Criticism By Katherine Stewart
The Child Evangelism Fellowship has been criticized for attempting to undermine the separation of church and state and (by other religious organizations) for overtly encouraging very young children to proselytize classmates. In her 2012 book The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children, journalist Katherine Stewart criticizes various practices of the after-school Bible study program, the Good News Club, including young participants being rewarded for recruiting friends of other faiths and denominations whose parents have not enrolled them in the program (thereby circumventing prohibitions on canvassing children directly without parental consent). She also alleges that GNC volunteers are told to initially mask the true born-again evangelical nature of club pedagogy from parents, in order to better recruit from Catholic and other Christian denominations. She also claimed in an article in The Guardian that the lesson plan for the Old Testament narrative in 1 Samuel 15, describing the divinely-ordered slaughter of the Amalekites, is used to justify genocide. That narrative, in which King Saul is rebuked for disobedience in sparing the Amalekite king Agag, has been used to justify genocide throughout the ages. She notes that the lesson plan aims to "champion obedience in all things." CEF President Reese Kaufmann responded to her editorial in a letter, stating that I Samuel 15 was "not an instruction in genocide" and that "the goal of Child Evangelism Fellowship is the proper teaching of the passage."
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