Several years ago I and my then-girlfriend (now wife and Arts Editor) went to a Minnesota Fringe Festival show that staged some of the works of Jack Chick, the Christian fundamentalist tract writer. The show took several of his tracts and turned them into plays.
As I recall, virtually everyone in the audience roared with laughter at the ridiculous antics and stereotypes on display, mostly warning of the sinful habits of non-white, non-protestant, drinking, cussing, gambling, fornicating folk, and their eventual spirals straight to a fiery hell.
Virtually everyone laughed, I said. Everyone but my wife. She sat in her seat writhing in embarrassment at the hypocrisy of the message being presented.
She grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home, and she said when these same stories were enacted at the churches she attended, they were often done in the exact same way, bigoted, judgmental humor and all. After all, fundamentalists like to laugh, too. But illustrative of the wide cultural chasms that Americans often have to deal with, the liberal city-dwellers viewing the Fringe Festival production saw the stories as nothing more than a way to poke fun at the absurdity of Chick’s tracts, while for some Americans in the religious sector, these are still sources of wisdom, to be considered serious messages from God.
Well, now Jack Chick is gone, as reported by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State:
Americans United gets numerous messages from our adoring fans in the Religious Right, many of which are of the snail mail variety. Some of our biggest admirers take it upon themselves to send us little cartoon pamphlets promising damnation if we don’t change our evil ways.
These evangelistic brochures tackle a range of topics, including gay rights, evolution, abortion and the supposedly satanic nature of Halloween. Given the quirkiness of the cartoons, we tacked some of them up on a wall outside an AU’s staffer’s office.
These pamphlets, known as “Chick Tracts,” were created and published by a fundamentalist evangelist named Jack Chick. Chick died last week at the age of 92 and he will be missed – mainly by some of the people who send us mail.
Here’s a sample tract from chick.com, for those interested. I’d been aware of Chick for years, but kinda put him in the same category as the Church of the Subgenius – a little too weird to believe. Just scanning Jack’s biography on Wikipedia, I see this:
He was a believer in the King James Only movement, which posits that every English translation of the Bible more recent than 1611 promotes heresy or immorality.
Being agnostic myself, I can only wince. I guess I can see the logic, since once you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, you can use circular logic to rationalize anything. But I’ll still wince.
