Challenging My Assumptions

February 4th, 2003

I consider Jack Chick my philosophical arch nemesis. At the very least, one of the roster of evil henchmen I had to defeat en route to the castle. He makes tracts. Really, really terribly bad tracts with pictures of Satan pointing and laughing and saying, “Har! Har har!” as sinners fry in Hell. In a tract about homosexuality, obese leather-clad sodomites molest small children. In one about role playing games, an evil coven of witches determined to kill children uses tabletop games to convert children to Satanism. His work has always, for me, been a freakish charicature of Christian stereotypes and bigotry.

His tracts disgust me — when I see them lying around, I feel compelled to take them, lest someone who’s not a Christian actually read them. The love of God and the relationship He desires to have with us here on Earth is absent. The concept of faith and relationship with God as a growing process, a way of life rather than a boolean switch between Evil Badness and Virtuous Goodness, never enters his universe.

Then yesterday, I talked to Kris.

He’s a relatively new Christian who’s been a part of my bible study group for a couple of months now. He’s a great guy. Really insightful, sincere and enthusiastic about life and his faith and Stuff In General. He’s going through a really, really rough stretch of life as his mother dies of cancer right now. A few of us caught up with him on Sunday and talked for a while about how things were going. He mentioned a good friend of his from Colorado who’d given him a lot of static after his conversion. The guy — a diehard snowboarder with a pot-fueled anti-authoritarian streak — had called him up the other night, crying. Kris had sent him a Bible and a tract a few months earlier, and the guy had read it. It had left him moved, deeply so. He was even more moved by the fact that Kris would send him that after being ragged on so much about his new faith.

“Thank you for caring about me so much, man.”

It was a Jack Chick tract.

I know Kris. He doesn’t think he’s better than anyone else. If anything, he has a really solid grasp on the “Hey, I’m screwed up as much as anyone else… look at this incredible stuff in the Bible, though! Isn’t it cool?” view of things. But in the split second after he told the story, I found myself recoiling. A Chick Tract. Surely, I thought to myself, nothing good can come from Galilee.

It doesn’t change my views on Chick tracts and the memes they contain. It hasn’t turned me into a believer in the power of scare-tactics and stereotypes. But it has caused me to think. Sometimes I’m just as smug and arrogant in my convictions as I feel Jack Chick is in his. Thanks, Kris.