Link of the Day: Chick Publications

“Everyone loves Chick tracts!” says the banner across the top of the site. Which is ironic, because Chick tracts don’t exactly love the vast majority of people back. In fact, it’s kind of a weird way to sell one of the most hateful, hostile, and occasionally hilarious sites on the web.

Dig through the archives, and you’re sure to find a story explaining why all the members of the race, religion, creed, sexual community or lifestyle of your choice are bound for Hell, unless they accept a very specific and largely hate-driven version of Jesus. Jack Chick, a California-based evangelical cartoonist who will turn eighty-seven in April, has been banging these things out for over forty years, and his sense of how the world works doesn’t seem to have evolved one iota throughout that time.

For a sense of the tone, you can check out the newest tract, “Uninvited,” in which “Nurse Clara gives the men [at the AIDS hospice] straight talk about how they got in this mess, and how Jesus can give them hope.” I don’t want to give away the ending, so let’s just say that all that “straight talk” isn’t very flattering to the gay community.

Why link to something like this? Partly to acknowledge the cult following that Chick’s tracts have generated over the decades, and partly to point a finger at the raging, hamfisted xenophobia that drives the whole enterprise. If you want to learn more about homosexuals and how to treat them with respect, for example, you’d do well to read “Uninvited,” throw away everything it says, and do the opposite of whatever it recommends.

Posted in Link of the Day

2 Responses to “Link of the Day: Chick Publications”

  1. neil says:

    oh shit matty…

    found chick tracts are one of my most enduring high school memories. i think they still got a pile of em down at the beguiling… “allah had no son” might be my favorite on the basis of extreme audactity.

    http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0042/0042_01.asp

  2. jason says:

    I’d never heard of these things before I lived a summer in Calgary a decade ago. Whoa.