Does your average evangelical read Chick Tracts or believe what they say?

[JustaServant]

I never heard of Jack Chick before coming to CAF.

You think we created him in a laboratory?

Chick is popular with wide-eyed radical KJV-only fundamentalists. He’s an example of the extreme. No great surprise he would not be known among mainstream Protestants or the more agreeable evangelicals.
One look at his tracts makes one think he is in need of some kind of heavy SSRI.

 

[Daizies]

You think we created him in a laboratory?

Chick is popular with wide-eyed radical KJV-only fundamentalists. He’s an example of the extreme. No great surprise he would not be known among mainstream Protestants or the more agreeable evangelicals.
One look at his tracts makes one think he is in need of some kind of heavy SSRI.

I don’t think AbideWithMe are saying he is made up, just that they had never heard of Chick before, which is entirely possible. He’s not THAT big.

They used to give us those tracts when I was a kid at the Baptist Church we went to. After I left the Baptists and went more Pentecostal/Charismatic, I never saw his stuff except at a random bus stop. In fact, it has been so long since I’ve seen any of those tracts that when people brought it up here, my first thought was, What? You mean that stuff is still around? (though I used a different “s” word…)

Those things so gave me nightmares as a kid :sad_yes:

 

[benjammin]

No, and yes.

I you present a typical Evangelical with such a thing, s/he will recognise it for hateful propaganda, and dismiss it.

However, quite a few of the ideas in the tracts (many of which date back to the Reformation) circulate individually within Protestantism, and the repetition of those ideas from many sources around them leads Evangelicals to think that there must be some truth to them. This is what leads people to believe that Catholics worship Mary, that Catholicism is fundamentally pagan, that it is all about wealth and power for the Pope, etc.

So, they do influence people’s belief, but not independently or directly.

Thats what made me wonder about them. Sometimes I would hear this anti catholic stuff and wonder if they got it from chick tracts. However, I think the thing with your typical evangelical from what i’ve seen is more from ex catholics. The ex catholics didn’t feel satisfied in the church and didn’t understand what they were told about the church, and thus attack it, at least in my experience

 

[benjammin]

I don’t think AbideWithMe are saying he is made up, just that they had never heard of Chick before, which is entirely possible. He’s not THAT big.

They used to give us those tracts when I was a kid at the Baptist Church we went to. After I left the Baptists and went more Pentecostal/Charismatic, I never saw his stuff except at a random bus stop. In fact, it has been so long since I’ve seen any of those tracts that when people brought it up here, my first thought was, What? You mean that stuff is still around? (though I used a different “s” word…)

Those things so gave me nightmares as a kid :sad_yes:

So it’s more of a fundie baptist thing I guess. Thank GOd there aren’t many of those around where I live

 

[JustaServant]

I don’t think AbideWithMe are saying he is made up, just that they had never heard of Chick before, which is entirely possible. He’s not THAT big.

They used to give us those tracts when I was a kid at the Baptist Church we went to. After I left the Baptists and went more Pentecostal/Charismatic, I never saw his stuff except at a random bus stop. In fact, it has been so long since I’ve seen any of those tracts that when people brought it up here, my first thought was, What? You mean that stuff is still around? (though I used a different “s” word…)

Those things so gave me nightmares as a kid :sad_yes:

No offense meant to AWM, shoulda put a smiley there.
If we did build him in laboratory, I would demand the money back. We can create a far more convincing anti-Catholic.

 

[Izdaari]

I am not “your average evangelical”. Indeed, I’m not an evangelical at all anymore. Earlier this year I jumped ship and went over to the “mainline”, from Assemblies of God to Episcopalian.

But even as an evangelical, I never took Jack Chick very seriously. I knew he was a total buffoon when I read his attacks on rock music, roleplaying games and modern bible versions…

 

[CB_Catholic]

What is really disgusting is that people have been known to leave these tracts outside of the emergency room in the Catholic hospital where I work. Can you imagine having a loved one in the ER in danger of death and finding one of these tracts???

There was a group leaving them around the hospital a few years ago and they were stupid enough to have printed the name of their church and a telephone number on the back cover.
It was fairly easy for Sister to take care of the matter with that group.

In my experience it has not been the average Evangelical who buys into this stuff, it is the rabid anti-Catholic fundamentalist, who usually is anti anything but his own brand of religion.

 

[AbideWithMe]

I don’t think AbideWithMe are saying he is made up, just that they had never heard of Chick before, which is entirely possible. He’s not THAT big.

