The Gospel According to Jack Chick
The evangelical tracts I read as a child cultivated more fear and suspicion than love. But Christ still formed something beautiful.
By Tulio Huggins
Behind the pews of my Independent Baptist church growing up were a continuous supply of Gospel tracts for people to take home and place around town. The topics varied: on the defense of Creationism, where the biblical Cain got his wife, what “believer’s baptism” was. Many of these came from other conservative Baptist or fundamentalist ministries, such as Answers in Genesis (known for the life size Ark and Creation Museum down in Kentucky), but I loved the Chick Tracts the best. They were story-oriented panels reminiscent of newspaper comic strips. After church, I would often check to see if there were any new ones available. These tracts were an early catechism for me, and they still influence me in my ever-evolving faith. It had been years since I’ve read through them, so I ordered a couple of the Chick Tracts to rekindle my memories of them.
Chick Tracts are short religious stories released and distributed by Chick Publications, an evangelical organization committed to convincing people to repent from their sins and follow Christ. Founder Jack Chick was a World War II veteran who converted to Christianity and dedicated his life to spreading the Gospel through art. Eventually, he started up a ministry that has sold over a billion tracts (according to the organization’s own reported figures). The booklets are small, around twenty pages long, and employ simple cartoons and drawings to spread their messages.
The tracts varied wildly in theme. Going over the ten or so I bought, I remembered some of them from church. “A Love Story” was a question-and-answer tract with a big red heart on the cover. It asked the reader questions like, “WHO CREATED THIS WORLD FOR YOU TO LIVE ON?” and, “WHO LOVES YOU ENOUGH THAT HE WOULD BUILD A GORGEOUS MANSION IN HEAVEN TO LIVE IN?” The answer was often Jesus.
“Holy Joe” was a military-themed tract I often saw at church. A green combat helmet covered a tract about a Christian soldier in Vietnam and his atheist superior officer eventually converting before getting gunned down. Redeemed, the officer goes to heaven. I read this one often; the church was ten minutes outside of the military base I grew up on.
I took Chick’s evangelical directives very seriously as a kid.
Flipping through the tracts, I recognized more of Jack Chick’s theology that influenced my own. He saw an urgency to proclaiming the faith, with every tract ending with a call to conversion and a sample salvation prayer. He gives next steps, encouraging the new believer to join a church “where Christ is preached and the Bible is the final authority,” and read the Bible daily, specifically the King James Version.
“He Never Told Us!” was a free tract I got with my order. It starts off with a dead Christian who, though never talking about his faith, ends up in heaven. His friends are in hell, being burned alive and watched over by an angel with hair like Jay Leno. They ask why their friend isn’t with them. When they realize it’s because he converted at the age of nine, they angrily say, “You mean he KNEW about hell… and never warned us?”
I took Chick’s evangelical directives very seriously as a kid. I was active in my church youth group, advocating for other students to take up the cause of Christ and evangelize to their schools and communities. In my goal of becoming a writer, I even wrote a God’s Not Dead-esque novella following a Christian as he goes throughout his high school evangelizing to his atheistic classmates and teachers (it has a wilder sequel with time travel, but that’s another story). This passion reflected the most popular Chick tract, and the one that stuck with me the most: “This Was Your Life!” The story follows a man who, after dying unexpectedly, gets his life played back to him at the Judgement Seat. To his dismay, all of his sins have been recorded in cinemascope-like film quality, and he grows more and more terrified of his decision to not repent of his sins. When his name is found to not be in the Book of Life, he enters into the Lake of Fire. In a twist, it turns out all of this was a dream, and he converts as he wakes up. He dies again, this time after becoming the perfect Christian, and he now enters into Heaven. Eight-year-old me concluded one thing: God was simply a Judge. He wasn’t a Father, He wasn’t a Savior—He just sat on a throne and checked if I had said the Sinner’s Prayer. I was terrified of becoming the man in the tract, being turned away from the Almighty at the gates of Heaven. This fear propelled my desire to convert others.
That terrified reaction to the threat of hell wasn’t my only reason though. The desire to proclaim salvation to the lost, for God to work miracles in people’s lives, was also real. I loved God, even though at times I wasn’t sure if He felt the same way. But slowly and surely, God has shown His love for me throughout the years since, helping me see the beauty and bountiful love of Christ outside of the fundamentalist lens that had taught me to fear Him.
If anything, many of my nonreligious classmates were interested in learning about what I believed in, with a genuine curiosity that pushed me to question my assumptions about the world outside fundamentalism.
My later childhood years were spent in a Southern Baptist church in Pennsylvania. Though not exactly a haven for progressive Christianity, it was more liberal than my previous church—they had guitars in their worship set. My old church only used a piano for worship, except for the occasional choir performance by a church member or a traveling ministry group. God’s love was proclaimed over countless stanzas of Hillsong and Rend Collective, and the summer camps allowed the guys to wear shorts in evening service. It felt like a modern jolt into the twenty-first century, away from my culturally isolated church upbringing. God’s love felt more real. But that love also seemed more and more transactional in the budding world of Christian nationalism. To love God and have Him love you meant voting red and listening to K-Love. At times, it felt I was more focused on converting people to an Americanized God than to the God of the Bible. Nevertheless, to reject this God led to the same damnation in the Lake of Eternal Fire promised by the Chick Tracts—even if the path wasn’t spelled out quite as clearly.
