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 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 churchgoing family?
I'm a part of an interfaith family. We do attend church on a regular basis at
Trinity United Methodist 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, at CEF, the Child Evangelism Fellowship,
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,
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, 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, 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, is a pretty simple one. If you hand this to kids, it costs 50
cents, and they bring it to school, it's going to 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.
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 gonna 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, do you think? 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 gonna go to hell. They're not gonna,
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 gonna 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, 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 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 school approval. It's a very implicit, but direct way of saying
this has school approval, and a lot of parents immediately objected 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 not, 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, 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, as a teacher's helper. And, 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 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, are, 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 this 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, 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. Did the club go away? 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 180-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 them these t-shirts and telling them where they were on Friday. The kids are the mules that carry the advertisers home. The kids wear the t-shirts. They were wearing the t-shirts. The kids worry about their friends going to hell.
Well, 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, 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, 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, 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 degenerated
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 public school. The
public school is their mission field. Yeah. 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 mean, 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. 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.