Good evening. Welcome to Moral Politics with Bill Alford. I'm your host Valerie
Tirico and this is our monthly series on Christianity in the public square. How
would you feel if you found out that your local neighborhood grade school,
your public grade school, had become a religious recruiting ground? Would it be
okay if it was your church? How about if it was Mormons or Muslims? Would it
matter to you if it was Catholics or evangelicals or Jews? How about Jehovah's
Witnesses or Scientologists? You're probably thinking it doesn't matter who.
We have something called separation of church and state. It's not happening. No
religion has the right to troll for converts on a public grade school
grounds. If you think that, you're wrong. Here with us tonight is a North Seattle
parent, John Lederer, who's going to talk about what was happening at his daughter's
grade school. Thank you for joining us tonight, Mr. Lederer.
Oh, thanks. Is it okay if I call you John? Oh, please do. Call me John. So you went to your daughter's
school and quite by accident found out that there was something going on there
called a Good News Club. What is a Good News Club? Well, basically a Good News
Club is Sunday school that happens right in the public school. And it was
happening in my daughter's school back in 2008. She was a first grader. And
basically it has all the elements of Sunday school that you would expect to
find. It's basically, you know, singing songs, scripture, memory, learning about
the Bible in this case. Everything you would expect to see in Sunday school
happens in a Good News Club. And it was happening after school on a Friday
afternoon right after classes in my daughter's public elementary school. In
this case, it was Loyal Heights Elementary in Seattle. So, but it's after
school. It's not actually happening as a part of the school program. Well, it's not
exactly part of the school program, but it's happening right alongside all of the
school-sponsored after-school activities, all of the PTA-sponsored after-school
activities. It's happening in a classroom. In this case, it was a
kindergarten classroom. It's happening right after school and basically the
Good News Club students who are going to their Sunday school, essentially,
in the public school, were meeting in the cafeteria right alongside the
other groups, the chess club and the math club, who were meeting to have
their snacks. And they were virtually indistinguishable from any of the school
or PTA-sponsored after-school activities. So do you think the children, though,
could tell the difference? Absolutely not. I mean, if you walked into that
cafeteria and you saw, you know, one group of students over here and another
group of students over there, the Good News Club, you wouldn't know which was
the school-sponsored after-school club and the PTA-sponsored after-school club,
which was the why and which was the boys and girls club and which was the Good
News Club. You wouldn't be able to know. But, you know, they call it the Good News
Club because they want it to sound like an after-school activity, like the math
club or the science club. But it's not a club. It's Sunday school. Well, but I
think a lot of people would say, look, like kids in our culture could use a
little bit of character education, spiritual education, having the chance to
learn some Bible stories, you know, kind of learn about our Judeo-Christian
heritage. That doesn't sound all bad. Well, it isn't bad at all. The
question is whether it should be happening in a public elementary school
or not. And in this case, though, you have to also look at the kind of Bible study
the kind of religious practice that was going on in the Good News Club. So what
kind of Bible study is it? Well, you sort of have to go back to
who is sponsoring it to really understand what was going on. Who is sponsoring it? The Good News Club is
sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship. So child evangelism. Child
evangelism means converting kids, right? Yeah, it's basically about proselytizing
and converting children to a particular evangelical fundamentalist brand of
Christianity that is espoused by the CEF, the Child Evangelism Fellowship. This is
a national organization that's been around for quite a long time since the
1930s. But only starting in the 1990s did they really start to push in a major
way with some of their legal partners to get into the public schools. And they
were able to succeed in 2001. There was a Supreme Court decision that got them
the right to rent facilities in public schools. So you're saying that
the Supreme Court said they have the right to go on to public schools and try
to convert kids. The Supreme Court said that they have the right to go into the
public schools and rent school space if that district, if that school district is
making their space available to other to other community organizations. No, they
did not say they have the right to proselytize or to convert public
