Funny Political Cartoons Middle Ages the King Vs the Pope
Depending on whom you talk to, Jack Chick — who died in Oct at the age of 92 — was a fire-breathing hell-and-brimstone preacher, an underground cartooning genius, a leading disseminator of anti-Catholic sentiment, or a brave winner of souls.
The southern California-based artist was rarely seen in public, but for half a century he had a massive platform all the same: His ubiquitous tracts sold millions of copies, all designed to convert lost souls into Bible-believing Christians and warn against Satan's wiles.
"According to the cartoons, if you're a Mormon, Muslim, Catholic, Buddhist, communist, evolutionist, play a trick on-or-treater or rock-n-roller, you lot're pretty much doomed unless y'all have Jesus Christ (with a trivial nudge from Jack Chick)," wrote Andrew Griffin in 2004 in the Alexandria, Louisiana, paper The Town Talk.
None of Chick's own tracts were always near Donald J. Trump. And yet, they explicate a lot near some of the beliefs held by the extremist wing that is partly behind the Republican presidential candidate's rise.
Tin can nosotros describe a directly line from Jack Chick to Donald Trump? No — nor should we. Trump is a result of a complicated ready of factors that interlock and combust, and Chick is, or was, his own man altogether, more than a representative of mod American fundamentalism than of a specific party.
Only it's wise to stay clear of brushing Chick off as but a nutty anomaly, no thing how many religious and secular groups akin decried his logic. His reach was long, and his methods indicative of a pervasive manner of American thinking that many people are only starting to empathise.
"The Thomas Pynchon of evangelism"
Eulogized past a variety of outlets, Chick was deemed "the cartoonist who wanted to salve your soul from hell" (Christianity Today), "the reclusive king of the scaremongers" (The AV Club), and "one of the well-nigh prolific and polarizing religious leaders in U.s. history" (First Things). Chick'southward obituary in the New York Times noted that "some people called Mr. Chick the Thomas Pynchon of evangelism," due to his famously reclusive nature: "He had not given an interview since 1975," it ended, "and, it was said, had chosen comics as his medium because he was too shy to deport witness any other way."
On the charmingly circa-1999 Chick Publications site, y'all can buy your own copies of Chick'due south hundreds of tracts in small quantities or in bulk — or just peruse the in-print editions, which are available for free.
Chick'due south approach was simple. Step one: Dream up the almost extreme potential consequences of various "social ills," from feminism to Dungeons & Dragons to homosexuality to, in a higher place all, the Catholic Church. Footstep two: Insist on the aforementioned last-ditch, catholicon solution — namely, trusting Chick's specific, pope-hating, Rex James Bible-loving version of Jesus Christ equally your personal savior — for each one.
Chick was reportedly an Independent Baptist, part of a collection of loosely affiliated independent fundamentalist congregations that see themselves as a remnant. They stand up in opposition to widespread, supposedly hypocritical American Christianity, including mainstream and more moderate evangelical churches.
He rarely directly addressed specific politicians. But throughout his influential 50-yr career, Chick managed to both capture and disseminate a number of attitudes that marker a certain co-operative of today'southward American alt-right. Some of them are predictable; others are quite surprising.
Inspired past Communist propaganda, Chick co-opted a popular course — and then capitalized on it
Chick started writing his tracts in 1960, when he was nigh 36 years erstwhile, after a religious conversion prompted past hearing the radio preacher Charles E. Fuller's Old-Fashioned Revival Hour.
He'd previously written a unmarried-panel comic called "Times Have Changed?" simply after his conversion, he decided to use his skills to create tracts, which could help him and others overcome their own shyness in talking to friends and strangers nearly converting to Christianity, a do commonly chosen "witnessing."
He started with Why No Revival?, which he self-published after taking out a banking concern loan. The concept, to put it mildly, took off.
But the origins of Chick'southward famous comic-volume format are rooted in an interesting political place. In April 1992, Village Voice reporter Pagan Kennedy wrote that, in response to her inquiries to Chick Publications, she received a "one-folio class letter, which states that after Chick learned that the 'multitudes of Prc were won to communism through cartoon booklets,' he 'decided to effort to apply the same technique to win souls for Christ.'"
