Monday, April 19, 2004
The "True" Protestant's Protestant
Ever seen a Chick Tract? Well, they're small booklets that tell a story in comic book form.
You wanna know how to scare people into being Christians? This is the place to start.
Chick's strategy includes a rather trite scenario where someone is in a non-Christian situation. Then they are very scared, and often demons show up and scare them more. The resolution comes when the Christian pops in, and the panel of Our Holy Lord on the cross shows up, and the person accepts Jesus. It's like the sitcom of conversion stories. And they're available in tons of languages, so yes, even you Cable fans can get them in Creole.
Key to Chick's message is the use of grotesque images to drive the point home, and really give you the willies. One of my favorites is in the tract Doom Town, which is about homosexuality. The Christian giving the scary dish about homosexuality refers to that famous ancient Near-East flesh farm, Sodom. In detailing this, Chick details a pedophiliac with the care and love of a Ren and Stimpy close-up.
Another of my favorites is the tract against Catholicism, Man in Black. Now, I believe there are Protestants for a reason, and I count myself as one of them. And the Catholics have had their fair share of sinful leaders--the same, I'm sure, can be said proportionately for all the other denominations; it's just so much more obvious in Catholicism, because it's been around for a full thousand years longer, and for the vast portion of the Church's history was the Church's only structure.
Let me stop defending anyone right there--I'm glad there was a Reformation. We needed it. But I'm gonna...uh...draw the line at saying that, way back in the Middle Ages, "Satan and his Roman Catholic Whore ruled the world."
Plain proof Chick's taking it too far can be found in the collage of small Catholic "idols":
The thing to check out is Chick's claim that the "IHS" on the wafer stands for Isis, Horus, and Seb, "the Egyptian trinity". This plays straight into his theory that Catholicism is a new form of pagan idol worship.
Funny. I always thought that "IHS" was a summary of the Latin inscription Pilate wrote out for Jesus on the cross, Iesus Hominum Salvator, or Jesus, Savior of Humankind. Crap, was I wrong.
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