Christian Crusader or Madman?

Published on November 29, 2010 by The Truth Syndicate   ·   3 Comments

If  your above the age of 4 and have had some interaction with Christianity , Then more than  likely you have either heard of, or seen Jack T. Chick’s famous religious tracts. This man is responsible for vast amounts of propaganda speaking out against most types of religions, even other christians. We will delve into Jack T. Chick….The man, and the hate filled zealot in the following post.

Below is the Bio from his website chick.com

From early childhood, it was obvious that Jack Chick had an ability to draw. He even failed the first grade because he was so busy drawing airplanes in battle. As he grew, Jack was constantly drawing, and honing skills that God would later use in a great way.

While in high school, none of the Christians would have anything to do with him because of his bad language. They all agreed not to witness to him, convinced that he was the last guy on earth who would ever accept Jesus Christ.

After graduation from High School, Jack won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse to study acting, but his studies were interrupted by the military. He spent the next three years in the Army, which took him to foreign countries like New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines and Japan.

After being discharged from the service, Jack returned to the Playhouse, where he met and married his wife, Lynn, who was instrumental in his salvation. While visiting Lynn’s parents in Canada on their honeymoon, Jack’s mother-in-law insisted that he sit and listen to Charles E. Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour radio program. Jack recalls, “God was already working on my heart, but when Fuller said the words, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” I fell on my knees and my life was changed forever.”

Once married, Jack used his artistic talents to earn a living. He had always longed to be a professional cartoonist, but now as a Christian, he desired to use his artistic talents for the Lord.

While working at AstroScience Corporation in El Monte, California, Jack was sitting in his car reading a copy of Power From On High by Charles Finney, which an old welder had given him. He remembers, “That book pushed my button. I went to church and saw all the deadness and hypocrisy, and I thought, ‘that’s why there’s no revival.’ So I started making these little sketches. My burden was so heavy to wake Christians up to pray for revival.”

He couldn’t find a publisher who was willing to print his book, so Jack borrowed $800 from the credit union and paid for the first printing of Why No Revival?

Right after the book was printed, he was driving down the road, when his eyes were drawn to a group of teens on the sidewalk. Jack remembers, “At the time, I didn’t like teenagers or their rebellion. But, all of a sudden, the power of God hit me and my heart broke and I was overcome with the realization that these teens were probably on their way to hell. With tears pouring down my face, I pulled my car off the road and wrote as fast as I could, as God poured the story into my mind.”

Within 15 minutes, A Demon’s Nightmare was written. After going home and drawing the art, Jack Chick’s very first soul winning gospel tract was completed. God miraculously used the owner of the company Jack worked for to pay for the first printing of this new soul winning book.

One day, Bob Hammond, missionary broadcaster of The Voice of China and Asia, told Jack that multitudes of Chinese people had been won to Communism through mass distribution of cartoon booklets. Jack felt that God was leading him to use the same technique to win multitudes to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Not long after, he was invited to present the gospel to a group of inmates at a prison near his home. He drew several pieces of cartoon art and prepared a flip chart to illustrate what he was saying. At the conclusion of his message, nine of the eleven inmates present trusted Christ as their Saviour. Jack became convinced that God had given him a method of reaching people with the gospel that worked. That art was later put into booklet form and became the tract This Was Your Life!

Using his kitchen table as an office and art studio, Jack continued writing new tracts, as God gave them to him. Throughout the rough early years, he persevered as many bookstores were reluctant to accept this revolutionary concept. Jack recalls, “We were having a tough time out there. A lot of the bookstores were really outraged at some guy using these cartoons to present the gospel. They thought it was sacrilegious.”

But demand for the tracts increased, and Chick Publications was formed as a self-supporting ministry. The Lord assembled a dedicated staff and the work grew. Soon, people began wanting Chick tracts in other languages, and the ministry became international in scope.

For nearly fifty years, the work has flourished. Jack Chick has written and published hundreds of illustrated gospel tracts in close to one hundred different languages. Copies of Chick tracts were even requested by the Smithsonian Institute for a display on American culture. Hundreds of millions of copies have been read world-wide.

Proof of the effectiveness of Chick tracts is the fact that testimonies continue to pour in from around the world. Many current testimonies cover two or even three generations. People recount how Chick tracts were instrumental in their salvation thirty years ago, then in their children’s salvation and now in the salvation of their grandchildren.