That’s exactly what I was saying…I said what I meant, and there was no reason to read anything into my post beyond its face value.

I did look him up on Wiki after coming here, and learned he’s an 88 year old Independent Baptist who has had some serious health problems. He’ll be meeting his Maker soon enough.

IIRC, he’s also had to leave a major Christian bookseller association because they were going to remove him from membership due to his anti-Catholic trash.

 

[Seeker1961]

We used to find them in the Church pews in my parish in NJ back when I was in school. Our theology teacher used to love bringing them into class and challenging us to refute them.

 

[AbideWithMe]

No great surprise he would not be known among mainstream Protestants or the more agreeable evangelicals.

Aw, shucks, are you saying I count as one of the more agreeable evangelicals? It’s starting to feel all warm and fuzzy around here.

 

[AbideWithMe]

Jack Thomas Chick is an exceptionally intelligent, talented, and shrewd businessman…

No, he’s paranoid.

In accusing other large religious organizations of being con artists, it seems to me that the spirit of Chick may have infected you.

 

[Cat]

I was your average evangelical Protestant for the first 47 years of my life before converting to Catholicism 8 years ago.

When I was a teenager, I actually carried on a correspondence with Jack T. Chick. I convinced him to change the text in one of his tracts.

So he wasn’t always so fanatical. And there was a time when a lot of evangelical Protestants used his tracts, or at least some of them. I think there has always been a camp of evangelical Protestants who considered themselves “too intellectual” to use “comic books” to tell people about Jesus. But there were plenty more of us who agreed with Chick’s slogan back then: Chick tracts get read. They do get read–lots of people like to read comic books, and his little books are cleverly drawn and have good stories.

Sometime in the 1980s, I believe it was Cornerstone, or perhaps it was Christianity Today, both highly-respected evangelical Protestant publications, that did an expose of Jack T. Chick’s “anti-Catholic” tracts. All of us were talking about it back then, because it was quite shocking and revealed many falsehoods and misleading information in Jack T. Chick’s anti-Catholic tracts.

After this, most evangelicals rejected Jack T. Chick as a serious teacher/writer, and most churches and evangelical organizations stopped putting out his tracts.

After all, the Bible says that if a prophet is wrong about just ONE thing, then he is NOT to be trusted. And to evangelical Protestants, when they recognized that Chick was wrong about many of the facts in his anti-Catholic tracts, they recognized that his other tracts and booklets were spurious at best and dangerous at worst.

HOWEVER–I still think that there is some good in Jack T. Chick, and that he has written at least ONE TRACT that ALL Christians, including CATHOLICS–can appreciate and be inspired by.

That tract is called Somebody Loves Me–here is a link to a site where you can read this little tract in its entirety. It is a lovely little story that tells the most basic Gospel message–that God loves us. chick.com/reading/tracts/0006/0006_01.asp

Yes, the text after the illustrations is obviously not theologically-correct according to the Catholic Church. But the illustrated STORY of the little child who is introduced to Jesus is very sweet and simple, and although I realize that many Catholics are more advanced than this in their understanding of God and His Church, there are still quite a few Catholics and Protestants who still haven’t figured out a lot of the basics about God. This little tract might be just the jump-start they need to give them a proper perspective–Jesus loves me.

 

[JustaServant]

Aw, shucks, are you saying I count as one of the more agreeable evangelicals? It’s starting to feel all warm and fuzzy around here.

Oh shut up.

 

[Jack_726]

No, he’s paranoid.

In accusing other large religious organizations of being con artists, it seems to me that the spirit of Chick may have infected you.

He is an exceptionally intelligent, talented, and shrewd businessman, and If paranoia can make a person a multi-millionaire, where do I get a supply of paranoia pills which will make my pastor very happy? And his spirit has not infected me . . . I’m still poor as church mouse. Also, try to restrict your flummery to the limitations of your knowledge and experience so as to not let anyone in on our little secret.