school kids to their brand of Christianity. But in fact, that is exactly
what they do when they move into a school. And unfortunately, it's not being
properly checked by either the courts or the school districts. It sounds, it's, I
mean, targeting five, six, seven-year-olds for religious conversion seems ugly. Well,
it, you know, I kind of think it's, I think it's very wrong. I mean, basically,
as a parent, it's, it's my job to oversee my children's religious exposure, that
initial exposure to spirituality and to religion. That's my job as a parent. Are
you, may I ask, are you a church-going family? I'm a part of an interfaith
family. We do attend church on a regular basis at Trinity United Methodist and in
Ballard. And my children get their religious education, as I think is proper,
in a church, not in a public school where it doesn't belong. I would think a lot of people would
listen to you being offended at the thought of, you know, kind of Sunday
school, Bible school happening on, at a grade school, and they think, well, he
must be anti-religious. No, I'm not anti-religious at all. I, and neither is
my family. What I'm trying to do is to protect my children and, and my rights as
a parent to be overseeing and directing my children's initial indoctrination
into religion and spirituality. Well, what's wrong with a little bit of extra
Bible study? I mean, you, you go to a church, you value the Bible. Well, that,
that may be, that may be true, but the, the, the issue is where is the proper
place for this kind of education to take place? And I strongly believe it's proper,
not, not in a public school where we have lots of people of varying different
faiths and non-faiths, but in the community where, where it properly
belongs. I think you have to look at, at CEF, the Child Evangelism Fellowship, and,
and what they believe in to get a sense of, of, of the evangelical and
proselytizing nature of their work. So what do, what do they believe? Child
Evangelism Fellowship? Well, they, the purpose of the Good News Club, and you
can go to their website, cefonline.org, and you can find this for yourself, the,
the purpose of their Good News Club is to evangelize boys and girls in the
gospel of Jesus Christ. And by the gospel of Jesus Christ, they mean what? Well, it's a
very kind of fairy tale version of Christian faith, and, and that's a little
bit understandable given that they're focusing on five to ten-year-olds who
really don't have the capacity to, to understand their faith at a, at a much
deeper level at that, at that age. But, but given that, it's, it's a very fairy
tale version in a way. So by fairy tale you mean kind of happy, a little too
clean, a little too pretty? Well, there's, there's a basic story. One of the things
that they do in these Good News Clubs is they, they hand kids these little puzzle
toys. They're called flipper flappers. Flipper flappers. Yeah, they're, they're a lot of
fun. You can, you can, you can flip them around, and I gave one to my daughter
once, not telling her what it was or what the story is behind it, and she played
with it for 20 minutes. She, she thought it was a lot of fun. It really captured
her attention. But the idea is, is a pretty simple one. If you hand this to
kids, it costs 50 cents, and they bring it to school, it's gonna start a
conversation. So what's the, what's, yeah, what's the conversation? The conversation that they have around
this little toy is one which, you see, you see this yellow, yellow circle. That's
supposed to represent the, the wealth of, of Christian faith, the, the God's love.
And then, and then if you turn to the black heart, the black heart is supposed
to represent the, the heart of sin that is in all children that they're born
with. So they're basically teaching this idea of... You're going to hell because you
have a heart of sin unless you would, unless you adopt some simple rules, and
they have to be simple because they're only five or six years old. Obey your
parents, love Jesus Christ, adopt Jesus Christ as your Savior for the rest of
your life, and go to church. If you do those simple things, then you, God will
absolve you of your sin, and that's the Red Cross, the idea of this, the blood of
Christ. God will absolve you of your sin, and you will achieve the white heart, the
pure heart, and achieve salvation. So what they're looking for children to do in a
Good News Club is to make a, what they call a salvation commitment, where they
agree to adopt these, these, these four basic rules, and to, and to basically move
on to, to, to a world in which they're ensconced in a church. So you go to a
Christian church, and I happen to be familiar with that church, that I don't
think that that church would say you have to be saved by blood, that you have
this kind of original sin, your black, heart is black, unless you're saved by
this, the blood of Jesus, you're going to go to hell and burn forever, and there's
only one way. So, so you come from a different kind of Christian tradition.