College provided more drastic shifts away from my childhood’s faith. My first months of college made me realize that my fundamentalist perceptions of the world weren’t always true. The non-believers I was supposed to convert from damnation were… normal. Shockingly so. They weren’t some mocking “godless” bunch that made fun of Christians; no teacher of mine was forcing me to defend my belief in God. At the very worst, they were simply ambivalent about Christianity. If anything, many of my nonreligious classmates were interested in learning about what I believed in, with a genuine curiosity that pushed me to question my assumptions about the world outside fundamentalism.
Back home, I, like the rest of the nation, spent the spring and summer of 2020 immersed in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Many members of my former churches made their thoughts clear on social media, revealing undercurrents of racism that I couldn’t fully comprehend as a child. My family, already distant from that church, cut more ties with friends we’d had for years. Those losses were painful and, coupled with the theological upheavals of my freshman year, brought on a crisis of faith. I didn’t know what to believe.
I started thinking more about why I believed what I believed. Did my faith simply come to be because of my geographic location and family history? Was I believing and following the tenants of the faith just because I was taught to? Theology books like Tim Keller’s The Reason for God and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity scattered my room. I spent hours on my floor, reading these books and listening to podcasts touching on theological questions like supersessionism and church authority. I was talking with friends about whether we still believed about God what we were taught growing up . I remember calling an upperclassman to ask about his beliefs on Islam, and a week later talking with a youth group friend about New Atheism. It was a time of uncertainty. I wanted to get my faith right, to be accepted by God the Judge, and to avoid the fires of hell.
Only after I got the right church, the right systematic theology, the right liturgy did it seem that God would keep me from hell.
As I arrived back on campus in the fall, my overwhelming questions didn’t stop coming and, in what became a pattern in my college’s Christian community, I discovered Anglicanism. Anglicanism was a happy medium between my desire for a faith with deeper theological roots and my learned dislike of the Catholic Church. Liturgy, though foreign to my Baptist upbringing, gave me a tie to both history and the global church. A study abroad in England, during which I attended an Evangelical Anglican church in London, confirmed this. I loved it. When I came back to campus, I attended services in a small Anglican parish in the basement of a Baptist church. But my Anglicanism didn’t last. Part of it was because of a lack of connection to the broader Christian church. I was Anglican, but not a part of the Episcopal Church, the main and more liberal Anglican communion in the States. Instead, the church was a part of a smaller branch of Anglicanism that had only a couple of thousand congregants. Though the intimacy of worship with that congregation was beautiful, it didn’t provide a sense of stability within the broader Church. Was this church with a size of about twelve and an average age of seventy the truest Church, the truest representation of Christ’s bride? It felt too esoteric to be true. And through it all, I still had the feeling of searching for the approval of God the Judge. Only after I got the right church, the right systematic theology, the right liturgy did it seem that God would keep me from hell.
During this theological searching, I also started to attend Catholic mass. My initial relationship with Catholicism was tense; Jack Chick’s disdain for them had been ingrained in me from a young age. One of the tracts I bought when I started writing this essay was “Are Roman Catholics Christian?” It had a rosary on top of a blood red background, an ominous start to a tract that explained that billions of Catholics were being deceived by Satan. The tract is full of sources, but the sources are mainly other Chick Publication books. The comic expounded dubious histories like tracing the veneration of Mary to the Egyptian Isis, and alleging that the practice of confession is based off of Babylonian occult practices. Granted, those beliefs were extreme, but there was still a noticeable disdain for Catholics in the church communities I grew up in. Catholics, we all thought, were at best extremely misled and at worst all bound for hell; it made me both pity and resent the Catholic Church for her false doctrines. So when I started to actually interact with Catholics involved in the Christian ministries on my campus, I realized how inaccurate my views were. The Catholics I saw loved God, read Scripture, and were, once again, normal. Sure, they prayed the Rosary, but the mass-produced wooden beads in the college chapel didn’t look nearly as ominous as the Chick tract made them out to be.
My relationship with Chick Tracts—and the fundamentalism they grew out of—is complicated.
Thankfully, God seems to have been patient with His work in progress. God showed Himself to me in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the same one that the Chick Tracts and my early church families growing up would have chastised me for believing in. But in that Sacrament, I saw with fresh eyes a God who truly saw me and loved me. I didn’t see a God who was distant, only concerned that I checked the right boxes of faith and was otherwise indifferent to me. Instead, there was a God–right here–who had experienced human suffering and came to be with us and save us. The Eucharist tore down, and continues to tear down, the twisted or erroneous beliefs fundamentalism taught me over the years.
My relationship with Chick Tracts—and the fundamentalism they grew out of—is complicated. These tracts were short and simple and they gave me an early understanding of and desire to participate in the faith of which I was a part. True, they lacked many doctrines that connected with the global Christian church, and they committedly tore down their brothers and sisters in Christ who held differing views, to the detriment of readers like myself. True, I grew up with a constant underlying fear that God would reject me, and that if I didn’t play my cards right, I would end up in that eternal Lake of Fire. But looking back, I can see now that that doesn’t mean God didn’t work through the tracts. The Great Commission was preached, albeit a warped one. And that desire to follow in the steps of Jesus and the Apostles has grown into a healthier evangelical urge, one that’s focused on simply pointing people towards the beauty of God and His salvation.
Rereading these Chick Tracts hasn’t convinced me to start using them again. But as I flip through their black-and-white pages, I can still see how God worked through them in my own life to bring me closer to Him. And I think that’s beautiful.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark, from images of Chick Tracts and drawings of Bernardo Ramonfaur, via Adobe Stock
Tulio Huggins is a campus minister at Dartmouth College, where he graduated from in 2023. His hobbies include writing, baking bread, and playing rugby.
