Jack Chick, soul-winner and Catholic-hater, is dead.Chick, who produced hundreds of fundamentalist Christian tracts over 50 years, passed yesterday at the age of 92. He was initially known for tracts like “This Was Your Life,” which used compelling and sometimes frightening visuals to depict fundamentalist beliefs about hell and salvation. His contribution to the Satanic Panic rightfully earned him public infamy, as did his fear-mongering about feminism, LGBT rights, New Age spirituality, and even Catholicism.
Chick was a true cultural separatist whose doctrinal views were heavily influenced by works like The Fundamentals and Charles Finney’s Power From On High. Only the King James Version of the Bible sufficed; Satan is directly responsible for all other translations. Catholics? They’ve eaten the infamous Death Cookie and are doomed to hell. Infant baptism? Dangerous heresy! Dungeons and Dragons? If you have to ask, you’ve probably got one foot in the lake of fire already.
A few of Chick’s views, specifically on abortion, evolution, and LGBT people, possess a pernicious longevity. He celebrated AIDS as just deserts for anyone who didn’t adhere to his stringent sexual standards—a sentiment 14 percent of Americans still believe.
I cannot even begin to imagine the number of children that have been traumatized by reading this garbage, but all it did for me was to make me even angrier that there were adults who victimized kids with bullshit like this.
Those Chick Tracts were heavily focused on eternal damnation and any non-Fundamentalist point of view was essentially labeled Satanic and dismissed out of hand.
Somehow I feel that the planet is just a little bit more progressive now that Jack Chick has shuffled off his mortal coil.
OK, I love these so much I have a collection of Chick tracts. My favorite is "Big Daddy" about evolution.
ReplyDeleteOh to be a fly on the wall at the "pearly gates" when he find's out he's not welcome there. If there is such a place as heaven I believe hateful people would not be welcome unless they go through some kind of therapy first. Mr. Chick sounds like he has a lot of issues to resolve before entering.
ReplyDeleteGood riddance to the hateful old bastard.
ReplyDeleteI was raised by devout Methodists in the Bible Belt but was never exposed to the severe religious indoctrination that you apparently suffered.
ReplyDeletelol.
DeleteThe cross he bears...
Nope--no pearly gates, no everlasting fire, no nothing. Hopefully, Chick's last thought was the realization that nothing awaits him, because he's dead. And I hope his last emotion was crushing disappointment.
ReplyDeleteNever heard of him. Boy am I glad.
ReplyDeletePunch in the gut>
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/watch-parent-slugs-7-year-old-boy-in-the-gut-for-no-reason-in-school-hallway/
Someone used to come into the old American History Museum's bookstore (Smithsonian) and slip those obnoxious This was your life comics into the books. They would fall out whenever someone looked at the books and we would have to collect them. My coworker then used to grumble about collecting as many as possible so he could burn them. He hated them more than I did.
ReplyDeletePUSSY, Pussy, pussy Riot!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/pussy-riot-just-released-straight-outta-vagina-and-it-skewers-megalomaniac-males-like-trump/
When I encountered those years ago as a young Catholic kid, I found them so blatantly untrue to what I knew that I laughed hysterically. Maybe some kids were traumatized by them, but I wasn't. I did wonder, however, why people believed such hateful stuff to the extent that they felt they had to fear monger in the service of their supposedly loving God.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a teenager, my older sister joined a fundamentalist Christian cult and used to spend her free time standing on street corners handing these types of tracts out to unsuspecting people. She tried to convert me, and even back then I thought it was bullshit. She found her way out of that cult, but has immersed herself in other cults since then including being a diehard teaparty nut. Guess what her new thing is? Yep, huge supporter of Donald Trump. Ugh.
ReplyDeleteShades of the Crusades and the Inquisition...
ReplyDeleteCan't wait till he finds out God is a hispanic speaking african american liberal lesbian militant radical atheist.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian home, and even though I wasn't indoctrinated with this extreme crap....it still took me into my 40's to shake off the idea that I would burn in hell for eternity if I decided that it was all in people's imagination. Actually, the Internet helped a lot...with all the added info. (before that, it was mostly the local -conservative- library)
ReplyDeleteScalia, Schlafly, Chick. 2016, you suck, but at least you're trying to redeem yourself.
ReplyDelete