Your church doesn't teach those things. Well, absolutely it doesn't, and, and, but
when you, when you do teach those things to very small children, and you do it in
a public school, I mean, think about how the child reacts to that. How do they
react? Well, I, I can see how they react, because it's happened in our school. You
know, they basically say, okay, I'm saved, I've made that salvation commitment, but
all my friends in my school, they haven't made that salvation commitment, so
they're all going to go to hell. They're not going, they're not going to get to
live with Jesus after they die like, like, like I will, because I haven't made
that commitment. They haven't made that commitment like I have. So you've got five-year-olds at
Loyal Heights looking at their friends and thinking their friends are going to
be tortured forever. That's basically it. So, of course, they're going to try to
draw them in. They're going to try to take that message to them and say, I want
you to be saved like me, because I want to live with you and with, and with Jesus
after we die. So, so the message itself is evangelical. The message tells
children to try to reach out to, to other kids, but there's other things that CEF
does in addition to the message that clearly is designed to reach the
unchurched. I mean, and in fact, that is the goal of CEF is to, that's why they're
in the public schools. That's why their name is called Child Evangelism,
evangelize them, right? Evangelism. It's about, it's about getting converts, right?
Getting converts, and, and the school becomes a fertile ground for doing just that.
You know, there's a lot of different ways in which they do this. So if in the
Supreme Court, in this kind of legal gray area, whatever it is, if, if it was said
these guys are going into our public schools, their goal is to get converts
among five, six, seven, eight-year-old children, you're saying that, that the
Supreme Court said, that's okay. We can't stop that. No, absolutely. The Supreme
Court did not say that's okay. You know, in a way, it's, it's kind of sad because
CEF is pretty systematically misrepresented what the Supreme Court
actually said in its, in its decision. What did the Supreme Court say as you understand it?
As, as I understand it, in reading Justice Clarence Thomas's decision, it was a
six to three decision. It was very controversial. There were five different
decisions rendered among nine justices. They couldn't agree on how to decide
this case. I mean, that's pretty unprecedented, but Justice Thomas wrote
the majority opinion, and he, he basically said, look, if a school district makes
its facilities available to anyone, to any community group, they can't
discriminate as to whether that community group is religious or not. Okay,
that's what he held, but he then went on to say there's no issue here about the
Establishment Clause of the Constitution. There's no issue because the CEF in the
case that was before the court had taken great pains to separate itself from the
school. They weren't holding their, their, their, their Good News Club in a
classroom. They weren't involving teachers. They weren't involving staff.
They weren't, they were doing it well after school. They weren't advertising
in any of the school communications. He noted all of those things in his
decision. So, and, and is that what happened at Loyal Heights? The exact
opposite happened at Loyal Heights, and the exact opposite happens every time CEF
goes into, into a new school. How did it work at your school? At our school, what
they did is they came in and they immediately tried to embed themselves in
kind of the legitimacy of the school. They, the, the first thing they did is they,
they sent home a flyer in kids mail advertising themselves. Well, kids mail,
you know, kids backpacks. That's, that's a school communication tool, and they
basically used it. So it's an implicit way of saying this has school approval. This
is a school approval. It's a very implicit but direct way of saying this
has school approval, and a lot of parents immediately objected to saying, okay, what
is this Good News Club and why is it here? Because we didn't ask for it, and two,
why are you using kids mail to get the word out about this outside group that
wants to hold an after-school club at our school? And the principal immediately
reacted, said, oops, we shouldn't have done that. From now on, I'm changing the
policy. I'm going to review everything that goes out in kids mail, and I'm, and,
and, you know, that's never going to happen again. They're not going to use it.
