Here’s a link to an article in yesterday’s Guardian by Katherine Stewart on fundamentalist Christian after-school clubs that are obliterating the boundary between church and state in the U.S. They’re called Good News Clubs, and in 2001 they won a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court that effectively required publicly-funded elementary schools to include them in their after-school programming.
In her article Stewart notes that one of the lessons that’s taught in the clubs is how genocide is morally justifiable if the people being killed are unbelievers. It’s a lesson the Bible apparently teaches in a story on Saul and the Amalekites where God instructs the former (depicted above with spear in hand) to slaughter the latter. Although Saul eventually bailed on the complete annihilation of the Amalekites (he killed all the women, children and men, but spared the king and all the healthy livestock), so God punished him with the loss of his kingdom.
With faith-based schools on the rise in Saskatchewan, and the provincial government having recently allocated 50 per cent of 90 new day care spaces in Regina to organizations with strong Christian ties , it makes you wonder how much damage is going to be done to children and society as a whole in the next while as indoctrination becomes an integral component of our “education” system.