Chick Tract #001 - Why No Revival? (1961)

Chick's first tract differs from many of his later releases in that it does not follow a sequential narrative. Rather, this tract seeks to provide insight into why churches are experiencing a decline in attendance and social engagement. The tract is directed exclusively at believers in an attempt to highlight ways in which the author feels they are failing to live up to the commission of their belief system... a fact driven home by the explicit warning on Page 2: "This book is for Christians only - not for the unsaved." Specific examples shown include a reluctance to profess one's faith when confronted, lack of humility regarding one's own piety, frivolous prayer, judgment/lack of charity towards non-believers, lack of support towards the clergy, lack of church attendance, congregational focus on secular celebration, 'Christian' rock music, religious hypocrisy, association with more heretical religious sects (i.e. Catholicism), etc. The tract ends with a final warning regarding the risks of Hell and divine judgment.

• Suzi - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet


• George - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet


• Charlie - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet


• Gregory - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet


• Unnamed Characters - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

As America entered the 1960's, Jack Chick was frustrated. When he became a Christian just over a decade prior, it was on the back of a sermon about how Israel's takeover of Palestinian land was a sign that the end was nigh. That it was time for the churches to get excited! That any time now Jesus was gonna come back and snatch up His people. revival should surely have been sweeping the nation, but as far as he could tell, it wasn't. Was he so out of touch? No, it was the Other Christians who were wrong.

Inspired by a copy of Charles Finney's sermon "Power from on High"   that a welder at his day job gave him, Chick decided to push his skills as an out-of-work newspaper cartoonist to their fullest and do a short booklet calling out all the shortcomings he saw in his own church and the churches around him. He took this to Rusthoi Publications, a Los Angeles based Christian publisher, who published an initial print run costing Chick $800.00, which he took out a loan to cover.

The end result is a series of 19 full-page vignettes, each showing something that Chick perceived as a shortcoming in mainstream Christianity. One depicts a family watching a western on TV, with newspapers strewn around them, as the Bible sits unread on top of the television set. Another shows a pastor on his knees, about to toss a coin to choose between two stock sermons, his Bible also gathering dust on a shelf. Some of the scenes presented are somewhat ironic in light of Jack's later work. In one, he condemns denominationalism, citing a bible verse stating that the main thing that matters is that they all believe in Jesus and love one another. In another, he condemns an emphasis on topical sermons about modernism, politics, crime and "GODLESS COMMUNISM" because Paul said to focus on Jesus. Chick attempts to emphasize how important he considers the information in the book to be by presenting it as information The Devil does not want you to read. The cover page depicts a group of demons trying to lock and barricade the book shut and implore the reader to "go look at some other book." Inside, on the copyright page, one of those demons can be seen again pleading with the reader to stop reading, before finally running away defeated. Chick doesn't feature any further demons, or indeed, any supernatural elements at all, over the rest of the tract, but would further explore this depiction of demons as funny little guys in his next tract, A Demon's Nightmare.

At more than double the size of a standard Chick tract, it must be noted that the artwork stands out as being really good. Chick puts every inch of his drawings to good use with a lot more visible detail than his smaller tracts contained. Particular highlights include the massive wide shot of the large church interior on Page 16, and the various congregants jostling and bickering on Page 19. It's clear that his background as a newspaper cartoonist has given Chick an eye for caricature which very much shines through in the drawings here. It also got Chick his first taste of controversy. He drew several characters in the likenesses of people who attended his own church, and when they saw themselves presented as examples of what's holding Christianity back, well, they weren't particularly happy about it. In Chick Publication's official biography about Jack, his successor David W. Daniels notes that Jack had once said to him "I wish I had known better and not put their faces in the tract" but concludes that he still did the right thing in doing so, claiming that when Chick Tracts became successful, people would eagerly ask to be depicted in them^A.

