The Real Bad News About The Good News Club

A Supreme Court ruling that a religious group can meet in public school facilities after hours has many concerned about the separation between church and state. Even more troubling, perhaps, is that the ruling is just another validation of the growing practice of manipulating children. PNS commentator Joe Loya is a California writer currently writing a memoir on his experience in prison.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Milford Central School must allow the Good News Club to conduct its religious meetings on school premises immediately following regular school hours.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the court opinion, stated, "any group that promote[s] the moral and character development of children is eligible to use the school building."

Milford allowed community groups to use its facilities after class hours for "social, civic and recreational meetings." The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and the 4-H Club were allowed to meet, but the Good News Club was barred because the school considered its program "the equivalent of religious worship."

The Good News Club operates under the umbrella of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, founded by the Rev. Jesse Irvin Overholtzer in 1937.

His notion that a child aged five or six could make a decision about spiritual life was controversial from the start. Mainstream Christianity believed in 1937 that even a 12-year-old child was too young for God to hold accountable for their eternal salvation.

But Mr. O. -- as the Fellowship faithful refer to him -- was inspired by Charles Spurgeon, a famous 19th century English expository preacher, who stated that "a child of five, if properly instructed can as truly believe and be regenerated as an adult."

My mother taught Good News Clubs, and in 1964 she noted in my baby book that I accepted Jesus as my Savior in a Good News Club meeting when I was three. I couldn't tie my own shoes and barely comprehended buttons, but apparently Jesus was a snap.

The irony of chronicling my adult-like decision in a baby book eluded my mother, who was then 19.

In Good News classes, I received a candy for every Bible verse I memorized. And I was taught that I would earn a star in the crown in heaven for every soul I saved.

Rote repetition -- of Bible verses or anything else -- is in line with the propagandist's intuition that people accept as true those ideas they repeat most often. Like most 3-year-olds, I was impressionable and susceptible to all the ploys adults use to get children to drink their milk or brush their teeth.

So my desire to believe in Jesus at three was not so much the product of sound argument as a matter of memorizing beliefs for the reward of candy.

Some will see the Court's decision as degrading the figurative wall between Church and State. But I'm less concerned with where the Good News Club meets than I am disturbed by the fact that we don't question the entire idea that it's proper to calibrate a child's interior compass to an adult's and call that consent and not manipulation.

For example, "ERIC Digest" a clearinghouse on elementary and early childhood education, estimates that elementary children spend $15 billion a year, including $11 billion on toys, clothes, candy and snacks.

That's a lot of milk money in the age of program-length toy commercials and high-priced video games, with banking, radio networks and 900-number telephone services aimed at children.

And because children spend 25 hours a week in school, they are particularly vulnerable to advertisers who "sponsor" school activities (in the name of Justice Thomas's "moral and character development") like literacy programs and anti-drug campaigns.

"Good" kids are rewarded with coupons they can use to purchase the sponsor's products. Others advertise on vending machines in the school corridors or at campus sporting events.

There is a reason why we don't allow tobacco companies to advertise cigarettes to 15- and 16-year-olds, much less younger children. We know that advertisers, like religious leaders, create a discontent that only their product can dispel. This is how desire is manufactured.

The best way to protect children from being manipulated is to protect the educational integrity of our schools.

Today, more than ever, we need to give elementary kids the skills to critically read advertisers and propagandists. Our schools need to send forth intelligent and self-aware citizens to the community, not deliver tiny souls to evangelists or children's lunch-money to corporations.

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