So that was, that was the first thing. The next thing they tried to do is they
tried to sponsor an ad in the PTA's auction pamphlet. We have a big fundraiser
at the school. It's an auction that happens every year. So another way of saying this
is integrated into the school. We're a part of the school community. They were
trying to reach parents and get the word out, so they wanted to have a full-page
ad in the auction catalog, and a bunch of us, other parents, basically said to the
PTA, no, you can't accept their ad because then it will look like they're
part of the school, and they're not. And that's what the Supreme Court said they
couldn't do. They couldn't do, exactly. And so, so in that case, that was the, that
was the second example. The most egregious example of them over, and then
they were also putting up signs in the hallway, and we had to deal with that,
but the most egregious example was when the leader of the Good News Club, who was
this woman from a local church, an evangelical church called United Free
Evangelical Church in Ballard, she decided she wanted to start
volunteering in a kindergarten classroom, and she started volunteering four days
a week in a kindergarten classroom as a teacher's helper. And this, this
was really problematic because suddenly you had the church lady, the person who
was leading Sunday school, who's now volunteering and looking like a teacher
to a five-year-old in the classroom. So suddenly it looks like teachers, or
volunteers in this case, are participating in the Good News Club and
leading the Good News Club so that it's all part of the, so, so clearly it crosses the
line of making to the student the Good News Club look like it's part of the
school curriculum. And as a psychologist, I would say there is no way a five-year-old
can tell the difference. Between a volunteer and the teacher and the staff,
and I mean it's all the same to them, they're all adults, right? And so they
couldn't see the difference. There were a lot of parents in that classroom who
said, you're not, this woman is not working with my kid, and they had to move
her to another kindergarten classroom, and this kept happening until eventually
the principal had to ask this woman to not volunteer anymore because it wasn't
working. She couldn't work with any of the, any of the parents' kids because they
all kept saying, we don't want to work with her. So what can, you said though, the
school can't do anything about it? What, or can they? Well there's a lot of things
that the school district, you know, needs to do in order to really make sure that
that these, these divisions that need to take place between the Good News Club
and the rest of the school are solidified. One is that they need to make sure that
teachers and staff don't participate in the Good News Club in any way, and that
includes right on down to helping a kid get to the Good News Club meeting place.
I mean they, they really can't go anywhere near the Good News Club. Once
they do that, then it looks like the Good News Club is part of the school's
curriculum. And, and then they also need to take great pains to make sure that
there's no perception of any endorsement or the practice of religion. They need to
make sure that the, all the school's communications vehicles, all the PTA's
communications vehicles are free of any information about the Good News Club. It
cannot be just simply added to the list of after-school activities because then
it becomes part of the, of the school's sponsorship. So what do you want, what
do you want parents to know about this? Well I think, I think, I think part of it
is I need to, I need to tell parents what we were able to do with this story. We,
we pushed back and because immediately they came in and crossed all of these
lines that, that the court had established, that, that school policy had
established, they immediately came in and crossed all of these lines. And we pushed
back and we got the administration at the school to stop some of the most
egregious practices. We got the PTA to not, to not take these ads and do all of these
things. And no, the club hasn't gone away. It's still there, but the second year
that they came back was a hundred and eighty degree change from that first
year. They had clearly decided consciously they were going to change
their strategy radically in Loyal Heights Elementary School. They did not
put, advertise at all, not even on the community bulletin board where they're
allowed to advertise. They didn't advertise anywhere in the school. They
stopped wearing their t-shirts. They, they, the first year they had all of their
kids wearing Good News Club t-shirts on Fridays just to remind everybody.
So they were using kids to recruit other kids. They were using kids as advertising. They were using kids as advertising by giving
these t-shirts and telling them to wear them on Friday. The kids are the mules that carry the advertisers home. The kids wear the t-shirts.
They were wearing the t-shirt. The kids worry about their friends going to hell. Well, and, and just having the t-shirt is a
conversation piece and that's what it's designed for. But in the second year they,
they stopped doing that. And they also were moved from a classroom to, to a
portable. So farther away from the mainstream and they accepted that. So
basically we've come to an uneasy standoff where because parents pushed
back against the Good News Club and CEF, we were able to change the rules in a
way that we can live with. We don't like them, but we can live with it. And they
were not able to cross, immediately cross the line of trying to integrate
themselves into the rest of the school. And they, and they have remained somewhat
isolated from, from the rest of the school ever since. So, so I guess the
message for parents is if you're vigilant and you press back, you can
change their behavior in a very fundamental way and we, we've shown that.