Partially because of Jack’s travels overseas while in the military, he has always had a special burden for missions and missionaries. The sights he saw in New Guinea and other countries left an indelible mark in his brain. He thrills each time a new tract is translated into a foreign language. His burden has always been to get the gospel into the hands of millions of lost people around the world. He wanted to be a missionary himself, but his new wife wanted no part of missionary life. Her aunt had been a missionary in Africa. While pregnant, she was being carried across a river on a stretcher, when one of those carrying her lost a leg to an alligator.

But God had other plans. He wanted Jack to stay home and produce effective gospel literature that missionaries could use to win the lost. As a result, many missionaries love Chick tracts and use them to reach multitudes they could never reach one on one.

Today, nearly fifty years after writing his first tract, God is still giving Jack Chick new gospel tracts. In fact, he is now producing some of his most popular work. As of this writing, five of the ten most popular Chick tracts in stock have been written in the last year or two.

Today, Jack labors without the love and support of his wife, Lynn. On February 10, 1998, his love of 50 years went home to be with the Lord.

Summary

A pastor who recently called us summed up the life and ministry of Jack Chick quite well. He said, “The thing I appreciate most about Jack Chick is that thirty years ago when I read my first Chick tract, it was a pure soul winning tract, presenting the gospel in a simple format that anyone could understand. Today, thirty years later, he hasn’t changed a bit. While many other Christian leaders have left soul winning far behind, Jack Chick is still faithfully producing easy-to-understand soul winning gospel tracts with a salvation message that anyone can understand. He has never swerved or strayed from his calling to share the gospel with the lost multitudes around the world.”

And then  we have the viewpoint of  catholic.com

Jack Thomas Chick is a recluse. Little is known about him. He does not give interviews. Only two out-of-date pictures of him are publicly known (one is a high school yearbook photo). Rumors about him abound, making it difficult to sort fact from fiction concerning his life. He was born April 13, 1924, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles,[14] and he was not always a Fundamentalist. According to the biography posted on his web site:

While in high school, none of the Christians would have anything to do with him because of his bad language. They all agreed not to witness to him, convinced that he was the last guy on earth who would ever accept Jesus Christ.

After graduation from high school, Jack won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse to study acting, but his studies were interrupted by the military. He spent the next three years in the Army, which took him to foreign countries like New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines and Japan.

After being discharged from the service, Jack returned to the Playhouse, where he met and married his wife, Lynn, who was instrumental in his salvation. While visiting Lynn’s parents in Canada on their honeymoon, Jack’s mother-in-law insisted that he sit and listen to Charles E. Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour radio program. Jack recalls, “God was already working on my heart, but when Fuller said the words, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,’ I fell on my knees and my life was changed forever.”[15]

The scene of falling on one’s knees to accept Jesus is one repeated over and over again by characters in Chick tracts. But how did Jack Chick make the leap from being an ordinary Fundamentalist to the foremost Christian comic publisher in the world? For a time, he worked as a technical illustrator for an aerospace company in California, but he longed to be work for God:

He wanted to be a missionary himself, but his new wife wanted no part of missionary life. Her aunt had been a missionary in Africa. While pregnant, she was being carried across a river on a stretcher, when one of those carrying her lost a leg to an alligator.[16]

Eventually, Jack started combining his work as an illustrator with his passion for evangelization, producing his first published religious works, Why No Revival? and A Demon’s Nightmare. He became convinced of the effectiveness of this technique after using it with a group of prisoners:

[Chick] was invited to present the gospel to a group of inmates at a prison near his home. He drew several pieces of cartoon art and prepared a flip chart to illustrate what he was saying. At the conclusion of his message, nine of the eleven inmates present trusted Christ as their Saviour. Jack became convinced that God had given him a method of reaching people with the gospel that worked. That art was later put into booklet form and became the tract This Was Your Life![17]

Following this episode, Chick Publications became a full-time venture for Jack, and, in the more than forty years since it was started, his tracts, comic books, and other publications have reached hundreds of millions of people, spreading their message of simple Fundamentalist theology fused with elaborate conspiracy theories.

In time, the art in the tracts received an upgrade—not because Chick changed his own style of drawing but because he hired an artist with much better skills. Yet he did not announce this fact and did not put the new artist’s name on the works he produced. Instead, they continued to carry the credit “by Jack T. Chick” or simply “by J.T.C.” The difference between the two drawing styles was so dramatic that it was immediately noticed by readers, and rumors circulated about who the “good artist” might be. It would be some time before Chick disclosed that the man’s name was Fred Carter.

