The tragic life cycle of the Chick tract evangelism campaign

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As one of only a few survivors of the 1980s evangelism campaigns extinction event, the Chick tract evangelism campaign has remarkable staying power. Though its numbers fell to critical levels in the 1990s-2000s, evangelical conservationists have made remarkable efforts to sustain this rare and enchanting beast.

Alas, they may be too late to save it from complete extinction.

(Related: A Jack Chick retrospective; The culture of Chick Tracts.)

An overview of Chick tract evangelism

Chick tract evangelism is a subset of tract evangelism, which itself is a subset of personal evangelism.

Personal evangelism involves face-to-face recruitment. Very often, a personal evangelist is a layperson rather than a professional recruiter like Billy Graham. Personal evangelists often try to recruit friends and family, but they seem to prefer approaching total strangers.

Tract evangelism involves handing people religious tracts instead of talking to them as personal evangelism requires. Most evangelicals consider it far less confrontational than other methods of recruitment. A religious tract is a small booklet containing religious arguments. It seeks to persuade readers to join a particular religious group.

Chick tract evangelism involves handing people religious tracts made by Jack Chick’s company, Chick Publications. Jack Chick himself died in 2016, but his company lives on.

A Chick tract is a small cartoon booklet containing stories that try to persuade its readers to join the religious group of the person handing them out. It is extremely similar in form to Tijuana Bibles, which were similarly-sized cartoon booklets containing very sexual stories (often featuring copyrighted characters like Popeye and Daffy Duck; link is NSFW).

As far as I have ever seen, Chick tract evangelism is the only well-known subset of tract evangelism. No other company producing tracts has achieved this distinction.

The wild and woolly days of evangelism plenty were good for Chick tract evangelism

Back in the 1980s, evangelicals found personal evangelism to be relatively easy. Since their groups held cultural and social dominance in America, and since Christianity itself was the nation’s dominant religion, evangelicals only had to persuade existing Christians to switch to their own groups.

Huge incoming waves of young recruits made evangelism even easier. These recruits had not grown up in evangelicalism. As a result, they took evangelical recruitment promises seriously, while young adults reared in evangelical churches had learned—often at great personal cost—not to take any of that twaddle as real. And new recruits had a great deal of zeal, so they seemed to have far less trouble with the idea of personal evangelism than their hand-reared peers did.

This grand age of recruitment megafauna lumbered across the plains of Christianity and ushered in a number of evangelism subsets that flourished for a while. Youth ministers seemed to love coming up with ways to pack their recruitment events with decoys that would interest their prey.

Two big favorites here were Christian concerts and pizza blasts. They both operated similarly: Offer youth-oriented Christian pop music or free pizza, then bring in the fire-and-brimstone preachers to perform the actual recruitment pitches. A lesser-known recruitment and devotional event, the lock-in, may shock modern audiences due to its requirement of locking church doors to prevent attendees from leaving. But back then, it wasn’t regarded as an issue at all.

How Chick tract evangelism achieved popularity

It was a grand age of gullibility, most of all.

Conversion testimonies got more and more fanciful, with demons and illicit sexcapades galore, and not one person ever thought to fact-check anything about them. Similarly, evangelical recruiters told gaudily-embellished stories that contained fantastical claims that likewise somehow never got questioned or criticized. As well, almost all of the “Arguments to Avoid” noted by Creationist site Answers in Genesis began or gained popularity around this time. I myself encountered “Joshua’s Missing Day” in the 1980s.

Chick tracts combined fanciful testimonies with fantastical claims, overly-simplistic moralizing, and promises of harsh punishment for those who disregarded evangelicals’ demands. Their creator(s) held to an extremely fringe set of beliefs for the time. These included Young-Earth Creationism (the Earth being less than 6k years old) and Catholicism being a demonic fakery meant to dupe billions of people into going to Hell.

It’s worth noting that the faux-experts Jack Chick consulted for his tracts included Creationist Kent Hovind, who is a convicted felon and the writer of possibly the dumbest doctoral dissertation ever made, and anti-Catholic crusader Alberto Rivera, who was actually a conjob posing as an ex-Catholic priest. In particular, Rivera claimed that as a priest, he’d performed espionage and sabotage missions for his superiors. (But somehow and despite being all tight with the Vatican, ol’ Alberto apparently missed all the child rape going on.)

