Member-only story
The Jack Chick’s Religious Tracts Ruined My Childhood
How a religious comic skewed my entire belief in life and death.
There’s some backstory here to really drive in what made this entire thing insane. My mother was a devout Lutheran while my father was Assembly of God in the entirety of their youth and young adult lives. For some reason when they were married and had me, they decided both of those religions were too much.
So naturally, they went with being good ‘ol southern Baptists.
The concept of death is taught young in a Baptist church but it’s ruthlessly religious. We were taught that we were sinners even before we could talk and our lives were meant for suffering and repenting until at some undetermined point in time, we would be taken up to Heaven in the Rapture. I feared that I would be taken in Rapture while I was still young or worse, that my parents would be taken but I would be left alone. I was afraid to make friends who weren’t ‘saved’ because if Jesus decidedly to randomly come down to take believers, my friends would be left behind to suffer while I got to go to paradise. Being the curious children that we are, our Sunday school teachers were having a hard time explaining these concepts to us in a way that made us less terrified.
We then started being given these tiny comic books at the end of every class.
