Tags
Apologetics, Childhood, Comics, God, Jack Chick, Jesus, Pornography, religion, School

The God of Chick Tracts always struck me as something of an asshole.
I still remember the first time I encountered a Chick tract, but I can’t remember if it was the 4th or the 5th grade. I think I might have been hanging around after school for some reason. I do remember quite clearly that it was one of several that had been left scattered about the boy’s bathroom at my school.
This particular pamphlet contained a pretty generic story of a sinner who died and went to Hell. The pamphlet ended, as always, with a message of hope; we didn’t have to end as the character in the story did. Through Jesus we could be saved. In my charitable moments, I like to think that message of hope is the real point of these pamphlets, but frankly I think that might be giving a little too much benefit of the doubt. On that day it was clearly the message of fear that left its biggest impression on me. I remember the feeling of horror coursing up and down my spine as I read about the suffering of sinners damned to a lake of fire. The mere thought that this could be the world I was born into was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and keep it there. The suffering itself and the cruelty of the being who would inflict it stuck with me for days, as did the cruelty of anyone who could say of such a thing that the source of it was good and worthy of praise.
It’s more than a little fitting that my first encounter with a Chick Tract was in a bathroom, because my whole world got a little creepier that day and I don’t think it’s recovered since.
I grew up in a household filled with the ideas of Spiritualism and Theosophy, essentially the forerunners of modern day New Age thinking. I’d heard of people who believed in Satan. I’d heard of people who believed in Hell. In retrospect, I must certainly have known many who believed in the things talked about in that pamphlet, but I hadn’t ever really talked to any of them about it. What I heard of God and Jesus was all love and kindness, and so those who literally believed in Hell were (much like Hell itself) a remote possibility to me. To my family, such people were largely a whipping boy, an image of someone who gets it wrong conjured up mostly for the purpose of telling a story about how more enlightened souls get it right.
The Chick tract was the first time such people became real to me. They became real to me in the most caricatured form imaginable. On that day, the worst things said of organized religion by the adults around me had not come close to the pure malice of the story I held in my hands. Someone had left this with the intent that children would find it and read about it. Whoever that person was believed quite firmly in Hell, and they believed in it strongly enough to want to share that message with others.
…with children.
It didn’t escape me that the chosen mode of delivery was less than honest. Leaving pamphlets in a children’s bathroom is more than a little underhanded, and this fact was the icky icing on a whole cake of ugly. So, there I sat with this pamphlet, trying to wrap my mind around the twin horrors of this vengeful God and the fact that some people actually do believe in Him, and whats more that they love him. Suffice to say those horrors outweighed the significance of any hope the pamphlet might have had to offer. The vision of Jesus might have been the end of the story, but it’s most memorable moment for me (and I suspect others) had clearly been the lake of fire.
Could the world really be so perverse? Could people really be so morbid as to think this way? Those are the questions I kept asking myself after encountering that first Chick Tract. It’s all I could think of for some time afterwards. Eventually, I managed to put the whole thing behind me, but not entirely. It was a bit like some of the dirty stories my friends were beginning to tell at that age, or images of odd porn that somehow crossed my path. I hoped one day to make sense of all these things, but for the time being I found them simply disturbing and I preferred not to think about them much. To me, that pamphlet had always been a kind of pornography.
It still is.
I understand the author of that pamphlet, Jack Chick, has recently passed away, and it reminded me of that day back in school. I don’t wish to celebrate his death, but I’m also quite aware that his passing will stimulate a surge in public interest regarding the man and his work. I take no pleasure in his passing, but I do think his life’s work is worthy of a comment or two, critical as mine most certainly will be.
The next time I had cause to consider Jack Chick’s particular brand of pornography came in the mid 80s when I and my friends took to playing Dungeons and Dragons. “Dark Dungeons” would be Jack Chick’s main contribution to the Satanic panic of the era. I don’t recall when I first became aware of it, but the story-line always struck me as both laughable and deceitful. I didn’t really become fully aware of Jack Chick himself (or of his operation) until I joined a few discussion boards back in the early 2000s. It was odd to me, a bit like learning the name of a creepy caller. This was the man who had written that story from back in my childhood. He was the author of those morbid images, and he was the source of that sick feeling I had upon seeing them.
Good to know.
…but also a little disconcerting.
I recall only one other Chick tract with any degree of significance to me. It was about Navajo Medicine Men. Chick portrayed them as Skinwalkers, thus conflating healers with monsters, and of course ending the whole matter with a familiar pitch to Jesus. It was no more insightful than the hack job Chick did on D&D.
I’ve encountered a few more of Chick’s pieces over the years, but not many have really stuck in my memory. The formula is simple. Some worldly interest will lead a person down a very dark path toward Satan, death, and Hell itself, but Christians will offer them salvation. In the end, the reader is invited to accept Jesus and be saved. I understand others have been doing the work for sometime now, but the essential formula remains largely unchanged. I always wonder at the choices Chick and his successors make in these stories. Do they really believe the details of their claims? It’s one thing, for example, to believe that Dungeons & Dragons is a bad influence on kids, and quite another to believe that it is literally run by a cult as a means of initiating children into arcane magical rites. This is what fascinates me most about such work today. It isn’t testimony to faith, but rather the myopic interest in sordid stories about actual people real world world institutions. What kind of mind spreads stories like this? And how did they decide to produce them? With or without evidence, I can’t help thinking the bottom line is the same. Someone is getting off on these narratives. Whatever their interest in selling the hope of Jesus, someone is reveling in the vision of sinfulness a little too much.
Don’t get me wrong; I have no particular reason to condemn anyone for pursuing their prurient interests, at least if you can do it without harming anyone. What bothers me in this instance is the bad faith and the lack of self-awareness, the sense that someone could play so happily in the very imagery they seek to condemn in others. Perhaps more to the point, what bothers me about Chick Tracts is the sense that this is a pleasure taken in sordidness of others’ lives, a kind of hope that other people might really be worse than you could possibly know, and of course a hope that they will suffer in the end. This sort of thing is not unique to Chick publications, unfortunately, and one can often find preachers indulging in a kind of proxy porn. I suppose that was Chick’s particular genius. He found a particularly vivid way to present that kind of material. Whether that is to his shame or his credit is of course another question. For me the answer is clear enough.
I wish I could find something better to say about Jack Chick than this. It is of course tempting to follow an age old wisdom and say nothing at all, but Chick’s passing reminds me of that moment all those many years ago in which I first found one of his publications. Don’t get me wrong. Worse things have happened to me than the discovery of that creepy pamphlet. Even still, I can’t help thinking it wasn’t a particularly positive experience. For me, that will always be Jack Chick’s legacy.
It isn’t a good one.
Interesting, I’d never heard of Chick tracts!
nor had I!
I had to Google this because I’ve never heard of this gentleman. Is this a regional post? Anyways it was a good read not his yours..
I saw plenty of his tracts when I was a kid. One of my one brother’s friends was a “doorknob,” belonging to the local congregation of the Pentecostal group The Door. And, although we didn’t openly look for them, being a conservative Lutheran PK, my family didn’t really disagree with them, either.
Growing up the Four Corners, I also remember his take on Indian religion indeed.
Sad to say I was raised in one of those families that believed every word of it, and I was given Chick Tracts to read routinely as a young child, mid-1970s to early 1980s I guess. It took me many years to get over the trauma and get to the point where I now say if there is a god, he damn well owes me (and everyone else) an explanation for a lot of things, so fuck him. Raising children in a American Christian fundamentalist/evangelical belief system is nothing short of child abuse.
I was the most terrified, anxiety-ridden little kid ever. Every “sinful” thought that crossed my mind made me think I was doomed. I was even worried that it was a “sin” to buy the wrong product, like if it was produced by child labor or damaging the environment, and if I gave money to a company that did bad things, I’d go to hell, even if there was no way for me to know the company’s practices. (A thought process that I now note other evangelicals were and are not burdened by, as they clear cut rain forests, torture animals, and drill baby drill. Not sure how I didn’t get the memo that a sin is a sin, unless you can get rich from it in which case it’s man’s dominion over the earth.) It also didn’t help that I was unable to feel any emotional connection to any of it. I knew what I was supposed to believe, and I was able to recite what I was supposed to believe, but I certainly never felt any of the joy or comfort or whatever else it is that people claim to get out of religion.
After many years of being an adult and living away from my family, I had enough, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” moments that I’m free of religion and all that. Whenever I see a Chick Tract, it’s hard to fight back the traumatic memories, but I’m trying now to concentrate on appreciating the artwork (which was excellent) and ignore the horrific messaging.