I hope evangelicals savored these days of wild claims and titillating testimonies. There’ll never be another age quite like it.

Chick tract evangelism flourished in these heady years

During the 1980s and even into the 1990s, it was not uncommon at all to find Chick tracts everywhere. They could be found in particularly large herds on and around college campuses.

But these tracts weren’t free. No religious tracts ever are. Chick Publications sold—and still sells—their products in bundles both large and small to suit any evangelism campaign. At the time, evangelicals could also easily find them packaged for sale in most religious bookstores.

Once a religious group or individual purchases these tracts, they then go forth to hand them out to passersby and friends alike—and to stuff them in innocuous spots for someone to discover. I personally knew people who stuffed Creationism-themed Chick tracts into library books about evolutionary biology.

Even back then, these tracts felt like a much socially safer option. And little tiny comic books have a certain disarming appeal that an up-front recruitment pitch just doesn’t.

Chick tract evangelism requires a certain mindset and worldview to succeed

These tracts clung, parasite-like, to various innocuous host vessels. Evangelicals never thought about what they revealed about their end of Christianity. One in particular, “Somebody Loves Me” (archive), is downright horrific in what it unwittingly reveals about evangelicals’ worldview:

A small, impoverished, Hispanic-looking boy’s father beats him to the edge of death. Despondent, the dying boy crawls through the rain to a discarded wooden box in an alley. Though many people see him crawling, nobody stops to help. Once in his box, he shivers and awaits his doom. But then the wind blows a piece of paper to the boy. The paper says “SOMEBODY LOVES YOU.” It confuses him.

A wealthier-looking little girl arrives right then. She reads the paper aloud to him. The boy clutches the paper tightly, marveling at this sign of love. The girl covers him with her plaid coat, then leaves to find help. Alas, he dies before help can arrive. An Aryan angel with preacher hair flies the boy’s spirit/soul to Heaven.

It’s worth noting that one reviewer claims that in the original tract (archive), the girl does not say she’s going to find help. I suspect this reviewer is correct because the words “I’ll go for help” look wedged-in and out of place in the panel. It’s possible that she also didn’t originally cover the boy with her coat, either, since he only has it in one out of five post-leaving panels, along with a tiny plaid bit in a second.

Even with these apparent improvements, it’s striking to see how little “Jesus” apparently cares about a boy living under such awful conditions. Jack Chick only cares about the boy’s conversion, not about improving a single aspect of his life before death or bringing his abusive father to justice.

My Evil Ex, Biff, liked to claim that “Somebody Loves Me” had a hand in his conversion. I didn’t believe this claim even at the time. But it certainly tells people something about Biff that he shouldn’t have wanted anyone to notice.

Aiming a Chick tract to a specific target

Undeterred by a singular lack of success, Jack Chick created slews of different tracts. They all dealt with specific topics like “Off-limits sex makes baby Jesus throw a tizzy fit” or “Doing good deeds won’t get you into Heaven.” A long-running theme involved the Satanic Panic, with star standout “Dark Dungeons” acquiring popularity for all the wrong reasons, at least among people who played tabletop roleplaying games.

How could anyone not love these overwrought fever dreams?

Years after that contrived moral panic had dribbled to an end, someone even made a fantastic movie adaptation of the tract. (We reviewed it, too. Most excellent, highly rated. Definitely check it out!)

Back then, a number of evangelicals tried to find Chick tracts that corresponded to whatever they saw as their target’s most pressing need. Was their target…

• Gay? Hand them “The Gay Blade“!
• A non-Creationist? They need “And It Was Good.”
• Mormon? Obviously, they should see “The Visitors.”
• Black? Hand them the supremely offensive “It’s a Deal.”
• Freemasons? That’s a job for “Good Ol’ Boys.”

I knew evangelicals who carried all sorts of Chick tracts on them while evangelizing, just so they could draw out the appropriate one for each target.

And I’m sure Chick Publications didn’t mind all those extra purchases.

Chick tract evangelism might be making trying to make a comeback

For many years, these little comic booklets were all but ubiquitous on college campuses. Then, as the 2000s and 2010s rolled past, they faded into obscurity. I no longer caught sight of them on amused Reddit posts, or saw people on social media asking what on Earth they’d just found in a public bathroom.

