, are no different from the encouragement to teamwork on the soccer field, for example. Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter, who all wrote dissenting opinions, found this logic preposterous. Of course the Good News Club teaches morals; but it also teaches doctrines, such as the notion that if you don’t believe in Jesus you will go to hell — the kind of thing that soccer teams tend not to teach. If taken seriously as a way to analyze religious cases, Souter concluded, the Milford decision “would stand for the remarkable proposition that any public school opened for civic meetings must be opened for use as a church, synagogue, or mosque.”

    • Schools routinely exclude from their programs entire categories of activity — dancing, martial arts, whatever — for a variety of compelling reasons. In the wake of Milford, however, the one category that cannot be excluded for fear of litigation is religion. In other words, if your school lets in a lacrosse group, it will see itself as practically bound to let in the Good News Club; but if it lets in the club, there is nothing to stop it from excluding lacrosse.

      
      
      

      The CEF has been able to achieve this enviable result thanks to the support it receives from a team of aggressive lawyers. CEF is represented by the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a powerful legal arm of the Evangelical movement. The ADF organization is extraordinarily active, interceding in the moral hot-button issues favored by the religious right. In the first three months of 2009, ADF was involved in more than 30 legal actions pertaining to its opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive freedoms, its support for Christian groups and prayer in the schools, and other causes linked with a right-wing religious agenda.

    • With ADF’s backing, the CEF has sued school districts in New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, and other states, not only arguing for the right to assemble but also seeking, among other things, the right to send flyers home with students and to avoid paying usage fees. “CEF is very aggressive from a legal standpoint,” said Ira Lupu, professor of law at George Washington University. “I’ve been following this issue for 20 years, and I hear stories all the time. If they get turned down for something or if the school says ‘no’ to something, they talk to their lawyers right away, who write a letter and say, ‘We’ll give you 30 days to change your mind or else we’ll see you in court.’”
    • If the legal juggernaut of militant Evangelism makes the prospect of opposing the Good News Club daunting, the personal politics can be even more troubling for concerned parents. “I earn a living from my business in this community, and there are a lot of religious people here,” said the Wisconsin father who objects to the club’s activities in his school. “But I know that if I were to go public with my objections, I’d lose a lot of clients and my kids would get targeted.” A California mother added: “My kids are going to be in this school system for many years. I don’t want them getting blowback from their peers. And I don’t want them to be discriminated against by their teachers.” Another parent in New York said, “As a member of a religious minority, there is an additional sense of burden. You feel like your behavior is being scrutinized, you are worried about stereotyping. So you don’t speak up.” Even Emma’s parents wished to remain anonymous.
    • The only other faith-based group I could find that sponsored programs in the public schools is the Kabbalah Centre International, the organization popularized in the media by Madonna and her former husband, Guy Ritchie. The programs, called “Spirituality for Kids,” are said to be nondenominational; last year, there were nine of them in the Los Angeles area, while CEF has more than 400 groups in the L.A. area, according to the Liberty Counsel, a legal defense organization with a right-wing agenda. Nevertheless, the presence of the Kabbalah Centre’s programs in the public schools has sparked widespread outrage, and was the subject of a front-page article in the L.A. Times last March.
    • As far as I could discern, it was basically the Evangelicals alone who organized religious groups in the public schools on a large scale. The question remained: Why?
    • In the microcosm of the Cold Spring School District, circa 2009, in any case, I was certain that any notion that the CEF was battling satanic forces of secularism was just plain false. The opposition to the Good News Club in our little town wasn’t coming from liberal government or activist judges. To the contrary, the club had Justices Thomas and Scalia, the ruling majority of the Supreme Court, and a phalanx of lawyers at their back. The Good News Club wasn’t defending itself in the context of an ongoing war. It had picked a fight right out of the clear blue sky of Santa Barbara. And the people with whom it picked that fight were the very people whom it claimed to represent. Just as our school board had realized at the outset, it was we who were powerless, and the CEF — notwithstanding its sense of victimhood — that could do as it wished.

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