Dear Americans - Please Don't Do This in a Foreign Country!

This is part high demand religious jerkery combined with American exceptionalism - Chick Tracts

My personal favorite of all the Chick Tracts it is now a rarity. It somehow manages to combine disdain for Hispanics mixed with the open racism of deciding they are all gang members with prison stereotypes and Catholic bashing! All the bad stuff in one. Only thing missing is Muslim-bashing and LGBTQ-bashing. But I am guessing if they could have found a way to mix in those two they would have, but there isn’t a problem with Muslim-Catholic gay Hispanics gang fighting during “End Times.”

Right now we’re hosting a friend from the United States and he brought his brother with him. We’ve been having a great time, or at least an okay time until last night. What happened? Dear Brother, whom we’d never met until 24 hours before, offered to pay for our meal at our favorite beach side restaurant - this place and….

…when Bro whipped out his credit card he also took out a 3 by 5 inch religious tract in Spanish - a Jack Chick Tract - tracts so awful and inflammatory in so many ways that the Southern Poverty Law Center defines them as “hate speech”. They are banned as hate speech in a few countries too, Singapore and Canada have banned the tracts.

Almost certainly copied stylistically from the infamous “Tijuana Bibles” of an earlier era, instead of pornography they tell rather harsh and judgmental tales of salvation. It drew directly from Jack Chick’s own brand of Charismatic Christianity that posited any difficulties in life as a titanic deathly struggle between good and evil. Instead of, you know, just us shooting off our own feet by our own bad actions. It goes a long way towards explaining the weird little black and white world in Chick Tracts.

What a world of extreme black and white positions it is! He’s written screeds against the game Dungeons and Dragons, Halloween, Catholicism, rock music, long hair, Freemasonry, Jews, Muslims, LBGTQs and Hispanics. The way Chick worded his works was offensive on so many levels, throwing righteous shade at others in an attempt to frighten the reader into accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

I’ve never found fear to be a particularly effective way to reach people, although our president seems to be able to use it to gather supporters. Many who’d worked with Jack Chick in some capacity ended up repudiating him as his comics became wildly more inflammatory in nature. Some are out of print right now because of this.

Until last night I’d thought that Chick Tracts had started to fade into a deserved obscurity. Oh no! Very uptight religious Bro was substituting these cartoon tracts in Spanish for the hard working Tico waiters tips in one of the higher end restaurants in town. I had to sneak behind and tip the waiter, telling him that I was sorry about the tract and to just discard that thing into the nearest can of basura.

I’ve always said that the Ticos in Costa Rica are the country’s greatest natural resource. Costa Rica has much higher numbers of weekly church attendance and belief in God than in the United States. Coming here and assuming their own faith is somehow insufficient strikes me as one of the most awful examples of USA white entitlement there is. Please don’t come here with any agenda like this! It insults the loving nature of the people here who are primarily all Christians anyway, they may not be the favor of your Christianity but that’s legitimately none of your business. When you do this you are the very offensive Ugly American stereotype.