But recently, I’ve been seeing them return to public awareness.

One that a college student recently spotted in the wild was the relatively-recently-made “Love the Jewish People.” It’s one of about six Judaism-targeting tracts.

Like most older evangelicals, Jack Chick had a major obsession with Judaism and Jewish mythology. He really bought into the pro-Israel culture war that American evangelicals have waged for years, since they think Israel’s existence will be of great importance during the end of the world. With the recent attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s retaliation, evangelicals have likely wanted to reinforce that imaginary partnership.

(Related: Evangelicals’ raging Israel boner)

The student who found it had no idea what in the world it was. This tract ran completely outside her worldview. Nothing in her entire frame of reference correlated with it. And here’s the funny part: Her parents are longtime veterans of the atheist-evangelical culture wars. They knew immediately what it was.

I didn’t ask, but I bet it felt incredibly weird for those parents to try to explain to their daughter what she had discovered. There’s just no single word of that explanation that has any idea what the other words are going to be.

Chick tract evangelism, like all similar forms of evangelism, offers a poor return on investment

Quite a few evangelicals think that tract evangelism in general is wildly successful. These evangelicals almost always have some kind of vested interest in tract creation or marketing, or else they happen to prefer tract evangelism to other forms of evangelism.

(Related: Manga Messiah, the new comic-book evangelism campaign in Japan.)

Aspiring evangelists definitely don’t prefer tract evangelism because it’s more effective than other kinds of evangelism—even with Chick tracts!

Most forms of evangelism have extremely low rates of return. But the less interpersonal contact the form involves, the less effective it’ll be. Handing people stuff to read is about as impersonal as one can possibly get while still interacting face-to-face.

Chick tracts probably do a little better than other brands of tracts, simply because they look so different. But even they aren’t particularly effective.

Not that we have exact stats for any form of evangelism, of course. Evangelical hucksters haven’t done much any objective research on any of their evangelism techniques. All they have to go by is perceived returns on investment.

That’s how pizza blasts slowly faded from the evangelical landscape, as did the small-scale Christian evangelism concert. There didn’t come a time when some bigwig in evangelicalism declared that they weren’t effective. Instead, churches gradually sensed that these events no longer brought in many young converts. One by one, they stopped doing them.

Tract evangelism—including Chick tract evangelism—is harder to pin down for effectiveness. Most of the return occurs outside of the evangelist’s presence, when the target (theoretically) finally opens the little comic book and reads it. Unless the target shows up at the evangelist’s own church, the tract hand-off is their only contact.

Evangelicals love to comfort themselves in these cases by thinking they’ve planted seeds, as the Christianese goes. However, even when I was one of them I noticed that hardly anybody ever mentioned tracts of any kind in their conversion testimonies. I’ve kept an ear open since my deconversion, but I’ve heard even fewer mentions.

But it’s just so easy to perform tract evangelism that it’ll always have fans. And that fact leads us to one of the most important truths about Chick tract evangelism.

Effectiveness was never the primary issue here

I used to think it was really weird that apologetics media was so singularly ineffective with the people it targeted. Consider the apologetics section of any big-box bookstore or a religious bookstore (if any brick-n-mortar ones even exist anymore). Consider all those books promising foolproof, no-fail apologetics routines that will blow heathens’ li’l minds and get them sobbing on their knees in no time flat.

And then consider that every one of those books is ridiculously puerile, simplistic, fallacy-laden, condescending, and worse. None of their offerings ever lasts a microsecond past impact with an actual heathen. It’s always been this bad, and it’s only gotten worse as evangelicals began their decline in earnest.

Then, slowly, we heathens realized that apologetics materials weren’t actually aimed at us, but at those actually purchasing them.

That’s how Chick tract evangelism works, too.

It’s not about the return on investment. It never was.

It’s not really even about conversions, or about performing evangelism of any kind.

It never was.

The manufacturers and marketers of Chick tracts, like those of all tracts, get their money from evangelicals, not from heathens. All they need to do is convince evangelicals to purchase their products. Once the purchase is made, the transaction is complete. It doesn’t matter if not a single person converts after that.

It only matters if evangelicals themselves can be persuaded that the product does what it says on the tin, so to speak. And as that college student discovered on her campus, some evangelicals out there still think that.