Outside of the claims made past Chick Publications itself, it's not clear how many tracts take led to actual conversions — by nature, statistics on tract-dissemination are difficult to rail. Simply Brandon Dean, who studies Chick, wrote to me via e-mail that conversion don't really seem to accept been Chick'due south aim, despite his rhetoric.
"I'thou non certain 100 pct convinced that saving souls is the sole religious purpose of the tracts," Dean wrote. "Like virtually Protestant Christians, Chick believed that but religion in Christ could gain you entry into heaven, and he often railed against assertive in the saving power of good works in his anti-Catholic tracts. However, it seems that he believed that works, like his drawing evangelizing, would deliver to him and the people who bought and distributed his tracts to the general population special rewards in the afterlife."
No matter what, the tracts certainly sold. According to Chick Publications, effectually 900 million copies of the cartoons accept been sold in 102 languages. Chick wrote all of the tracts himself simply simply illustrated some of them, teaming upwards with at least two other illustrators to create the others. (One of them, Fred Carter, is quite talented.)
They eventually became a cult hitting with comics collectors, who chase down rare or discontinued titles. You can buy The Unofficial Guide to the Art of Jack T. Chick, by Kurt Kuersteiner, or explore Chick's piece of work via the Chick Tract Club, a fan club which in its own short eulogy calls him "The Male monarch of Hugger-mugger Publishing."
American evangelicals and fundamentalists have a long history of co-opting whatever popular civilization and technology is bachelor to spread the adept news, so in some ways, Chick was just another in this lineage, using the course of comics but to spread the story of Jesus, just as radio and Tv preachers did with their corresponding new mediums.
Chick is best described every bit a fundamentalist with a deep evangelistic streak. (Evangelicals and fundamentalists are oft equated with one some other, but that's not quite right either historically or practically, at least in the United States.) He believed most churches were corrupt and total of backsliders and fake Christians, but the true church still survived in small, Bible-assertive congregations.
And his tracts had wide reach, as attested past the flood of tweets in response to his death:
RIP Jack Chick. Thank y'all so much for making Dungeons & Dragons and so incredibly fascinating to a young me.
— Ian Boudreau (@iboudreau) October 24, 2016
Wow, Jack Chick died. This guy's cartoon pamphlets were responsible for a lot of the anxieties I STILL have around God hating me.
— Sara Zarr (@sarazarr) October 24, 2016
In youth I was influenced by Jack Chick's anti-Catholicism. I got improve. He didn't. May he notice more than mercy in death than he offered others.
— Steven D. Greydanus (@DecentFilms) October 24, 2016
I am genuinely curious about what God said to Jack Chick when he rolled up at the pearly gates yesterday.
— Nicole the Impaler (@Nicole_Cliffe) October 25, 2016
I have my ain memories of Chick tracts, generally of the bestselling "This Was Your Life," which told the story of a person who died and went before the Judgement Seat, on which a faceless Christ sabbatum to decide his fate. (This is probably Chick's all-time-known tract.) Our protagonist soon discovers that he is about to encounter a replay of his whole life, including his worst deeds:
I spent the better part of my childhood worried that everything I did would be projected onto a massive screen after my death, so I showered speedily, to lessen the time I'd spend on screen unclothed. Sometimes I waved, as if at some invisible camera. This assertion, that everything we did in life would be taped and somewhen projected, is a recurring theme of Chick's piece of work.
Almost everybody has a Jack Chick story
After Chick died, I wondered how many people had similar experiences with his tracts. So I asked around on Twitter, and received a flood of emailed replies. Information technology turns out I'm not alone — and the ascendant retentiveness many people take of reading Chick tracts is feeling scared, but also curious.
Considering there is and so much repetition in his piece of work — in some Chick tracts, characters are converted as they read other Chick tracts — the details of Chick's plots have grown fuzzy for many people.
"It'south hard for me to remember specific plots because they didn't seem to be about the stories to me," ane young woman, Hope, wrote to me in an email. "I thought they were just supposed to be scary. I remember several graphic images of people called-for in Hell or more often than not suffering because of their transgressions."
Another respondent, Noel, was similarly scarred: "His tracts helped traumatize my childhood while also offering me helpful conspiracies nearly the Catholics, the 1 world government and the Satanists."
