Evangelical clubs deliberately exploit public school space to borrow its authority for proselytizing children

Evidence

The club’s organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their “mission field” and our children as “the harvest.” … I thought their plan was outrageously inappropriate in our religiously diverse public school. I also thought it was a freak occurrence. They seemed completely out of place in the sunny land of stand-up paddle boarders and open-air wine tastings. In my eyes they came out of the American past, not the future. I was quite wrong about that. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 20

Categorization

• SEED: A ‘weaponized sacred space’ angle: how marginal religious actors turn schools, cathedrals, and even mission fields into authority-transfer machines by occupying institutional territory rather than their own better facilities.
• XREF: connects to: Religious-right strategists target children aged four to fourteen for indoctrination — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 989; Child Evangelism Fellowship deliberately exploits child psychological vulnerability to recruit converts — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 988

Broader Connections

• Child Evangelism Fellowship deliberately exploits child psychological vulnerability to recruit converts #corroborates (0.88) — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 988
• Religious-right strategists target children aged four to fourteen for indoctrination #corroborates (0.80) — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 989