How evangelicals are making children their missionaries in public schools

I saw this article on Diaspora today and decided to share it here.  This is not news to most of us in the south who often see the 'Flag Pole Prayer Events,' but it is high time we paid more attention to the problem.

-----------------------------------------------

Katherine Stewart

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 25 September 2012 12.07 ED

Adults can't proselytise in schools – but kids can. Hence a new scam by fundamentalists to circumvent church-state separation

When he was 15, Jim ran drugs for a cult group. When I first heard his story, I was shocked – not just that the group was running drugs, but that they had directed one of their youngest recruits to do the dirty work for them. Then I learned why it made sense in a technical sort of way: the cult leaders reasoned that the older members, if caught, would face serious sentences and lifetime records, whereas the kids could get away with an unpleasant but not life-altering juvenile detention. It was a matter of using kids to do what the grown-ups didn't want to risk doing themselves.

In a tactical sense, religious fundamentalists in America appear to have taken a page from the same book. The constitution and the law prohibits adults from, say, establishing ministries within public schools aimed at proselytizing to the children during school hours. But a growing number of religious activists have come to realize that it's technically legal if they get the kids to do their work for them. OK, so religious proselytizing is not the same thing as running drugs – but manipulating kids to exploit legal loopholes isn't pretty wherever it happens.

Read the rest of the story here: