Wednesday, May 04, 2011

State of the Bible Tract Address

The good news (get it? "good news?") is that I've come into possession of a fair few Bible tracts over the years. The bad news is, none of them have been Chick Tracts--either people give them to me; or I find them lying around, left by people trying to make converts--and I suppose this means I'm responsible for the people who went unsaved for lack of a tract because I took it to make fun of like the obnoxious librul élitist that I am.

But c'mon, people--you expect anyone to Accept Jesus™ based on some lame, off-brand tract? Actually, it's not the "off-brand" so much as it is the "lame." Batty and frequently incredibly offensive as they are, Chick tracts are rarely unmemorable, whereas the sort of thing you see more often is just gonna put you to sleep. Example:

Jeez--welcome to Snoozeville. And to add insult to injury, the church stamped its information over the name and address section, so you couldn't even send it back if it did cause you to get saved. Bah.

This one's a little better, for some definition of "better." They attempt to draw you in by promising something vaguely sexy…

…and then you open it, and GOOD GOD:

Just imagine for a moment how screamingly offended this tract's producers would be at the free availability (to children, no less!) of an image that gruesome that wasn't Christian-themed. Kind of a dick move, really. Here's the back, so you can finish the fun "Love Test:"

I'm struck by how completely contentless these things generally are--they're all about form rather than substance. Absolutely no indication here of what getting saved actually entails, behavior-wise, beyond saying the magic words.

Note also that URL: "" The focus on FEAR seems rather inimical to real belief, but it's impossible to gauge just how far the website takes this, because it's currently dead, and all that's left is that portal site featuring a woman with a backpack in a college-y environment who (this occurs to me every time I'm faced with this image, so I want to take this opportunity to tell the world) looks a lot like adult actress Ashlynn Brooke.

There IS a, at which you can buy creepily bellicose Christian t-shirts from people trying to sound like they're really into death metal, but in a Christian way (here's one about how Jesus is probably going to murder you); I don't think this tract has anything to do with that, however. much for "fear," I guess. I'm definitely down with that.

Here's a seasonal tract with a cheery Jack O'Lantern on the cover!

Inside and on the back, there is this:

Kudos, at any rate, for a consistent theme, but, while all these tracts do this to some extent, this one really serves as a textbook example of begging the question in its original, logical-fallacy sense. They may be substantially similar, but there's surely a difference between "hey, the Bible sez you should accept Jesus" and "inasmuch as the Bible is true, you must agree that you're wrong to believe X."

Finally, a particularly maladroit effort to reach out to The Kids:

The Kids like celebrities, right? And Devil Music? So these really hideous caricatures of dead musicians should be just what the doctor ordered! But…who's the guy in the lower left? You can more or less tell who the others are meant to be, but who's that one? Ronald Reagan? What the hell is he doing here? Our former Clown-in-Chief is in no way someone The Kids care about.

No, it's John Wayne. But the point stands, and in fact is even stronger, since Wayne probably has even less contemporary relevance. Why this bizarre odd man out? You couldn't come up with more than six dead rock stars? Well, more likely they couldn't come up with more than six that would be sufficiently easily-identifiable from half-assed caricatures. Sorry, Echo and the Bunnymen's Pete de Freitas!

Also note that, in their eagerness to quote from "American Pie," they accidentally (I assume!) imply that music can, in fact, save your mortal soul. Also, note this: "Jesus said, 'Whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery already with her in his heart.' Have you ever looked with lust?" First, note that The Kids are pretty much endless fountains of nothing but lust, and telling them that they should knock it off is the most laughably futile warning in the history of everything. Second, note that the way this tract is trying to appeal to The Kids is by evincing knowledge of rock musicians of whom they are allegedly fans, and rock music, too, is to a very substantial degree an all-out celebration of lust--I mean, they include Jim Morrison, fercrissake, who was pretty much nothing but a personification of libidinal energies. What I'm trying to say is, this is a quite amazingly confused piece of work. As ever, reaching out to The Kids seems likely to be more alienating to them than regular, non-The-Kids-directed material would be. Also, the publishers have an incredibly hideous website.

I guess all I'm trying to say is: step it up, tract makers. You're never gonna unseat ChickCo like this.


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