In 2009, journalist Katherine Stewart heard that something called The Good News Club was coming to her daughter’s public elementary school in Santa Barbara, California.
At first she thought its mission seemed benign, but once she began to look into the organization and how it operated, she felt compelled to dig in further.
Her reporting led to the book “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children” (PublicAffairs/2012) in which she documents how a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case changed the landscape for how religion operates in public schools throughout the country.
There are now about 4,000 Good News Clubs operating in the U.S., and Stewart argues that while they bill themselves as after-school bible study, their true mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity.
Host Frank Stasio talks to journalist and author Katherine Stewart about her book in advance of her appearance at the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham tonight at 7 p.m. Stewart's North Carolina event was sponsored by the Orange-Durham Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