One popular way to laissez passer out Chick tracts (or receive them) was at Halloween, since the pocket-sized comics were only the right size to drop in a kid's bag of candy. "I went to a large Baptist church as a kid, where my begetter was a children'due south minister, and greatly call back receiving numerous Chick Tracks at Halloween," a homo named Jonathan wrote to me. "They were, in a mode, my introduction to graphic novels, though as an adult nigh of the graphic novels I read now are tamer than those."
That introduction had a humorous consequence later on in life for the former pastor'south child: "Also, when I discovered [satirical comic artist] R. Nibble I thought he was the same guy. Not quite."
Noel had a similar experience: "I went to an independent Fundamentalist Baptist church growing upward, and these things were a primary tool to convert the sinners to Jesus," he wrote. "My family gave them out not only at Halloween but left them everywhere you could think of."
Ane woman I heard from, Rachel, had very clear — and almost comical — memories of covertly reading stacks of tracts stored in her grandparents' bedroom: "I accept very vivid memories of finding the ones that were nigh alarming and reading them over and over, sometimes hiding nether the covers to read them. … Almost vividly, I remember reading about the cease of the world, the Rapture, men with 666, the marker of the beast, marked on their heads or their necks Reading these tracts felt like sneaking a look at a PG-13 pic at the firm of a friend with cable much more than than information technology felt like reading something written for the benefit of my soul. After reading them I would carefully place them in random places in the pile of tracts and so that no one would know which ones I had been reading."
I personally retrieve racks of tracts at my church in upstate New York, with piles left in corners at the state-broad homeschool conventions I attended with my parents. I spoke to one person who mentioned seeing stacks of Chick tracts left around science fiction conventions in the Pacific Northwest, a recollection shared by fellow con attendees.
"We were Jack Chick groupies in the '90s. Had the complete set in a box in the back of our oh-and so-homeschooler conversion van," wrote Nelle. "They taught me everything I needed to know well-nigh Catholics, gays, Muslims, Satanists, truck drivers, women who had abortions, women who had sex, large flat-white gods on IKEA thrones, etc." (The faceless God on heaven's throne is a authentication of Chick's artwork.)
Chick threw his about peppery bolts at … Catholics?
Near of the ink about Chick's tracts has been spilled over his anti-Catholic rhetoric, which was peculiarly vehement, even past Chick standards. His anti-Cosmic tracts are pervasively marked by vast, bluntly bewildering conspiracy theories.
His tract "Mama'due south Girls," for case, is "a fairly good instance of Chick's far-reaching, anti-Catholic conspiracy theory," Dean tells me. "In the tract, the Catholic Church, headed past Satan, gave birth to four 'daughters' — Islam, Communism, Nazism, and Freemasonry." Hither'due south a sampling:
The Chick Publications website lists only 10 tracts under the "Catholicism" category — all 10 are as well listed under "false religions" — just Chick'due south anti-Catholic rhetoric goes far beyond these, also popping upwardly in many tracts that focus on other topics. He spent an outsized amount of time on the religion, which he saw equally Satan'due south virtually nefarious plot on Earth.
One famous tract is "The Decease Cookie" (1988), which proposes that the edible wafer consumed by Catholic churchgoers and members of another denominations in the practice of the Eucharist is not what information technology seems. In U.South. Catholic Historian in 2003, Marking Massa wrote that "what the reader quickly learns is that the origin of these 'cookies' is not Jesus at the Last Supper (where Catholics mistakenly believe the Eucharist originated) but rather Satan himself." The tract goes on to "show" that the tradition actually originated from an ancient pagan Egyptian practice.
Another ane of Chick's nearly famous anti-Cosmic stories was also large for a tract, so he produced a series of full-sized comic books that were purportedly the true story of a human being named Alberto Rivera, who had once been a Jesuit priest but claimed to take seen the light, left his club, and become a hunted homo. "Rivera accuses the Catholic church building of submitting him to daze treatment, of infiltrating Protestant churches, and of being led by the antichrist," Kennedy wrote in the Village Voice. (In March 1981, Christianity Today published an investigative report by Gary Metz that debunked Rivera'southward story.)
