Religious Propaganda and the anti-tract

A couple years ago, a few of us in my church were working together to think of ways to get the gospel out in our community when the subject of tracts came up. These are the little bound pamphlets which tell a simple story and invite the reader to make a commitment to Jesus. I do not like tracts. We agreed that most people in our community do not like the way they boil down the good news into easily swallowed, bite-size morsels. This is just stating a fact about us, not stating a fact about the value of this method of communication. They may be just the trick in another place (or time). One or two of our group were going to write some for themselves, reasoning that we could do a more personal job of communicating the gospel to our people.

I woke up one night stressing about this, thinking, "Oh, man, are we really going to hand out little brochures about God?" I was so distracted by this, and concerned over whether we would be attracting people to the Kingdom or scaring them away, that I resolved to try and write something myself. "If I had to hand out a piece of paper, what would I want it to say?"

So begins my experiment with the anti-tract. These projects reflect my ambivalence about this method of communicating faith. There is a healthy "anti" component here. But there is also some "pro" that surprised me a bit. I think this ambivalence will be clear in the self-consciousness of the pieces. Follow the link to see the works.

View Propaganda