{"id":6237,"date":"2016-10-30T10:05:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-30T15:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=6237"},"modified":"2016-10-30T14:14:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T19:14:49","slug":"the-passing-of-jack-chick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/10\/30\/the-passing-of-jack-chick\/","title":{"rendered":"The Passing of Jack Chick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several years ago I and my then-girlfriend (now wife and Arts Editor)\u00a0went to a Minnesota Fringe Festival<\/strong><\/em> show\u00a0that staged some of\u00a0the works of Jack Chick<\/a>, the Christian\u00a0\u00a0fundamentalist tract writer. The show took several of his tracts and turned them into plays.<\/p>\n

\"badbob\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As I recall, virtually everyone in the audience roared with laughter at the ridiculous antics and stereotypes on display, mostly warning of the\u00a0sinful habits of non-white, non-protestant, drinking,\u00a0cussing, gambling,\u00a0fornicating\u00a0folk, and their eventual spirals straight to a fiery hell.<\/p>\n

Virtually everyone laughed, I said. Everyone but my wife.\u00a0 She sat in her seat writhing in embarrassment at the hypocrisy\u00a0of the message being presented.<\/p>\n

She grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home, and she said when these same\u00a0stories\u00a0were enacted at the churches she attended, they were often done in the exact same way, bigoted, judgmental humor and all.\u00a0 After all, fundamentalists like to laugh, too.\u00a0 But illustrative of the wide cultural chasms that Americans often have to deal with,\u00a0the liberal city-dwellers viewing the Fringe Festival production saw\u00a0the stories\u00a0as\u00a0nothing more than a way to poke fun at the absurdity of Chick’s tracts,\u00a0while for some Americans in the religious sector, these\u00a0are still\u00a0sources of wisdom, to be considered serious messages from God.<\/p>\n

Well, now Jack Chick is gone, as reported<\/a> by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t change our evil ways.<\/p>\n

These evangelistic brochures tackle a range of topics, including gay rights, evolution, abortion and the supposedly\u00a0satanic nature of Halloween<\/a>. Given the quirkiness of the cartoons, we tacked some of them up on a wall outside an AU\u2019s staffer\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

\"chick2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These pamphlets, known as \u201cChick Tracts,\u201d<\/a> 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 \u2013 mainly by some of the people who send us mail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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><\/strong><\/em>\u00a0– a little too weird to believe. Just scanning Jack’s biography on Wikipedia, I see this:<\/p>\n

He was a believer in the King James Only movement<\/a>, which posits that every English translation of the Bible more recent than 1611 promotes heresy or immorality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em>. But I’ll still wince.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years ago I and my then-girlfriend (now wife and Arts Editor)\u00a0went to a Minnesota Fringe Festival show\u00a0that staged some of\u00a0the works of Jack Chick, the Christian\u00a0\u00a0fundamentalist tract writer. The show took several of his tracts and turned them into plays. As I recall, virtually everyone in the audience roared \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6237"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6272,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6237\/revisions\/6272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}