Why No Revival? received several major revisions over the years, each more incoherent than the last. When Chick Publications started self-publishing, Chick rewrote practically the whole tract for the new format. Very little of the original artwork survived, and the few panels that did had to be redrawn to fit the new, much smaller layout. In this version, Chick bumps the urgency of the subject matter. The front cover depicts a church that is not only sleeping on the job, but boarded up altogether, with the word "ICHABOD" written on the front, in reference to a story in 1 Samuel lamenting the glory departing from God's people. Chick broadens his scope considerably, with a great deal more emphasis placed on topical subjects such as the civil rights movement (he's not a fan), negative cultural depictions of Christianity, and (again) godless communism. This version in particular reads like a mishmash of chain letters and urban legends. Moral panic is drummed up over queer poetry^B. Stories are backed with nothing more than a caption saying "This actually happened!" and an entire quote purporting to be from a French communist magazine appears to have been made up entirely (the publication cited is in fact a French ANTI-communist magazine)^C.

The tract was revised once again in 1986. By this point, the influence from Chick's later collaborators and conspiricists such as John Todd and Alberto Rivera is readily apparent. Panels concerned about churches turning away newly-converted hippies are replaced with panels about churches being infested with literal witches. The threats of Civil Rights and Godless Communism are replaced with the threats of Rock Music and the massive Roman Catholic Megaconspiracy which by now occupied Chick's every waking thought.

As of 2024, it's out of print altogether, having been superseded by its own sequel fifty years later, 2011's Still No Revival, a considerably more alarmist piece where Chick goes off on one about Catholics compromising the integrity of the Bible and Muslims taking over America. At the beginning of this sequel tract, Chick reflects on the reaction to the original tract, and takes one final swipe at his old fellow congregants for having "found it offensive".

Unlike tracts such as The Last Generation and The Great Escape, revisions to this tract were few and relative inconsequential. However, in addition to the conversion of hand-lettering to machine-lettering and the ablation of Grawlixes which have since been made to other works originally released during this era, there are still a number of modifications which warrant noting...

• On Page 2, the grawlix in Paul's speech is removed and the formatting is slightly altered. He changes from accusing Jimmy of "interrupting" their cell meeting to claiming he "busted" into their "private" cell meeting instead


• In Panel 3B, the slang spoken by an unknown individual in reference to Paul's beating is changed from describing it as "outta sight" to "awesome". In the dialog bubble for the singing girl with the guitar, a treble clef is replaced with two beamed eighth notes as well as an additional solitary eighth note.


• In Panel 4A, a double em-dash in Paul's speech bubble is replaced by a period. In Panel 4B, Paul goes from describing Jimmy's religion as being "a flop" to being "phony" and he goes from describing Harry pre-deconversion as a "Jesus Man" to "born again".


• On Page 5, a couple sets of em-dashes are removed and Jimmy goes from describing Harry's previous spiritual relationship as Jesus having "fellowship with him" to "dwelling" in him instead.


• In Panel 6A, Harry's grawlix is bowdlerized to "jerk", he goes from saying Christianity is "nowhere" to being "a thing of the past", and he says he "resents" Jimmy calling him filthy instead of asking how he can dare to do so. In Panel 6B, Paul goes from claiming that he is personally "building a new world" to stating that his group is collectively "creating one world government" and he goes from saying that he can't "coexist" with Jimmy to saying that "there's no room" for his kind. His grawlix is also redacted and he refers to Jimmy as a "loser". A bible reference to 1 Timothy 1:15 is added to the bottom of the panel as well, the only such reference absent from the original version.


• In Panel 7B, Paul goes from incorrectly referencing the phrase by Karl Marx that religion is the "opiate" of the masses to correcting it to the "opium" of the masses.


• In Panel 8B, "Comrade" Gregory targets "capitalistic oppression" and "police brutality" as the obstacles to overcome to usher in a "brave new world" in the 1972 edition. In the 2010 variant, he claims they must destroy the "oppressive free market system" to allow a "one new world order to rise out of its ashes". He also goes from promising Paul and his fellow revolutionists positions of power and honor in the new "communistic" world to referring to it as their "fair, tolerant socialist world". While Communism and Socialism share some ideological similarities (and are frequently conflated with one another), they are not synonyms and do represent two distinctly different schools of though.