In 1972, he hired Fred Carter, an African-American painter and illustrator from Danville, Illinois, who had studied at Chicago’s American Academy of Art. Carter’s realistic illustrations and distinctive inking style made him a perfect fit for the [Crusaders comic book] series’ action sequences and exotic locales. Witch burnings and ritual murders are captured in gleefully visceral detail, while the books’ sexual overtones—as well as scantily clad biblical sirens like Eve, Delilah, and Semiramis—have led critics to describe Carter’s work as “spiritual porn.”

At once, the artwork improved tenfold. Chick, however, kept Carter’s name off all of the comics. Rumors and speculation about the identity of the so-called good artist at Chick Publications began to spread. For years fans theorized that Carter’s work was produced by a team of illustrators or an unknown Filipino man dubbed “Artist J.” Chick finally revealed Carter’s identity in 1980, claiming that the artist is “rather shy and declines to put his name on his art.”[18]

Through the years Chick also became associated with others who had an impact on his publications. The conspiracy angle in his works jumped significantly through his involvement with two men in particular.

One was John Todd, an evangelist who claimed to have been raised in a “witchcraft family” and supposedly was part of a gigantic conspiracy of witches called “the Illuminati.”[19] According to Todd, numerous political and religious figures were part of the conspiracy. He claimed that as a “Grand Druid High Priest” he was given a thirteen-state territory and that “over 90 percent of politicians in that thirteen-state area received financial support from him and took orders regarding political decisions from him.”[20] The religious figures allegedly part of the witch conspiracy included Jim Bakker, Billy Graham, Walter Martin, Oral Roberts, and Pat Robertson. Also involved were C. S. Lewis, Pat and Debbie Boone, and a number of Protestant denominations, “from Assemblies of God to the Southern Baptists.”[21]

One way the Illuminati spread their occult tendrils through society was through rock music. Songs in this genre often “contained coded spells or incantations that the listener wasn’t aware of.”[22] Based on Todd’s claims, Chick issued a number of publications, including the large-format comic book Spellbound? (against rock music) and the tract Dark Dungeons (against fantasy role-playing games).

Todd was exposed as a fraud in publications such as Christianity Today[23] and Cornerstone. He later was convicted and sent to prison for rape. Nevertheless, Chick is still publishing materials repeating his claims and thanking him openly for providing the information.[24]

The other major figure hyping Jack Chick’s conspiracy theories was the late Alberto Rivera, and he is important enough to Chick mythology to deserve his own section.

Aside from Jack Chick’s own name, the name most familiar to readers of Chick comics is that of Alberto Rivera (1935–1997). He is mentioned in numerous tracts and serves as the central character in six issues of Chick’s The Crusaders full-size comic book. Chick even devotes space to him in the handful of books the house publishes.

Alberto Magno Romero Rivera was born in 1937 in the Canary Islands. He claimed to have been a priest who served as an undercover operative of the Jesuit order to infiltrate and destroy Protestant churches and institutions. He maintained that he was so successful that he secretly was made a bishop. Yet he turned his life over to Christ and became a Fundamentalist evangelist. He claimed to have rescued his sister—a nun—after she nearly died in a convent in London.

In the 1970s he met Jack Chick, who publicized his story with much fanfare. It added immense amounts of detail (and implausibility) to Chick’s global Catholic conspiracy theory. The Alberto series included some of the wildest claims found in Chick’s publications—that the Vatican started Islam, Communism, the Masons, and the Klan; that it controls the Illuminati, the Mafia, and the New Age movement; that it created the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, and is databasing the name of every Protestant church member for a future inquisition.

The Alberto series started a controversy that resulted in Chick being unable to sell the comic books in many Protestant bookstores. Following a complaint from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the Christian Booksellers Association began considering whether to expel Chick.[25] Soon afterward, Chick withdrew from the CBA.

The protest against the Chick Alberto series was waged by both Catholics and Evangelicals. Many Catholics, naturally, protested the lurid and inaccurate depiction of their faith, and many Protestant bookstore owners who saw their point removed the series from their stores.

In response, Chick published My Name? . . . In the Vatican? in which he repeated many of Rivera’s sensationalistic claims and gave grudging acknowledgement to the ability of Catholics to get his works taken out of Evangelical bookstores.

While it is natural to expect Catholics to be upset over Chick and Rivera’s outrageous claims, many Evangelicals were upset as well, and they began to investigate Rivera. Prominent Protestant publications, including Christianity Today, Cornerstone, and even Forward—a publication of Walter Martin’s Christian Research Institute—did investigations leading to exposés of Rivera as a fraud.