Why would Chick object so strenuously to the Catholic church in particular? One reply is clear: Chick is devotedly American, and so in painting the Cosmic church building every bit a mass conspiracy spearheaded by Satan himself, Chick is borer into a strong current of anti-Catholic sentiment that was present in America at its founding, partly summarized in Chick'southward 1985 tract "Are Roman Catholics Christians?" At that place, the Cosmic protagonist is characterized as a "a citizen of two countries" with "two loyalties" — one of which was to Rome.
This stance, along with the shadowy intimations of a vast conspiracy headed by Rome, is frequently associated with the nativism of the 19th century and early 20th century. "Until the 1920s, America's doors were open to European immigrants, as long every bit they qualified under a statute passed in 1790 that reserved naturalized citizenship for 'gratis white persons,'" Josh Zeitz wrote final year at Politico. "Whether Southern and Eastern Europeans of darker hue — or all Catholics, whose presumed loyalty to Rome rendered them suspect candidates for democratic citizenship — qualified under the statute, seemed very much an open up question."
Catholics are still viewed with suspicion by some bourgeois Protestants, who don't consider them to be "existent" Christians. And in Chick's terms, as Massa summarizes it, a real Christian is someone who reads simply the Male monarch James Bible, then attends a "Bible fellowship" that isn't involved with whatever broader religious establishment — non "the National Council of Churches and the General Associates of the Presbyterian Church no less than the church of the 'Pope of Rome.'"
Chick oft weighed in on hot-button problems, with an apocalyptic bent
Until his death, Chick was still adding new titles. In later years, he often confronted hot-button issues that helped reveal his politics; they usually fell along standard right-wing talking points, but in their nearly fever dream-esque top. Some Chick tracts sound similar they were straight out of Focus on the Family's James Dobson's "Letter from 2012," published to the web in 2008 equally a way to sway people away from voting for Obama.
"The Last Generation" (1992), for instance, meant to be a window onto the very near future, opens with the "Supreme Justice Mahoney, Due south.J." issuing a decree on Television set "from Rome" and professing that Christians will be executed. The rest of the tract goes on to depict a dystopian world nearing the render of Christ. "The kids call me slime because my parents are directly and still married!" a child exclaims, while another explains that his teacher is a witch who said that cats and dogs would make for a bang-up Halloween sacrifice. (Tomorrow they're going to learn about the "Mother Goddess.")
In "Global Warming" (2012), Chick both characterized global warming equally a conspiracy and said the real global warming was yet to come. " Jesus is calling the shots … not the environmentalists!" one panel says. Christians need not fear global warming, Chick argues, and can discount scientists who say that global warming is real, since Jesus controls the climate — " not flesh."
"Baby Talk" (1995) and "Who Murdered Clarice" (2000) are both anti-abortion tracts; in the latter, the doctor who performed the ballgame commits suicide and must confront judgement, where it turns out he did it in order to sell baby parts.
One Chick tract is reminiscent of the 2014 indie Christian mega-hit moving-picture show God's Not Dead , in which a freshman philosophy student stands up confronting his professor's atheism in front of the form and wins. That movie appeared to be based on a variation of a specific internet meme, but maybe it came from Chick; as Kennedy notes in her 1992 Village Voice commodity, the Chick tract titled "Large Daddy?" sounds awfully similar:
Copyrighted in 1972, the pamphlet opens with a professor request, "How many of you lot believe in evolution?"
"Nosotros practise sir!" yell the students, shaking peace-sign fists … Of course, a groomed Christian student stands up and debunks evolution. He converts not only the professor, only also the hippies, one of whom moans, 'Then we didn't evolve! The Institution has been feeding united states of america the big lie.'"
In "Thanksgiving" (2005), Chick explores the origins of America, in which Uncle Mortimer tells his family the story of the starting time Thanksgiving, which they've manifestly never heard earlier. (This motif of full ignorance about very mutual things, similar the Pilgrims, or Jesus himself, is pervasive in Chick's work.) And then Uncle Mortimer chastises the gathered family: " Thanksgiving was in one case our most honored day. Only today it's a joke … We're not thankful for annihilation . And this offends God." When his nephew responds with questions that lead to the nephew accepting Christ, everyone else scoffs:
There are tracts on homosexuality and Israel, on "drugs/alcohol/STDs," on the occult, on suicide, on Native American religion, and on ecumenicism. Family Guy and Harry Potter came in for criticism every bit well: I is a proponent of degenerate values; the other is evil occult witchcraft.