• On Page 9, the term "liberation" force has scare quotes added to it.


• In Panel 11B, a revolutionist sporting an "afro" haircut goes from getting Paul's attention by exclaiming "Hey man" to addressing him by name.


• In Panel 12A, "Women and children" are no longer "taken hostage", but rather "Men, women and children are herded into detention camps" by the revolutionists. The concealed weapons of the civilian resistance is now explained to be "few" in number. An unidentified revolutionist has their grawlix removed when exclaiming that Paul had been hit and let's out a big "No!!!!" instead.


• In Panel 13A, while the contents of John 3:16 is present in both versions, the specific bible reference is moved from the panel's lower margin to inside of the thought bubble.


• Panel 14A is completely replaced. The early version shows a depiction of a radio station with a signal tower and mentions the "People's Liberation Army" radioing for volunteers. It also mentions the corruption and pressure put upon politicians and the eventual collapse of the armed forces. In the later edition, we see an indistinct group of revolutionist capturing a group of individuals in military uniforms bearing a white flag and the text explains that the populace had previously been disarmed and stripped of ammunition by many years of gun "regulations", subsequently leaving them defenseless against the revolutionists. Political leaders are said to "cave in to the "terrorists' demands" and it is the "nation" that proceeds to collapse. In Panel 14B, another unnamed revolutionist sloppily wearing a collared shirt and necktie goes from stating that the needed volunteers are "coming" and "pouring in" and instead says that the "land is ours" and that they had "won". Paul originally mentions the land being their's in the original version, but instead laments over "what a price we paid" in the newer edition.


• In Panel 15A, the Afro-lutionist originally states that it is "sort of strange" to see the foreign troops already being everywhere, whereas in the newer edition he asks Paul why they are "still pouring in all around" them.


• In Panel 17A, Jimmy at first extols Paul to "accept" Jesus as his "Lord and Savior', whereas in the 2010 version, he instead pleads with him to "believe" Jesus and "receive" him as his "Lord and Saviour" (emphasis added) instead, reflecting Chick's adoption of the habit of spelling the phrase with seven letters during the interim.


• In Panel 18B, the necktie revolutionist remarks to Paul that receiving their rewards from Comrade Gregory will be "outta sight". In the 2010 edition, he instead indirectly foreshadows that they will "get what [they] deserve".


• In Panel 19A, Comrade Gregory is now seen wearing a clerical "tab" collar in the 2010 variant, implying that he has been aligned with the Catholic Church all along. This is not present when he is addressing the revolutionists earlier in that same edition.


• On Page 20, an African-american revolutionist being led to their execution goes from referring to their forces as being their leader's "cannon fodder" to stating that they were "useful idiots" instead. In the 1972 edition, a footnote reference is provided to the book "I Was An NKVD Agent" ^B to support the claim that Communist takeovers are invariably followed by purges of their own supporters, as which took place in the Soviet Union during the later 1930's.

• Jack Chick's Funnybook Gospel - https://jackchick.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/chick-tract-review-why-no-revival/

• Trope Index

• #[A]⇑ You Don't Know Jack. by David W. Daniels (2017). Chick Publications.
  (https://www.chick.com/products/item?stk=1443)


• #[B]⇑ Jehovah's Child by Deena Metzger (1969). In J. Steinbacher (Ed.), The Child Seducers: How Pedophiles Get Away with It (pg. 72-73). Educator Publications, Inc.
  (https://archive.org/details/TheChildSeducersJohnSteinbacher1970422pgsEDUPSY.sml/page/n89/mode/2up)


• #[C]⇑ Paix et Liberté.. (1962).
  (https://)


• #[D]⇑ Black Manifesto by James Forman (1969, April 26). Presented at the National Black Economic Development Conference, Detroit, MI.
  (https://www.crmvet.org/docs/690426_manifesto.pdf)