The precursor to the Good News Club was born in the early 1920s, shortly after World War I and
the Bolshevik Revolution, both of which traumatized the national psyche and lent credence to
fundamentalist criticisms of German higher criticism, secularism, and liberal notions of the basic
“goodness” of human nature. Both Protestant fundamentalism and the Ku Klux Klan gained
widespread public appeal among significantly overlapping
support bases in the early 1920s, reaching their peak in the mid-
1920s, when fundamentalists nearly succeeded in expelling
modernists from two large mainstream Protestant denominations
and from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Founder J. Irvin Overholtzer was decidedly on the fundamentalist side of the
fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and he
was determined that CEF would be equally
steadfast. In his 1955 book The Children’s Home
Bible Class Movement, Mr. Overholtzer listed
seven criteria for his movement, three of which referenced
fundamentalism.
As Mr. Overholtzer traveled from city to city, he deliberately
contacted “fundamental” pastors and churches, organizing
them into dedicated volunteers.
In the 1940’s, Mr. Overholtzer’s wife Ruth — a graduate of the
Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University) — took on
the role of writing Good News Club’s first set of curriculum.
Ruth was strongly influenced by Biola dean and professor R. A. Torrey,
one of the most famous evangelists of his day and editor and co-author of the widely influential The
Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910-1915), which gave early 20th-century
“fundamentalism” its name.
Describing her experience of being one of Dr. Torrey’s students, Ruth wrote: “How could any of us
who had the privilege of hearing this author at eleven a.m. each weekday morning teaching from his
own book, ever, the rest of our lives, be ‘foggy about the fundamentals’? I was a blotter soaking up
great Bible truths.”
Significantly, Ruth credited Dr. Torrey’s teachings as forming the inspiration for the “Good News Club”
lessons she authored: “[T]he great doctrines of the Bible which I had studied under Dr. Torrey began
to form themselves into simple doctrinal lessons for children.” Indeed, it is not difficult to trace
many of Good News Club’s dark gospel themes — including the provocative declaration “we all
deserve to die” addressed (it is critically important to note) to an adult audience — to Dr. Torrey’s sermons
and writings.
History of the Good News Club
Fundamentalist Roots
J. Irvin & Ruth Overholtzer
© Intrinsic Dignity
