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A New Chick Tract – “Things To Come?”

I haven't written about Jack Chick and his religious tracts before.  Joshua Zelinsky has reviewed a few of them on occasion (such as the two he talks about here), but the urge to do so has never really hit me until recently.

Chick tracts, for those who don't know, are the little comic-book-like religious pamphlets that you sometimes find left in public places.¹

His work is notable for its total lack of nuance or subtlety.  Chick's theology is based on the notion that anyone who doesn't believe precisely as he does (including his KJV-only stance on the Bible, which is just weird) is going straight to hell.  I think he has a real hell fetish, since in many of his tracts the most detailed artwork is in the panels showing people getting tossed off a cliff into the flames.  He also has it in for Catholics, Muslims, Jews,² non-whites, women, gays, straights who don't hate gays, and pretty much anyone who isn't Jack Chick.

His latest is a little number called Things to Come? What struck me about this one is it's subtle³ juxtaposition of anti-Catholic sentiment⁴ with Rapture theology.⁵

The main narrative of this tract is that a (Catholic) fortune-teller (Delores)  isn't being very successful telling fortunes (I'll throw Chick a bone here and grant that he got this part right...), and is confronted by her housemate (I think we're supposed to infer that the two women are lesbians, but it's somewhat ambiguous) about the failures.  The housemate, Maria, mentions a Mr. Rogers who tells the future from "an ancient black book."  Maria mentions that their priest, Father Dowling, doesn't want people going to Mr. Rogers.  (Message for Mr. Chick - Catholics know full well what the Bible is, and have produced some fairly highly regarded scholarship about it, such as the work of the late Raymond E. Brown.)

Dolores goes to see Mr. Rogers, who tells her about Jesus and the rapture.  We get a typical Chick-scene of people getting burned:

Chick loves burning people, and apparently fails to see the inherent contradictions between the concept of an all-loving, merciful God and a God who gleefully tosses large numbers of people into the fire.  Conversion by coercion.  Gotta love it.

Anyhow, the tract moves on to some of the most egregious anti-Catholic bile that I've ever seen in comic form:

Chick seems to have formed his opinions of Catholics without ever having bothered to, I don't know, learn anything about Catholic doctrine, or attend a Catholic Mass, or even talk to a real live Catholic.

So the "fake" Jesus sets himself up as Pope, but is actually the Antichrist, and Russia and the Muslims (neither of which even existed when the Biblical books were written) are going to attack modern Israel,  which is rather different from Biblical Israel.

Now, after Mr. Rogers regales Delores with his scare stories and bizarre vitriolic propaganda, he poofs away, leaving a very shocked Delores sitting opposite a chair full of seedy clothes:

Goodness.

The basic premise at work here (besides "Catholics are evil") is that if you believe the way Jack Chick thinks you should, you'll be rewarded, and if you believe anything else at all, God is going to pitch you into the flames forever.

It's worth looking at this another way:  God, according to Jack Chick Theology, is really vindictive and petty - he's just itching to toss people into the fire for just about anything.  This stands at odds with any notion of a kind and merciful God, unless you perform some serious verbal and logical contortions.   Chick also can't decide whether accepting Jesus is sufficient or whether one has to do good works (contrast his use of Acts 16:31 and his use of 1 Corinthians 3:11-15), so it's really not clear what one would have to do to be saved, other than spend most of one's time cowering in fear and not asking too many questions.  And let's not forget the hate speech.

I'd be tempted to write Jack Chick off as just another kook on the fringes of ultra-conservative Christianity, except for the fact that his tracts turn up frequently enough that he must have a fairly significant following.  I've personally found them in hospitals (see footnote 1, below), on the table at McDonald's, in hotel rooms, in airplane seatbacks, and in public restrooms at colleges, airports, sporting venues, and highway rest areas.  His ubiquity makes him dangerous - his simplistic us vs. them theology is distressingly easy to understand, and his manipulative scare tactics can be very effective on people who haven't developed critical thinking skills.

My questions to the folks who are out distributing these things, or who might be inclined to use them are simple:

1. Do Chick's portrayals of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and so on match anyone you actually know?
2. Is Chick's characterization of God as a sadistic tyrant who relishes pitching people into the flames one that you agree with?
3. Do you think that attempting to convert people by terrifying them is a good thing?

My hope is that people who actually give the matter some thought will reject Chick's extreme views as the poisonous concepts they are.

-Jay

¹Personal digression: last fall when my dad went in for open-heart surgery, one of my brothers found a stack of Chick's Heart Trouble? screed that some assclown had left sitting in the open-heart waiting room. Heart Trouble? is a more heavy-handed version of Ray Comfort's Are You a Good Person? schtick, framed as a conversation between a physician and a heart patient.  I'm of the opinion that attempting to win converts by trying to scare people into accepting Jesus (or any other belief system, for that matter) by insinuating that they and/or their sick loved ones are going to burn for eternity if they don't follow a specific subset of beliefs is nothing short of emotional battery, and shouldn't be tolerated.  We binned the tracts.

²He's kinda schizophrenic about Jews. On the one hand, Chick's eschatology requires that Israel play a big role, but in the end the only Jews that are worth talking about are the ones who become Christians.

³In the same way that getting hit in the head with an anvil is subtle...

⁴I'll go ahead and point out that the Catholic Church has a lot of grave institutional problems - most notably its atrocious handling (at all levels, all the way up to the top) of child rape by members of the clergy.  That said, Chick's anti-Catholic vitriol doesn't have anything to do with real flaws and problems in the Church, and instead grows out of his distorted and hate-filled theology.

⁵Nutshell history of Rapture theology: John Nelson Darby basically made it up in the 1830s, Cyrus Scofield popularized it in his 1909 version of the Bible, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins spun it into the dreadful Left Behind books starting in 1995.  As well-known as it is, Rapture theology is flat-out rejected by much of mainline Christianity, including the Catholic church.  At it's heart, it contends that the Book of Revelation really was written as a prediction of events far in the future, rather than the obvious and much more well-supported interpretation that it was written to a contemporary audience about events that were occurring then, and that when predicted events didn't come to pass, it simply meant that the author was wrong, not that he was writing about things thousands of years in the future.  As long as something hasn't happened, you can claim it will, but that's a pretty thin argument to build a worldview around.  An interesting survey of end-of-the-world beliefs down through history can be found in Sharan Newman's The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012.

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