A Chick tract is a small (it’ll fit in your wallet) cartoon book by Jack Chick, a Christian fundamentalist. These tracts are sold as an aide to stealth witnessing–if you’re in, say, a phone booth at the airport and a little booklet or folded-up piece of paper with question marks on it catches your eye, you may have spotted the handiwork of someone who has chosen to attempt conversion at a distance. What lies within these publications is fascinating, if only briefly.
These tracts, all available for your perusal at Chick.com (no kidding), are a terrible disservice to Christianity. I mean the kind of Christianity defined by following that peace-and-love hippie named Jesus, not the kind that excludes Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, homosexuals and car salesmen. Christianity was and is a revolutionary religion, and the teachings of Christ were an antidote to the rule-of-law, paint-by-the-numbers version of religion sold and propagated by the stuffy right wingers of Roman-era Jerusalem, the Pharisees. And Chick tracts are full of scare-mongering, of tales in which any character is likely to die at any moment, and die at peril of hell. These tracts are the lightweight propaganda of today’s Pharisees.
This is nothing new to fundamentalists–my own childhood was colored by the certainty that I might shuffle off this mortal coil and join the bleedin’ choir invisible at any moment, probably headed straight to the ninth circle for transgressions like riding my bike farther from home than I was allowed to do. Theirs is a religion based on fear, and a narrow path one must travel in order to avoid hellfire. Funny thing is, when I peruse the Bible, I read that Jesus fellow as the ultimate in inclusiveness and being non-judgmental–he forgave people left and right for their frailties, and he hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors (and he wasn’t even a Democrat). I read a pretty broad path, if you define it by an earnest attempt to live in the revolutionary and laid-back style of Jesus.
There’s more to say for sure, but perhaps this conversation is best begun by showing a Chick tract, and following it up with some commentary shortly. This one’s called Party Girl. In it we learn that Jesus delivers precise information to grandmothers in the middle of the night, and we get the hell scared out of us because Satan poisons drinks. Enjoy! Here are a couple of choice panels:
