I M B Y P R O P A G A N D A

Religious Propaganda and the anti-tract

History: 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 a simple, bite-size morsel. 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.

"Religious Propaganda"

This piece is a single-sheet handout that is really wordy, but in a way that I like. You have to really read it. I've created a version that can be read in a browser. It won't look like what you'd see on the street. But I think it gets the idea across.

"Don't Judge This Book by its Cover"

This little folding booklet was produced by pasting a message on a folded up piece of paper, so that when opened it would reveal progressive bits of the message in their proper orientation. The thing is photocopied, and folded. Very low tech. The reader is directed to unfold it in stages as they read through the message. The simple, cheapie look of the thing supports the message.

To read it online, just make sure you've seen the whole page (might have to scroll down to see the successively larger pages) then click the image to "unfold" the next page.