Yale Divinity School Library Special Collections
Comic book tract by Jack T. Chick about homosexuality, on display in new exhibit.
How to convert a sailor while chatting with the young fellow in a boat. How Hitler, a devout Roman Catholic, secretly had his Gestapo run by by the Jesuits.
Those are some of the ideas and techniques, from the tame to the terrible, that emerge as subjects in a new exhibit called Two Hundred Years of Tracts.
Despite the perhaps not most fetching of titles, the exhibition, which is up at the Yale Divinity Library on upper Prospect Street, is fun and lively and runs through May 31.
Allan Appel Photo
Sample tracts from the Camilo Jose Vergara Collection of Urban Church Ephemera.
It’s a chronological review of how evangelical tracts have been created and disseminated to persuade and convert over the last couple of centuries of Protestantism’s march across the globe.
Although the show consists mainly of paper ephemera — including many facsimiles because the original tracts, often cheaply printed, are too fragile to display — the exhibition covers a lot of years and is packed with historical insights.
For example, as organized by Special Collections consultant Martha Smalley, the first vitrine tells — and shows you the evidence — of how “the early tract [19th century] societies can be seen as a catalyst for women’s liberation.”
Library
A “colporteur,” or distributor of tracts in Maine in the early 1900s.
That’s because the need and zeal to distribute tracts — for example, on observe the sabbath and, increasingly in the pre-Civil War years, on encouraging temperance was so great, there apparently weren’t enough males to do the job.
Enter the women to meet and study the Bible, and in the process, to bring along a a cent or two to support the publishing and distribution of the Christian tract literature.
In this manner “Cent Societies” were created.
Smalley’s labels assemble comments by scholars on these early pamphlets, who assert that this was often the very first opportunity for women to get out of the house.
In passing out the lit of, for example, the early temperance societies, they got to see the condition of the urban poor. That activated women eventually to do other social welfare work, creating organizations and programs dedicated to improving general living conditions, medical care, and education.
That work was, in turn, empowering — to use a word from our time.
“Conversation in a Boat,” one of many seamen tracts.
The tract distribution as a kind of trigger for women to be involved in societal reform, particularly at the beginning of the 19th century, was one of Smalley most interesting of her own takeaways from assembling the materials, she reported in an email.
The numbers are startling as well.
One of the exhibit’s labels reports that in 1830, the Connecticut Temperance Society had 22,530 members. That’s either a lot of women who want to get out of the house or a lot of drunks. Or, probably, both.
The tracts were produced in such large numbers and were so easy to print, they were like a kind of paper internet of the 19th century. Zealous Christians wanting to spread their faith, however non-mainstream it might be, could produce and distribute their own stuff, their own take on the Bible, and on how it related to the present moment of their lives.
These tracts thus are a window onto popular or folk religion, what ideas and images were popular among people, regardless of what the official concerns or lines might be.
All of it comes to a comic climax, so to speak, in the work of Jack T. Chick, which fills up the third vitrine in the library rotunda.
The vitrine displays examples of Jack T. Chick’s small, punchy comics that express his fringe Christian fundamentalist opinions on the Devil’s “666” mark, various takes on messianism, and just messy thinking, such as how the Nazis’ Gestapo was really the work of the Jesuits.
In the center of the Chick vitrine, Smalley has displayed Christianity Today’s Oct. 23, 2016 obit of Chick: “Jack Chick, the cartoonist who wanted to save your soul from hell died Sunday at age 92. The biggest name in tract evangelism, Chick distributed more than 500 million pamphlets, nicknamed “chicklits.” over five decades. His signature black-and-white comics warned against everything from the occult to Family Guy.”
The “Doom Town” tract, in the photograph at the top of the story, deals with homosexuality and retells the Biblical story of the destruction of the city of Sodom, Smalley wrote.
In that kind of material we’re a long way from the gentle-sounding “Conversation in a Boat,” one of the many tracts specifically targeting seamen. But the contextualizing achievement of the little exhibition allows us to marvel at how similar they seem.
