In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, bills itself as an after-school program of Bible study. But Stewart soon discovered that the Clubs real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their unchurched peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school.

Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed thisand other forms of religious activity in public schoolslegal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey to dozens of cities and towns across the nation to document the impact. In this book she demonstrates that there is more religion in Americas public schools today than there has been for the past 100 years. The movement driving this agenda is stealthy. It is aggressive. It has our children in its sights. And its ultimate aim is to destroy the system of public education as we know it.

Review

Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement
In The Good News Club, Katherine Stewart unveils a world of stealth ideological warfare, where public schools undergo forced conversions into evangelical churches, other peoples children are missionaries most important harvest field, and biblical literalism is served with free candy and pizza after school. With deep reporting and a keen sense of the larger picture, the stories in this book demonstrate how far-right activists have co-opted the principle of tolerance to advance an exclusionary agenda.

Kirkusreview in January 1 issue
Solid reporting [A}compelling investigative journalism about an undercovered phenomenon.

Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction
Even those well-versed in the religious rights attempt to Christianize American institutions will likely be shocked by The Good News Club. Katherine Stewarts book about the fundamentalist assault on public education is lucid, alarming, and very important.

Sarah Posner, senior editor, Religion Dispatches
Katherine Stewarts riveting investigation takes us inside the world of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a sprawling organization that aims not just to evangelize Americas schoolchildren, but with the help of lawyers and policymakers, to dismantle the separation of church and state. From the playground to the courtroom, Stewart exposes how, despite roiling communities and pitting neighbors against each other, their persistence has paid off, altering the relationship between public schools and religion.

Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of education and history, New York University, and author of Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools
Do you think that our state-sponsored schools are free from religious indoctrination? If so, think again. As Katherine Stewart shows, evangelical organizations have cleverly insinuated themselves into the day-to-day operation of American public education. From history curricula to after-school clubs, our classrooms bear the mark of proselytizing by the so-called Christian Right. But this trend is under challenge from other Americans, including many devout Christians, who defend Americas noble but battered tradition of church-state separation. If you want to understand our impending culture war over faith and education, read this bracing little book. You might be shocked at what you find.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Stewart is a gracious narrator, respectful of the religious and nonreligious participants she came across during her quite vast research. In sum, the book is an important work that reveals a movement little discussed in the mainstream media, one Stewart worries is poised to damage "a society as open and pluralistic as ours.

DBC reads

The reason the world perked up and paid attention to Sinclairs The Jungle in 1906 is the same reason that the world should now, 105 years later, snap to attention and read Katherine Stewarts latest nonfiction book, The Good News Club: it awakens us to something we may previously have known nothing about, but which is under our noses every day, is active in our communities nonstop, and is potentially damaging to us all, and well into the future, too, if gone unnoticed. Stewarts findings cant afford to be ignored, for the same simple fact that made Sinclairs expose crucial: whether the book calls you to action or not, you are inarguably worse off not knowing whats detailed within it.

The Friendly Atheist

You need to read this book. Then you need to have all your friends read this book. Especially all your religious friends and all your religious and non-religious family and extended family members.

Free Thoughts
A must read piece of investigative journalismread this book!

Seattle Times
"A controversial book...masterfully told. Stewart treats all sides fairly."

A must read piece of investigative journalismread this book!

Richard Dawkins

Please read this book, talk about it, tweet about it, recommend it to friends, review it on Amazondo everything possible to bring Katherine Stewart's shocking message to the attention of everyone in America."

About the Author

Katherine Stewart has written for The New York Times,Reuters, andMarie Claire. She lives with her family in New York City.