Jack T. Chick has passed away. Is there still a company that promotes and sells his products?
I think that most of the Protestant churches have recognized that these tracts were popular at a different time in U.S. history–a time when the Viet Nam war was taking young men away from their families, when a President and his brother were assassinated, along with a beloved (and controversial) civil rights leader, when Charles Manson and his “family” terrorized Hollywood, drugs were gaining popularity with all classes of society, when rebellion and protests by young people were everywhere, when people were abandoning traditional social organizations including churches, and when technology started replacing human muscles and bra(name removed by moderator)ower in the workplace.
Most Protestant churches these days utilize modern methods to evangelize and disciple people. Jack T. Chick tracts don’t work well anymore.
The company is still very much in business, unfortunately. And someone is making money off of it.
Jack T Chick was a talented and successful secular cartoonist before he embraced Christianity. At one time I made a hobby of confiscating his comic books from public places, especially the ones that address Catholicism — most of them do not. They make for some interesting reading. Most of them are very simple, and quite frankly, do not teach heresy or anything
per se objectionable, it is just an issue of what they
don’t say, not what they
do say. The message is very simple — repent of your sins, change your ways, accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, be baptized, read the Bible, find a Bible-believing church, and “fellowship” (it’s a noun, not a verb) with like-minded Christians. Pretty innocuous stuff. There is even a little humor mixed in with some of the stories. I don’t think it’s a particularly bad evangelization tool, nor even an outdated one. A person could pick one of these up, read it, and say to themselves
“yes, it’s true… it really is that simple!”.
The anti-Catholic tracts are, however, very vicious, crude, and are a mash-up of things that are absolute falsehoods at worst, and selective half-truths at best. Even if Alberto Rivera was actually a priest — and I would not bet my soul that he wasn’t — not even Jack Chick can prove that his whole story is not just a pack of lies. A renegade priest could go nuts and concoct a legend that would be precisely what certain audiences want to hear (and could make some money at it while he’s at it). From what I heard, JTC had to “pray about it” to know if the story was real. That is what the LDS (Mormons) tell you to do about their claims — wait for the “burning in the bosom”. That proves nothing.
Unless a Catholic is very strong in their faith, Chick tracts are best to stay away from. They do absolutely nothing to make you a better Catholic.
