If it makes everyone feel a little better, I know that many Protestants don’t take Jack T. Chick seriously today. They consider him a leftover from the 70s who never moved into the 21st century. A nut case.
Several articles in respected Christian magazines over the years have really put a dent in his popularity, proving that many of his claims about Catholics and other groups are fallacies.
Most Protestants say that he has “gone overboard,” especially with his anti-Catholic tracts.
(I was an evangelical Protestant until I was received into the Catholic Church April 10, 2004.)
He hasn’t always been so awful, everyone. When I was thirteen, I was a major “Dark Shadows” fan. (The old soap opera with vampires and witches that got wildly popular in the late 60s/early 70s. There was a remake of it in the early 90s.)
One of the Chick tracts, “Bewitched,” showed Satan watching TV and commenting, “This show has done more for my cause than any show.” The show on the screen was Dark Shadows.
Well, I was upset about that, and wrote a thirteen-page handwritten letter to Mr. Chick refuting that comic’s claim. My main point was that fiction stories which presented a clear “good vs. evil” plot, where it was clear that GOOD was SUPPOSED to win, were glorifying to God even if they didn’t overtly preach the Gospel. (Remember, back in those days, movies like “Rosemary’s Baby” were popular, movies in which evil triumphed and that was a good thing. Dark Shadows wasn’t like that. Evil was labelled as evil, and good was supposed to win out. There was even one episode where people knelt and prayed!)
Mr. Chick wrote me back and agreed with me that he had been too hasty to send the comic book to press. HE had wanted to use the show “Bewitched” because of the way it presented witchcraft as a “Good” thing. But his staff had told him that the show was too popular and that he would hurt his ministry, and suggested Dark Shadows because it so obviously featured monsters.
The outcome–that tract was CHANGED, and if you get a later version of the tract, you will see the show “Bewitched” in the TV screen, not “Dark Shadows.”
So you see, at one point, Mr. Chick was a reasonable man. I agree with those who say that somewhere along the line, he slipped into unreasonableness, to put it kindly.
I can’t help but wonder what put him over the top.
Interesting that a lot of the “predictions” he made in his “end times” tracts have really come true, especially the predictions about entertainment and gay lifestyles. Perhaps he just got frustrated watching his own tracts come to life, and flipped out.
He has done one very beautiful tract–it was called “Somebody Loves You,” in which a ragged, homeless child is searching the streets for someone to love him. He finds a tract with a picture of Jesus and the words, “Somebody Loves You.” The child picks up the tract and hugs it as he goes to sleep. He dies in his sleep, and an angel carries him up to heaven to Jesus. The last page of the tract says, “And Jesus loves YOU too.”
There is no dialogue in the tract at all, just very well-drawn, emotional pictures. It is suitable for any Christian denomination in any language.
Personally, I think the biggest irony of all would be for a Catholic group to order thousands of that tract and use it for their evangelization. Stamp the tract with “____ Catholic Church” in the space on that tract that says “Call this church for more information about Jesus.” And then send Jack T. Chick a copy, along with a glowing note about how effective his tracts are in bringing people into the “______ Catholic Church.”
Ouch! But isn’t this returning good for evil?