Along with his takes on hot-button social issues, Chick had a sticky relationship with matters of race and immigration. Scholars note that he seems interested in evangelizing all people, with a clear sense that the gospel is for everyone. And yet there are plenty of racist tropes spread throughout his work every bit is the intimation that women are naturally more decumbent to corruption.
For instance, a "black tract" series tailored for African-American readers exists, with tracts like "Howdy At that place!" redrawn and renamed "Wassup?" (This is existent. I am not making it upward.)
Along with this comes Chick's views on immigration. In a paper on Chick'southward outreach to Castilian-speaking populations, Dean writes about "Holocaust," an out-of-print tract from 1984 "that details the conspiratorial actions of the Roman Catholic Church building in orchestrating the Holocaust and planning some other 'inquisition' by taking control of the U.s. government and executing Protestant Christians. Within this plot, illegal immigration from heavily Cosmic, Latin American countries is an essential tactic."
Dean goes on to annotation several changes in Spanish-language versions of pop tracts; in "This Was Your Life! (¡Esta Fue Tu Vida!)," for instance, the English language-tract sin of deceit is replaced with fornicario, playing into stereotypes.
And there are seven tracts on Islam (which as a religion is a secondary concern, given it is one of Roman Catholicism's "daughters" and thus just some other pawn in Rome'south quest for world domination). I tract chosen "Camel'southward in the Tent" outlines Islam's strategy for taking over the globe:
"May I come all the mode in?" the titular camel asks in the adjacent frame, poking its head into a tent topped by an American flag. "Of course. We are a tolerant nation," a vocalism replies.
In addition to the familiar Chick tracts, Chick Publications has published bottom-known, total-color graphic novels. One of them, "Unthinkable," is most why the Us must support Israel in order to secure God's favor.
"The portion dealing with Washington and the American Revolution argues that God sent Jewish people to America in order for them to finance the war (Chick specifically mentions Haym Solomon)," Dean wrote in his email to me. "In render, Washington cared for the Jewish people and therefore God looked after the USA. This connected through the following presidents, until FDR, who 'was non a friend of the Jews.'"
Jack Chick isn't the alt-right, but they sound a lot alike
Chick'due south nativist-leaning rhetoric sounds a lot like the discussions that have characterized the ascent of Donald Trump and the alt-right (with the key exception of Chick's support for Israel, which is feature of many strains of conservative American Christianity). But Chick himself was non overtly political — which may seem surprising, given the intertwining of the political and religious right in the Us over the very decades during which Chick was agile.
"Chick tended to stay out of political campaigns," Dean wrote to me. He explained further:
There is no mention of Trump or fifty-fifty Cruz anywhere on his website, and only a few references to Hillary Clinton. Information technology is natural to assume his personal views aligned more closely with the Republican Party — anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, etc.
Withal, he does seem to critique both Republican and Autonomous presidents and politicians. He went afterwards Romney for his Mormonism in 2008 and 2013, but even that was express to two articles in his newsletter Boxing Cry. I tin't find any show of Chick Publications pushing an "Obama-as-a-secret-Muslim" calendar.
In "Unthinkable," Chick argues that God killed FDR because of his opposition to the state of Israel and replaced him with Harry Truman, "a Bible laic" who supported the recognition of Israel. He praised Nixon for his love of State of israel. But he gave the near recent four presidents ([Unthinkable] was published earlier this twelvemonth and so that includes George H.Due west. Bush-league through Obama) all failing grades when it comes to Jewish relations, which in plough led to an increase in natural disasters and terrorist attacks because God lifted his protection for the US.
So, it seems to me that Chick cared less about political affiliation and more about how closely their globe views matched his own.