“I hoped one day to make sense of all these things, but for the time being I found them simply disturbing and I preferred not to think about them much.” Perfect line to sum up most of my childhood!
I was unwillingly taken to a Sunday Bible camp when I was about 13, it was the most traumatic thing I ever encountered…I was physically sick from what I heard and saw..so I can just imagine what these Chick Tracts did to you!
Wow. I’d forgotten all about tracts, though I often come home to find them stuck inside my doorframe. Easy enough to throw them in the garbage. But to leave them for kids to find??? Disgraceful! I can’t say it any better than you did: Leaving pamphlets in a children’s bathroom is more than a little underhanded, and this fact was the icky icing on a whole cake of ugly.
Those tracts are a goddamned embarrassment against anyone with a sliver of intelligence. As an adult, I find them almost amusing–they are so badly done, so over-the-top dramatic, so dumbed down that it’s hard to imagine anyone believing them. Except for a child, and allowing children to view such things is so wrong on so many levels.
I’ve come across tracts around Anchorage, usually in bathrooms and shopping malls, and when I lived in an apartment churchy people would often leave them on my doorstep (I guess the churchy people felt that people in apartment need their souls saved, eh?).
I’ve often wondered who in their right mind would choose to believe in all of the hell and brimstone, the suffereing, etc., mindset. It’s like: Why? And who would waste hours of a perfectly good Saturday morning walking around and leaving such tracts on doorsteps? Do they think they’re getting a pat on the back from God? That they’ll be saved from the fires of hell by a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus? The world can truly be a f*cked up place.
P.S. Loved this post. It made me think, which is always a good thing.
I have never encountered a Chick tract, didn’t even know what one was until reading your post, but I have run into enough zealots in my day to understand the mark it left on you. I was raised Jewish/Catholic, so I was condemned from around age 5 by people on either side. End result? I am an anti-religionist! The things people do to kids in the name of religion. Sigh.
There is a great deal in what you say- you have hifh-lighted many truths. Des.
I never heard of a chick tract. Cue assumption that there will be ‘chicks’ or girls as the focus of the tract… well that could be interesting…
OK, having read this I am seriously GLAD I never heard of this before. Gross.
I’m fairly certain that I’m not the only European who hadn’t heard of this at all. It (luckily?/seemingly?) didn’t make it across the pond. The few of them I read are a both terrifying and utterly ridiculous.
I actually came across them through Zompie Orpheus, when they made “Attacking the Darkness” which is a kind of different look on their (officially approved by him) movie-production of “Dark Dungeons”, that turned it into something entirely different – if you haven’t heard of this before, feel free to check out my post about it: Evil RPGs.
But it’s still weird that this is/was a thing at all…
There is a movie called” The Good Bad and the Ugly” which depicts ones life growing up. At around 6 years old being taught what those 3 meant and one I needed to follow was Good. The rest beware!! When something came up that I had question, my folks would help me sort out. Somethings I would ponder and take a wrong turn, and recognized I was on the wrong path. As I got older situations were more complex in depth and would take me to the edge, but I had a great learning and sensed I needed more mature thinking/experienced like my parents. I understand what is being said here, but a lot of kids, teens, etc experience similar situations. I heard about hell, simple teaching, realized not for me, Heard about God, His character, wanted be be like Him. I had so many opportunities to take situations and blame parents, religion, whoever and whatever, but it’s has a dead street ending. If situations are bad, hell on earth, my logic is try the opposite!! Works for me. God Bless America, Don’t forget to vote “wisely” 🇺🇸🇺🇸
I think you put into words what many of us have felt when we come upon these tracts. A much better plan of evangelizing is to walk up to someone, offer a gift as appropriate (could be a prayer), and say the truth, “God really loves you!”
Great post!
Christianity would be a lot better off if its followers simply lived as Jesus lived, followed the way he taught, and kept their mouths shut about their religion. Jesus didn’t come to found a religion, he came to show us how to love ourselves and others. Oh – and also to warn us not to judge others. Apparently, there’s been some misunderstanding, to put it mildly.
I never knew what these were called. I remember finding one at a grocery store while waiting on my mom to check out. It was about an abused child and it still haunts me to this day.
People often seem to leave them around. They probably think they are doing so in the hopes we will be inspired by them to come to the faith. I think there is also a little of the flasher quality in all of it. Some people are thrilled at the thought of shocking us.