Christianity Today’s story by researcher Gary Metz revealed that:

He is being sued in a Los Angeles court at the present time [1981] by a man who said that Rivera, on behalf of the Hispanic Baptist Church, which he started, borrowed $2,025 with which to invest in property, but never purchased the land. When the man asked for his money back, he received a receipt acknowledging his “contribution” of $2,025.[26]

The Christianity Todayinvestigation further reported:

In October 1967, Rivera went to work at the Church of God of Prophecy headquarters in Tennessee and began collecting money for a college in Tarrassa, Spain. When the Church of God of Prophecy wrote the college to ask if Rivera was authorized to receive donations for the college, it received a reply stating the college had given him a letter to collect funds only during the month of July. The college later discovered that while “he claimed to be a Catholic priest . . . he had never been one.” The college reported that he left debts he had acquired in the name of the parish of San Lorenzo and that Spanish police were seeking him for “authentic swindles and cheats.” Finally, they said that no funds had ever reached the college from Rivera. In a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, Charles Hawkins of the Church of God of Prophecy said Rivera’s bank had contacted them because he had written a check on a closed account.

In 1969 two arrest warrants were issued for him in Florida. One was for the theft of a BankAmericard: The criminal division of the Bank of America reports that he charged over two thousand dollars on the credit card. The second warrant was issued for unauthorized use of an automobile. Rivera abandoned the vehicle in Seattle and went from there to southern California, where he started a number of organizations.[27]

Concerning Rivera’s alleged liberation of his sister from a convent, Christianity Today reported:

The sequel [to the Alberto comic], Double-Cross, devotes its first nine pages to a description of how Alberto flew to London and contacted an Anabaptist church, whose people helped him rescue his dying sister Maria from her convent. Actually, the person he contacted was not an Anabaptist but Delmar Spurling of the Church of God of Prophecy. Spurling said in an interview that Rivera did not rescue his sister, because she wasn’t a nun but rather a maid working in a private London home.[28]

Concerning Rivera’s claim that he had been a priest, Christianity Today noted:

The Catholic Church denies Rivera’s most important claim, that he was a priest. To substantiate the claim, the Alberto comic book carries a picture of an official-looking document from the Archbishopric of Madrid-Alcala in Spain, dated September 1967. It identifies Rivera as a priest and gives him permission to travel abroad in his ministry. There is no other church documentation, such as an ordination certificate, shown in the book. An individual in California, who grew suspicious of Rivera in 1973, wrote to the archdiocese office in Madrid-Alcala to ask if Rivera were really a priest. The response was that no diocese in Spain had any record of Rivera as a priest. The archbishop’s office concluded that he was not a priest, and that the travel document, which was little more than a form letter, was “acquired by deceit and subterfuge” to enable Rivera to get a passport.[29]

Christianity Today further discovered that “that not only was Rivera not a Jesuit priest, but also that he had two children during the time he claimed to be living a celibate life as a Jesuit.” It explained:

Although Rivera claims to have been raised and trained in a Spanish Jesuit seminary, his hometown friend, Bonilla, said Rivera was living at one point with a woman in Costa Rica named Carmen Lydia Torres. (Alberto says Rivera was sent to Costa Rica to destroy a [Protestant] seminary and that a woman named Carmen was with him, posing as his girlfriend. The seminary was not named.)

Rivera later stated on an employment form that he and Torres were married in 1963. Their son, Juan, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1964, while Rivera was forking for the Christian Reformed Church there. Juan died in El Paso in July 1965, after his parents had fled New Jersey leaving numerous debts and a warrant for their arrest on bad check charges. The couple had two other children, Alberto and Luis Marx. The first two children were born during the time Alberto claimed to be a Jesuit priest in Spain.[30]

Concerning Rivera’s claim to have been made a bishop, Metz reported in Cornerstone that:

Alberto now claims that he was once a Jesuit bishop. None of his former associates remember this being part of his testimony until early 1973. Former associate Rev. Wishart (once a pastor of the First Baptist Church of San Fernando), who questioned Alberto about this, reported that Alberto admitted that he had never been ordained a bishop but used the title for prestige. He continues to call himself the bishop of his own church, the Hispanic Baptist Church (Oxnard, California).[31]

In Alberto, Rivera claimed that his conversion to Protestantism happened while he was being detained in a sanitarium following a public break with the Church. Yet Christianity Today’s piece noted that:

His later accounts of his conversion are contradictory. While speaking at the Faith Baptist Church in Canoga Park, California, Rivera pinpointed his conversion as March 20, 1967, after three months in the sanitarium, and he said he immediately defected from the Catholic Church. Five months later, however, he gave a newspaper interview in his home town of Las Palmas [in the Canary Islands], in which he was still promoting Catholicism. He said in the interview that he was doing ecumenical work for the Catholic Church in Tarrassa, Spain, during the previous six months, from February to August 1967. According to Alberto, he was in the sanitarium at the time.