Yet there are some primal matches in way, if not in statement. In an interview about his work's origins published in Chick's newsletter Battle Cry in 1984 (originally sent by snail mail service, and afterward email to all Chick Publications customers), Chick said that "when everything is caving in, and when the world laughs at the church, that's when we demand revival. Nosotros're in that position at present … We're a large joke out there. Everybody says they're built-in again … Mormons, Catholics, everybody, only they don't know what it means." Echoes, here, of Donald Trump's assurances that everyone is laughing at America.
The alt-correct — and Trump'due south own rhetoric, which belittles sissies and losers — also finds some common ground with Chick's 1978 tract "The Sissy," in which a pair of truck drivers telephone call Jesus a sissy, but are then schooled by a third truck commuter who explains the real situation:
The story ends with the truckers accepting Jesus into their hearts because "that Jesus had more guts than any man that always lived … And I love him for that!"
Clearly the aforementioned immigration/Islam tract "Camel'due south in the Tent" shares a straight line with Trump'southward rhetoric about Islam, even if no one has seriously suggested (however) from the political stage that Islam is in league with Catholicism. Similarly, Chick holds a caricatured view of nonwhite people that often leads him to code stereotyped views into translations and adaptations such as the "black tract" series.
Chick's rhetoric suggests nosotros need more than nuance when talking about the religious correct
One concluding conundrum from this election has been Trump's much-noted ability to split the religious right, a coalition in America for decades, often over the result of abortion. As Kate Shelnutt recently noted in Christianity Today, Trump has effectively destroyed the voting bloc that consisted of both evangelicals and Catholics. Among Catholics, more than than a quarter are start-generation immigrants, and 42 percent are people of color. Most Catholics — along with near nonwhite evangelicals — have backed Clinton.
Only that split may be the signal of something deeper. Writing about Chick and the civilization wars in the journal Religion and American Culture, Michael Ian Borer and Adam Murphree noted that Chick'southward fundamentalist Protestant insistence that the Catholic church is the devil's handiwork profoundly complicates the piece of cake "battle lines" that commentators tend to depict when writing most the civilisation wars. After all, Chick'southward strong stance against homosexuality, abortion, and other similar social matters are too feature of the Roman Cosmic church. The brotherhood along political lines seems obvious.
But, as Tapping and Murphee point out, it'due south faulty to talk about wars over culture as if they draw themselves merely forth obvious political contours. From studying Chick, they conclude that "when considering conflicts betwixt worldviews, it is just as of import to consider subjective definitions that groups make about their own and other worldviews every bit it is to consider the 'objective' worldviews themselves."
In other words, to someone on the secular or religious left, all conservative Christians may seem the same — merely inside conservative Christianity, people like Jack Chick may view Catholics or other Christians who don't exclusively read the King James version of the Bible as progressive. (In the view of some fundamentalist Christians, the Male monarch James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, is the only "divinely inspired" English version of the Scriptures; all versions since are bastardizations subject to human error and agenda.) And in their view, progressives are as much a source of evil as anyone else.
"Paying attention to the ways that claims makers like Jack Chick frame both their worldviews and the worldviews of their 'villainous' opponents, we must acknowledge that the boundaries of allegiance that define the civilization wars are less stable than previously considered," Borer and Murphee conclude.
It'south hard to imagine a better summation of the confusion of this election and, in particular, the potential combustion of the GOP. The boundaries that define the sides are unstable. As Sarah Posner reported in the New York Times on October xix, "The divide — or, more aptly, the crater — betwixt pro-Trump and anti-Trump evangelicals is a window into the future of the Republican Party."
And that is the crux of the affair: Jack Chick embodies a securely fundamentalist, nativist section of the American right fly. But while in his stance, he willingly alienated potential allies — pro-life Catholics, very bourgeois evangelicals — his reach was extensive, and his influence vast.
Chick's decades-long appeal to conspiracy theories is symptomatic of a section of the voting public still susceptible to the thought that those whom they oppose are not only wrong, but function of Satan's plan to rule the earth.
Of course, this doesn't stand for everyone voting for Trump. Just it'south a decent indication that this sort of alt-correct conspiracy-mongering has been nowadays for a long time, and is ofttimes rooted in the anti-establishment religious fear present since the eye of the 20th century. What'south startling now is that information technology'southward been explicitly mainstreamed.
Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/11/8/13426962/jack-chick-alt-right-fundamentalism-tracts-catholics-trump
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