Keeping Them Out of the Hands of Satan: Evangelical Schooling in America

The Christian School Movement, inter-denominational and Protestant, is the fastest growing sector of private education in the United States, we're told here. In an instructive, in-depth look at two evangelical Christian fellowships and schools in upstate New YorkLakehaven and Covenantsociologist Rose examines why alternatives to the public school system are attractive to those who believe that ``urban elites'' are altering the American landscape of traditional values. An extension of the New Right polity, itself a product of aversion to the turbulence of the '60s and '70s, conservative groups support a cultural return to the primacy of family, its members governed by fundamentalist morality, according to the author. Focusing on two different groups who are ``negotiating their way in the modern world,'' this balanced study acknowledges the innovative as well as the reactionary aspects of evangelism and its paradoxical role in contemporary America. (Nov.)