You know, it's another, another major. So I would guess that there are some
parents who would like to have their kids getting Sunday school on the school
grounds, who are getting kind of their, some religious education during the week.
But, but, and, and it sounds to me like maybe by pushing back you've kind of
gotten to a point where the kids who are going to the club would be those kids.
That it's not that they're on campus with the kids in the classroom recruiting
kids and trying to convert kids. Well, CEF is smart. They don't move into a
school unless they've got a core group of, of, of parents that are going to send
their kids. I mean, they need to have a critical mass before they're actually
going to make, make a move into a school. And basically it's, it's, it's generated
to that original critical mass. They haven't grown from what I've seen. They
have anywhere from six to 12 kids participating on a weekly basis. And it's
pretty much stayed there. So, and that's, I think that's been helpful. I think the
awareness raising has, has, has, has been helpful. I think also just keeping them
sort of isolated from the rest of the school has been helpful. So, so, so there's,
there's, you know, there's a group of parents that clearly, you know, are going
to participate no matter what. And the reason that they're participating is
because they want to establish a presence in the public school. I mean, they could
easily have their good news club down the street at the local evangelical
church. It's within walking distance of the school. In fact, we offered to buy
them a van, to help them buy a van if they would just get out of the school. Of
course, they didn't want that because they want to be in the school. The public
school is their mission field. Child evangelism. I mean, I have to say child
evangelism, proselytizing children, converting children away from their
parents' spiritual tradition. Child evangelism, it's just two words that shouldn't even go together.
I kind of feel that way too, but, but I think my fundamental point is this is
just an inappropriate activity in the school. When you press CEF, what they say
is, look, the Supreme Court has said we have a right to be here. But, you know, as
Americans, we need to be able to distinguish between what our legal rights
are and what's the right thing to do. And those are two completely different
things. And in this case, yeah, CEF has a legal right to rent space in a public
school. But does that make it a good idea for us to be having religious
instruction inside the public school as an after-school activity? I think not. I
think it's a really bad idea. And it doesn't, it doesn't really matter
whether it's evangelical Christians or any other religion. It just doesn't
belong in the public elementary school. It's, it's not an appropriate activity in
that venue. If they want to evangelize, go stand on the corner and evangelize, you
know, go stand in the public park if that's where you want to be, but not in the public school.
So if this was, if this was a more minority religion, even farther afield, I mean, I think in, you know,
fundamentalist, fundamentalism in this kind of, what you're describing is a
minority religion in Seattle. But what if it was Scientologists or if it was, who
knows, if it was Hindus, would they let them, would they let them? Well, yeah, I
mean, I think that's, that's the interesting part here is since 2001, any
religious organization has had the freedom to walk through this door. But
only one has. So what you're saying is that Scientologists would have the right
to form clubs on public schools. According to the Supreme Court's decision in
2001, they're, they're free to do that. They're free to rent space and have an
after-school club just like CEF, but nobody has. So you got to ask yourself,
why not? Why only CEF? Why does everybody else seem to get it except the Christian
Evangelical group? You know, everyone else seems to think, as I do, it's not a
very good idea to try to move into a public elementary school. But apparently
only this group seems to think it is a good idea. I mean, there's something
about this particular form of religion that, that lends itself to that kind of
thinking that somehow everybody else doesn't seem to, doesn't seem to think
in those terms. It's all right there in their name, isn't it? Child evangelism.
Right. We're going to reach children. We're going to bring the unchurched into
our church. And thanks to Clarence Thomas, we can now do that in a public
elementary school. And they're doing it. They're doing it every day. John, is there
anything else you'd like to say to our audience as we're wrapping up? We've got
like one minute here. Well, I guess, I guess the biggest thing is that I, I
really, I really don't want them, you know, getting in between me and my child and
my child's initial indoctrination into religion. And by bringing their form of
religion into the public school and by teaching this evangelical message to
children, that's precisely what they're doing. You know, we really need to, to
think about whether this is the appropriate activity that needs to happen
in a public school. And parents have the opportunity to really make a change and
to fight back and to, and to make a difference. Mm-hmm. Thank you for joining
us tonight. It's been my pleasure.