Child Evangelism Fellowship deliberately exploits child psychological vulnerability to recruit converts

Evidence

Good News Clubs confuse small children into believing that their school endorses the CEF’s form of Christianity, and they exploit that confusion to encourage children to recruit their classmates to the clubs. As I have detailed in my book on the topic, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, Child Evangelism Fellowship representatives discovered long ago that the particular qualities that make children so vulnerable—their tenderness, their innocence, their eagerness to please and to trust—also make them a fruitful focus of missionary activity. In strategy meetings that I attended, public schools were referred to as “mission fields” and children as “the harvest.” — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 988

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Radical religious upbringing can destroy a child’s ability to feel their own emotions — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 524; Evangelical fundraising depended on a cultivated sense of persecution — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 314; Closed indoctrination environments transform recruits by severing outside contact (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Radical religious upbringing can destroy a child’s ability to feel their own emotions #expands (0.85) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 524
• Enforced obedience converts children’s suffering into psychosomatic illness instead of rebellion #expands (0.85) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 522
• Pentecostal deliverance rituals inflict torture-scale harm on accused children. #exemplifies (0.80) — , The Rod and the Child, 4623
• Closed indoctrination environments transform recruits by severing outside contact #expands (0.75)
• Prosocial religions succeeded by bundling several psychological mechanisms into religious solidarity #expands (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 379
• Evangelical fundraising depended on a cultivated sense of persecution #expands (0.72) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 314