This week I saw on Twitter that a certain Jack Chick had died. I was rather astonished at the outpouring of jeering, bile and vitriol in response! In fact I had never heard of the man until a few years ago, when I heard some atheist cursing him. But apparently he was well-known in the USA as a writer of evangelistic tracts in cartoon form.
The tracts themselves are simple but rather compelling, and the message of the gospel of Christ is certainly preached very directly. I don’t think that I have ever seen any; but they can be found on his website.
An article on Taki’s Magazine here gave a review of his work. It also listed two of his tracts as particularly typical.
The Last Generation was written in 1992, and reads somewhat presciently now.
This was your life is a typical tract.
The first example of his artwork is one that I saw online on Instagram, in condensed form:
It’s all a useful reminder to focus on Christ.
We all spend our lives busy, earning a living, and pursuing our hobbies. But unless we have given our lives to Christ, in the end, it’s just like ploughing the sand. The graveyards are full of people who knew that they were irreplaceable. Everything screws up in the end. But … there is a way out, if we meet Christ.
I think the basic idea of comics tracts was good, and the art style was strong. I also think that Chick meant well, and the Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin’s brief biography of him tends to show that.
In the other hand, his claim that playing Dungeons and Dragons gave players real spellcasting powers was ludicrous, and brought the Gospel into disrepute. He also put out a good many offensive tracts that taught untruths about other Christian groups and hobbies. The anti-Catholic tract “The Death Cookie” was particularly infamous, as it claimed that Catholic Masses were necromantic occult ceremonies, but his grasp of Christian history was not strong anywhere.
So obviously I will pray for his soul and wish him well, but he made Christian life unnecessarily hard, both for those who believed his tracts and those who didn’t.
Jimmy Akin has a repeat of his 2004 Chick encounter article posted on jimmyakin.com. One of those weird life moments, very worth reading.
He also has a 2011 apologetics/critique book called The Nightmare World of Jack T. Chick, which I falsely remembered as a biography.
I’ll echo Jimmy and Banshee here– he’s a rather tragic figure. Great aims, great potential, but destroyed by what he did to try to achieve them. I don’t know if I’m more afraid that he knew he was lying in so many of the tracts, or that he didn’t.
I hope to meet him in heaven, some day.
This week I saw on Twitter that a certain Jack Chick had died. I was rather astonished at the outpouring of jeering, bile and vitriol in response!
Mandatory dark humor:
It was twitter and the guy couldn’t hit them back. Of course there was horrifically bad behavior.
I’d been aware of Jack Chick for around 40 years, but had never seen much of his work. I thought Terry Mattingly’s post on some coverage of his work – which includes what he thinks accurate description of that body of work – interesting, together with some of the discussion in the comments:
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2016/10/25/ap-turns-anti-catholic-superstar-jack-chick-into-an-all-purpose-fundamentalist-hero