Bad News About The Good News Club: Possibly the Strangest Book Review You'll See Today

Age thirteen, acceptance of his fate, and alcoholism arrived together. He was unlucky, unlovable, and Satan owned him. Even if he moved into the church and puked the bible Van Impe style, in tongues, he was not savable. Nothing could fix him, but alcohol eased the pain of hearing how his God-fearing parents had done nothing to deserve a disgraceful, demon-infested son.

With hell a certainty and unpleasable parents, what could it hurt to add drugs, sex, lies, disobedience, theft, profanity, non-Christian music, and evil thoughts to the enormous sin of attracting demons? A kid his age could hardly use mind-numbing substances without the other sins, and he needed them to survive in a world where all possible answers to his many questions were unbearable.

In his world, parents who promised his damnation engaged in many of the same activities—and worse—but for some reason God accepted and saved them. Unanswerable question #1: Why them and not him? Even if there were enough tears to wash away the ugliness that was him, he lacked the privacy or time to shed them. Maybe the parents had never been bad enough to learn that tears could be prayers. Or, more likely, his belief that tears could be prayers came straight from Satan and that’s why the parents mocked and punished him for crying.

He learned to hide tears and pain, to hide most of the sins, and to hide from most of the questions. Hiding was second nature--or maybe first--in a family where hypocrisy ruled. Was thinking that about his parents the real ticket to hell since failing to expect everyone else to adhere to rules he didn’t follow was the only difference he saw between them and him? Maybe God gave credit for making others do what you couldn’t? If he could only hate sinners, the saving might take?

Unfortunately, Satan stood firmly between him and riteous hating. Since he couldn't hate others, he would just have to hate himself.

In his world, parents preached love and family while sleeping in separate rooms and showing no signs of affection, toward one another or the offspring whose only worth seemed to be proof that the parents had, at least on a few occasions, engaged in heterosexual, marital, procreating activities. In his world, alcohol, drugs, and tobacco were sins unless used behind the closed separate bedroom doors, and hell-bound sinners were those who dared mention or question what went on behind the closed doors. In his world, lies were sins unless covering for parents and stealing was only wrong when others stole from the family. God-fearing, saved parents were allowed to take from people (including their children) who deserved it, like people who were the wrong color, the wrong nationality, the wrong religion, homosexual, too rich or too poor, or demon-infested.

In his world, tithing to the church meant you were exempt from taxes and it was okay to worship worldly goods purchased with what was left. People who envied what you had and demon-infested, unsavable kids who suggested you should help others with some of that money were sinners with their eyes on worldly goods. Illness was punishment for disappointing God so there was no staying home from school or skipping chores on sick days. Perfect attendance certificates eased the pain of having a son that even God couldn’t love.

In his world, laws were meant to be broken – until someone outside the fold decided to try it. This is where things got complicated. Sometimes, when sinners far removed from the fold committed crimes against him, the hell-bound son was considered part of the fold. He invited such offenses from outsiders in order to enjoy a few words of support from the parents. In his world talent was recognized when it served the Lord or earned money and fame, but was a sin if practiced for pleasure. Guilt-induced chemical abuse accompanied a lifetime of sinful enjoyment of his talent.

Knowing that he was unlovable made everyone who loved him suspect. It was his job to drink more and make himself unlovable; to teach them how to recognize demon-infested people when they met them. In his world, he often walked away or woke the next day reaching for another drink to ease the guilt of hurting every single person who loved him. And knowing that Satan makes people drink and lie and hurt people meant it was a done deal – every day of his remaining twenty-six years, he proved to himself that Satan did, in fact, truly own him.

If only he had been able to hide behind a locked door and miss all of this so he could be saved.

I buried most of this with him--years ago--but it all came rushing back as I read Katherine Stewart's book: The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children. Leaders and trainers in the Good News Club program speak of what they do in war terms.

“We're fighting against spiritual powers,” one man says.

He follows with talk about passing schools and seeing tanks on the ground, bullets, and mushroom clouds, and talks about a being in a war zone for the hearts and minds and souls of children – ages five through twelve, although in other parts of the book they broaden that age range to four through fourteen and warns:

“There will be parent adversity that will come against you. In more of a raging torrent than ever before. You are on that front battle. The battlefield is right in front of us. It is those children aged five through twelve.”

Until now, I thought his world of religious torture had been at home, and maybe at church although when he spoke of the guilt he carried, he never mentioned church. Or God. What if adults had come to his school with candy and pizza and tempted him to attend meetings where they, too, would consider him a battlefield and tell him he was a sinner who was going to hell if he couldn't find some way to get saved? Would he have started hating himself and drinking by third grade?

The Child Evangelism Fellowship/Good News Clubs are doing exactly that: showing up with treats, infiltrating schools, and telling small children that they are sinners who will go to hell if they don't accept Jesus Christ as their savior and evangelize their friends and families. They call the schools “mission fields” and are in 3,500 (and counting, according to their records) public elementary schools, terrorizing more than 100,000 elementary school children in the name of religion. And they don't plan to stop until they have reached every public school and every child in them. They are in 170 countries, with a goal of reaching all 208 by 2017, at which time they hope to have destroyed the public school system in America with the assistance of plants on school boards, and “prayer warriors” who attend school board meetings to disrupt.

In my world, telling children they are sinners and going to hell is child abuse. I've seen the consequences. I also think it is abusive to rewrite history so that it appears that our country was founded on Christian values[sic] and that separation of church and state was never an intention of the founding fathers. But they are rewriting history books to do that – and to remove references to justice and to responsibility for common good, and all forms of the word democratic.

While they wage war on our children, and try to “harvest” them into uneducated, fearful, Christian soldiers (many of them move their own children into Christian schools or homeschool them), they accuse the rest of the world of waging war on them - war on Christmas, war on Christianity, etc. And now we have their war on women, where they try to reverse that and say that it is a war on their religious freedom.

The only good news that might have come out of this in his world, is that they teach children that the end is near. That might have been good news for him. I imagine thinking the end is near would also discourage children from caring about education, caring for the earth, or seeking happiness.