The Bible has thousands of passages that may instruct and inspire. Not all are appropriate in all circumstances.

The story of Saul and the Amalekites is a case in point. In the book of 1 Samuel (15:3), God said to

Saul:

"Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put

to death men and women, children and infants...."

Saul dutifully exterminated the women, the children– but spared the king. God was furious that he

failed to finish the job.

According to Pennsylvania State University Professor Philip Jenkins, the story of the Amalekites has

been used to justify genocide throughout the ages – Rwanda and Northern Ireland being just two

examples.

Yet more than 100,000 American public school children, ranging in age from four to 12, are

scheduled to receive instruction in the lessons of Saul and the Amalekites in the comfort of their

own public school classrooms. The instruction, which features in the second week of a weekly "Bible

study" course, will come from the Good News Club, an after-school program sponsored by a group

called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The aim of the CEF is to convert young children to

a fundamentalist form of Christianity and recruit their peers to the club. There are now over 3,200

clubs in public elementary schools, up more than sevenfold in ten years.

The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, he

means all of them:

"You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every

living thing. Nothing shall be left."

"That was pretty clear, wasn't it?" the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.

The Good News Club also wants kids to know the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on

account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:

"The Amalekites had heard about Israel's true and living God many years before, but they refused to

believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment."

If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he wants you to kill them all. In three separate places in the

Amalekites lesson plan, the manual instructs teachers, “Have children shout, ‘God will help you

obey!”

Asking if Saul would "pass the test" of obedience, the text points to Saul's failure to annihilate them

all, posing the rhetorical question:

"If you are asked to do something, how much of it do you need to do before you can say, 'I did it!'?"

"If only Saul had been willing to seek God for strength to obey!" the lesson concludes.

The CEF is determined to "Knock down all doors, all barriers, to all 65,000 public elementary schools

in America and take the Gospel to this open mission field now! Not later, now!" in the words of a

keynote speaker at their national convention in 2010. The CEF wants to operate in public schools,

rather than churches, because they know that young children associate public schools with authority

and can’t distinguish between activities that take place in a school and those that are sponsored by

the school.

Good News Clubs should not be in America's public elementary schools. As I explain in my

book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, clubs'

presence has produced a paradoxical entanglement of church and state that has ripped apart

communities, degraded public education, and undermined religious freedom. The fact that the CEF

teaches obedience through a story of genocide drives that point home.

by Katherine Stewart

February 2013