 

[Mystophilus]

Thats what made me wonder about them. Sometimes I would hear this anti catholic stuff and wonder if they got it from chick tracts. However, I think the thing with your typical evangelical from what i’ve seen is more from ex catholics. The ex catholics didn’t feel satisfied in the church and didn’t understand what they were told about the church, and thus attack it, at least in my experience

There are a few reasons why I would not blame it on ex-Catholics. One is that they are much more likely to present a negative image of something which does exist (e.g., “All priests are hypocrites”) than to manufacture something which has never happened (e.g., “Catholic pilgrims to Rome worship a statue of Jupiter”), because they will at least have some knowledge of how things really work. Another is that the silly stories which go around - “Catholics worship Mary”, “Catholicism is all just paganism in a thin disguise”, “Catholics are disloyal citizens because their allegiance is to Rome” - I have actually seen before, in sixteenth and seventeenth century anti-Catholic propaganda. Finally, the most anti-Catholic people whom I have met are not ex-Catholics, but Protestants whose view of Catholicism was formed by stories of the Huguenots in France and the English Protestants executed under Mary I, i.e. the sixteenth century again.

 

[benjammin]

There are a few reasons why I would not blame it on ex-Catholics. One is that they are much more likely to present a negative image of something which does exist (e.g., “All priests are hypocrites”) than to manufacture something which has never happened (e.g., “Catholic pilgrims to Rome worship a statue of Jupiter”), because they will at least have some knowledge of how things really work. Another is that the silly stories which go around - “Catholics worship Mary”, “Catholicism is all just paganism in a thin disguise”, “Catholics are disloyal citizens because their allegiance is to Rome” - I have actually seen before, in sixteenth and seventeenth century anti-Catholic propaganda. Finally, the most anti-Catholic people whom I have met are not ex-Catholics, but Protestants whose view of Catholicism was formed by stories of the Huguenots in France and the English Protestants executed under Mary I, i.e. the sixteenth century again.

Oh, sorry I didn’t clarify, I meant that ex catholics were more influential in mainstream evangelical circles. Certainly ex catholics didn’t come up with the junk Jack Chick creates. That came from his own mind. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.

 

[Dave_Noonan]

For example, would students who attend Campus Crusade read and believe in chick tracts (for those of you who don’t know who Jack Chick is, read this by Jimmy Akin catholic.com/documents/the-nightmare-world-of-jack-t-chick) . I’ve never seen this things handed out except by some guys at a state fair (they were handing out mostly anti muslim stuff that day).

So does your average evangelical read chick tracts and believe what they say? I’ve never asked my evangelical friends because either I’m afraid they won’t know what i’m talking about (since I’ve never seen them read them or use them even when I had evangelical roommates) or they’ll hand me one and say i’m some agent of the Vatican LOL (i guess in a sense I am though)

I’ve seen Chick tracts around since I was a kid. I don’t think they are on the radar of the average evangelical, but they are still very influential at the more fundamentalist end of evangelicalism.

 

[Mystophilus]

Oh, sorry I didn’t clarify, I meant that ex catholics were more influential in mainstream evangelical circles.

:yup:
That is what I was responding to. The anti-Catholic propaganda current in Protestantism is not the sort of complaints which come from ex-Catholics; it is the same things which have been being said for five hundred years, because the same stories are being recycled by Protestants who are brought up to believe that Catholicism is evil.

 

[flameburns623]

I think Evangelicals are probably of at least 4 minds on the Chick tracts. Some Ev’s disdain the notion of using comic books to preach the Gospel. MOST Chick tracts are just basic, Billy Graham/easy-believism Gospel messages, in a format which leads almost anyone to pick them up and read 'em. Even moderate Ev’s may often like THOSE tracts, as a way of introducing some small iota of Christian content to folks otherwise unlikely to pay attention to God-talk. Most Evangelicals are aware, I suspect, that Chick’s Catholic conspiracy theories are looney-tunes, so many would not display or distribute Chick tracts covering THOSE issues. A much smaller group of Evangelicals or Fundamentalists MIGHT use them, in bad faith, as one tactic to break down a Catholic weak in the Faith. And a few Protestants, of the Fundamentalist or hyper-sectarian sort, may believe much or all of the Jack Chick spiel.

 

[wondrousgnat]

I am always suspicious of the terms “ex-Catholic” and “ex-priest.” In the church which I used to belong one of our pastors often proclaimed himself an “ex-Catholic” and in casual conversation with him he admitted he may have gone to mass 5 times in his life.

We also had an “ex-priest” as a guest speaker. I had recently become a Catholic and was invited back to hear him and return to the fold. I was shocked by his lack of understanding of the Catholic church then discovered he was never a priest. I could see the embarrassment on the faces of those who invited me because he was so bad. Soon I learned that many people who make money proclaiming themselves as ex-priests never were.
Clearly many of the charges against the church were made by liars. And big lies at that.