In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club bills itself as an after-school Bible study, but Stewart soon discovered that its real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity. Astonished to discover that the Supreme Court had deemed this religious activity legal in public schools, Stewart began an investigative journey to dozens of cities across the nation to document the impact.
As Stewart makes chillingly clear, the rapidly expanding network of Good News Clubs represents just one of a range of initiatives intended to insert religious values into public schools. Although they often appear to be spontaneous, local events, they are in fact organized and funded at a national level. Taken together, they represent a new strategy of the Religious Right in its long-running aim to "take back America," undermining our public education system and secular democracy itself.