Katherine Stewart's "The Good News Club"

 

Put on your to-read list.  I could not believe all the connections between organizations that I'm familiar with!  For me, as interesting as the CEF's Good News Clubs are, most interesting are the connections of the heavy hitter "Christian Nationalists" behind the story of the Good News Clubs and especially the fall out of the US Supreme Court's ruling in Good News Clubs v. Milford Central School (2001).

 

Page 251- 252, does not mention ACE, but it reads:  "The campaign to remove children from public schools is quickly gathering steam.  A substantial number of fundamentalist parents have already cast their votes silently, by bringing their children home.  Between 1999 and 2007, homeschooling shot up by 74 percent, to over 1.5 million children, representing approximately 3 percent of all school-age children in the United States--a figure that is undoubtedly higher today.  The largest part of that growth came from parents motivated by religious concerns. Many homeschooled Christian children use textbooks provided by Christian Nationalists, which teach that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time, minimum wage and progressive taxes are contrary to the Bible, and Biblical Christians have a duty to assume absolute power over government in preparation for the second coming of Christ."

 

For me something is emerging:  "Christian Nationalism"  I was groomed to be a "Christian Nationalist".  I did not even know that this is what I was involved with.  I think I've just learned an important identifying term describing what I was born and raised in!  I'm 37 in May. 

 

I left 8 years ago, and I'm just now starting to connect the dots . . . . It's infuriating, to me.  I posed a question to a group of professionals, in Connecticut seven years ago. I asked this group, "How do you figure out what you don't know?"  It's a question that still haunts me.  (There seems to be no concrete answer, from that group then, or from what I've learned by dent of will over the last 8 years)  What is most difficult, is that it would hardly be healthy for a person not to discover on his own.  It's vitally important to claim your personal right to understanding.   (http://icsahome.com/ particularly this workshop which you might want to list on help for ex-ACE students http://icsahome.com/pdf/fax_mail_sga.pdf;  It's the best professional network of licensed therapist and genuine research in this field of high demand groups, at least that I'm aware of.) 

 

I think to some extent, the un-brain-washing part is nearly impossible outside of a desire to learn, and re-educate oneself.  Self-autonomy is such fragile territory anyway.  I imagine this cozy thought of being able to hand someone a book that basically un-brainwashes her.  I suppose this would be a type of brainwashing too.

 

In another section of the book Katherine deals with "dominionism".  You are probably familiar with this movement.  I found it very strong among the Pentecostals that I meat in Central America. There seems to be strong ties to this doctrine of "dominionism"  and the Christian Nationalists. 

 

I'm mulling over this discovery of "Christian Nationalists"  I know their rhetoric to the core (at least the jargon I've read in "Good News Club").  My brother, right now, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, is waging his own campaign to change the face of Central American Politics, through, you guessed it . . . Christian Education, specifically, ACE.  My sister runs a Good News Club in Bellevue, Ohio.  She is secretary-to/(some of my family worries that she's possibly mistress-to) a bible-based cult leader; Ricky Neville. 

 

Neville is the person that headed up the organization that I left 8 years ago (Thompson Bible Institute).  They use ACE in their VERY small Christian Academy that I finished High School in in 1996.  I later went on to subjugate myself to 5 grueling years of Bible School training at Neville's Thompson Bible Institute; worked for 4 years for his church organization Wesleyan Alliance, in Belize Central America--church planting an extension of Thompson Bible Institute. 

 

It did not help that my father was the Academic Dean for Neville for 16 years.  My Dad drank the cool aid of toxic faith many years before . . .  when fresh out of high school.  He got swept up by the under-currents of the "holiness movement".  He sees himself still has a "militant Christian" with a mission to evangelize the world before Jesus returns, with of course his "special" version of the Gospel.  I'm on his naughty list obviously.  It was my father's goal to make me a product of a "reformatory" sub-culture of a sub-culture of a sub-culture of the Christian Right. 

 

As an example, Billy Graham had lost his way, apostatized.  My father's "Sinner's Prayer Conversion" at the end of a video taped crusade, that my grandmother took him to see when he was in his early teens was not "True" conversion.  Graham, and most of the religious right (shiver) are apostates in my father's opinion.  He went through a more "thorough" conversion experience in his late teens.  His whole conservative Methodist up-bringing (my cousins are still very homophobic, anti-abortionists, etc.) was labeled "liberal" and bad.  He drank deeply of the poison of toxic faith. 

 

Even though my father and brother push ACE it's in the context of the their belief systems.  Drs. Howards are not walking in the full light of the Gospel in my father's opinion.  My brother is not so certain anymore of my father's indoctrination, but he's pretty much an un-questioning agent of this system.  Sub-, Sub-, Sub- culture!  Wow.

 

Katherine is spot on in my opinion, she worries not that the Christian Nationalist will ultimately succeed at turning America into a "Christian Nation", but's worries rather of the damage that they will cause along they way as they ultimately fail.  She is alarmed at how far and how quickly they've risen to prominence in our modern society.  I share this concern.

 

Possibly you're already familiar with Katherine's book, and the topic of "Christian Nationalism".   If you are, which references on especially "Dominionism" and "Christian Nationalism" appeal to you as well researched and sound?