Rivera, who now [1981] lives in California, was asked for an interview to discuss the discrepancies in his tale, but he posed so many restrictions before he would agree that a legitimate interview was not possible. He did say that any wrongdoings prior to his conversion to Christ in 1967 were done under the orders of the Catholic Church and that any wrongdoings since his conversions are fabrications by conspirators.

Of course, if Rivera had been a secret Jesuit agent bent on conspiratorial acts, such deception and subterfuge might well have been part of his mission. Yet his fantastic tale lacks credibility. The numerous legal entanglements suggest that he was a simple con man. There are the contradictory accounts of his conversion, his admission that he was married, and the fact that he was the father of two children during his alleged time as a Jesuit priest. And then there is what was uncovered by the Christian Research Institute in its investigation of Alberto:

Bartholomew F. Brewer, a former Catholic priest who is now director of Mission to Catholics International in San Diego [a man long known to Catholic Answers supporters for his anti-Catholic activities and an authentic ex-priest] . . . related to us that several years ago Rivera wanted to work in conjunction with Mission to Catholics. Dr. Brewer did interview Rivera and decided not to use him in his ministry. Over a period of time, however, Dr. Brewer got to know Rivera better and he eventually concluded that Rivera was not only unfamiliar with Catholic theology, by obviously had never been a Catholic priest, let alone a bishop.

In examining the two Chick comics, one finds that statements are made that would seem to substantiate Dr. Brewer’s views. Rivera is apparently unfamiliar with Catholic doctrine, church history, and other factual information.

For example, in Alberto, Rivera seems to imply that celibacy is a sacrament. Also, he states that students studying for the priesthood were not allowed to read the Bible. He also claims that, in Catholic doctrine, Mary is co-equal with God the Father. These are all misrepresentations of the truth.

Rivera further calls his reliability into question by stating that the masterminds behind the Inquisition were Jesuits. This is an impossibility, since the Inquisition began around a.d. 1200, and the Jesuits were not established until the 1540s.[32]

CRI also discovered Rivera inaccurately quoting sources:

Rivera’s believability becomes still more questionable in Double-Cross, when he claims that [suicide cult leader] Jim Jones was secretly a Jesuit deacon and an agent for the Vatican. He says that the Jonestown massacre was part of the Roman Catholic Church’s “diabolical conspiracy.” For support of this contention, he refers to Dr. Peter Beter’s Audio Letter #40, November 1978 (Beter is a self-proclaimed “conspiracy” expert). But, on listening to the tape, one discovers that Dr. Beter believes that Jones was a manipulated dupe of the CIA! Thus, the authority Rivera cites for supportive evidence is opposed to his view.[33]

Rivera’s response to this investigation was to call CRI “a ‘tool’ of the Jesuits and its director [Walter Martin, at the time] an ‘agent’ of Rome.”[34] He subsequently claimed that Martin “was working with the Vatican and stated that his name was on a secret Jesuit list.”[35] CRI further reported:

After our initial research gave us reason to question the comic’s reliability, we attempted to contact both Alberto Rivera and Chick Publications’ founder Jack Chick. With no success in contacting Rivera by mail, two certified letters were sent to Chick Publications. In them, we conveyed our concern over some apparent discrepancies in Rivera’s story and asked for answers. When no reply was made to our letters, follow-up phone calls revealed that Jack Chick would make no reply whatsoever. He said that he was not answerable to any man and that the comic books could stand on their own.[36]

Alberto Rivera went on to found the “Antichrist Information Center” or AIC (which later explained its initials as meaning “Assurance in Christ”[37]). He died in 1997 of colon cancer, and his ministry was carried on by his widow, Nuzy Rivera.

The impact of Alberto Rivera on Jack Chick’s universe is difficult to underestimate. It was Rivera that provided Chick with his most sensationalistic, most anti-Catholic claims and allowed Chick’s conspiracy theories to grow increasingly complex and bizarre.

I’m going to leave the decision up to you, as  I’m no lover of the Catholic belief, I find what they have said very interesting. I encourage all readers of this to study this further in order to make a sound decision. I have debated many times over the years with believers that see this man a some kind of christian guru, and are relentless in their defense of him.

Below are a few videos you may also find interesting

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAsCNlBSTpM

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3KcxJPi7Mo

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