My first Chick tract: “Bewitched?”

After I recently critiqued a Jack Chick tract, a reader commented it had given her flashbacks from when she was exposed to the awful things when she was a kid. I know what she’s talking about. I grew up in Fundamentalist churches. Fundies love the accursed things. They already have Chick’s worldview: Everything in the world is evil and leading you to hell. Quick, say the sinner’s prayer before God has to righteously toss you in there!

Thing is, Chick panders a little too much to the Fundie worldview. As a result Fundies spread his little Tijuana bible-style tracts everywhere, believing they win tons of people to Jesus… ’cause Chick tracts are everywhere! But they’ve no idea how creepy and wrong pagans (and fellow Christians) actually consider them. See, Chick doesn’t bother with fruit of the Spirit. He may have some, but you surely can’t tell from his tracts. They’re graceless, joyless, peaceless, unkind, impatient. “God so loved the world,” Jn 3.16 but in a Chick tract, he doesn’t love ’em unless they’ve said the sinner’s prayer. After they have, they can then be as judgy and preachy as they like. You know, fruitless.

Which actually isn’t about witches.  Bewitched 1
(Reference numbers refer to images on Chick’s website; the cover is 1, the next page is 2, etc.)

So non-Fundies read Chick tracts and are just horrified. God sounds distant, wrathful, and violent. Christians sound rude. The devil sounds ridiculous. Jesus only shows up to quote bible verses. And non-Christians sound like loony caricatures—and once non-Christians see the way Chick depicts them, they immediately realize he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And likely hasn’t the most solid grasp on anything.

Oh, and everything has a vast secret history, or devilish conspiracy, behind it. “Bewitched” falls into the devilish conspiracy category.

I first read “Bewitched” back in the 1970s. I remember finding it in the house we lived in when I was between the ages of six and eight. Don’t know how it got there. Either Mom was given the thing by people from church, or Dad found it at work and had brought it home for us Christians to appreciate. (Dad was forever in the habit of stealing finding things in the workplace and taking them home.) Regardless, I found it, and I liked comic books, so I read it.

The experience still stands out strongly in my mind. I remember it repulsed me. It wasn’t the theological content; I didn’t fully understand that anyway. No, what bugged me was the art. The devils were creepy-looking. So, for that matter, were the regular people in it. Chick and his artists specialize in creepy-looking cartoons. If the objective is to make it stick in your mind, mission accomplished.