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Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English DOI: 10.1525/rac.2008.18.1.95 BibTeX citation key: Borer2008 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: Chick. Jack T., Religion, USA Creators: Borer, Murphree Collection: Religion and American Culture |
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Abstract |
In order to understand the practice of “culture wars work,” we examined the claims of a particularly vocal evangelist, Jack T. Chick. Chick is a writer and cartoonist known both positively and negatively for his “Chick tracts.” Chick tracts are small twenty-four-page black-and-white comic books that attempt to convert the reader to Chick’s particular brand of “Bible-believing” Protestant Christianity. We focused on Chick’s claim about Catholicism in order to show how theological and ideological boundaries can be constructed between presumably allied religious populations. Chick presents his anti-Catholicism using three main frames: (1) the associative frame—Catholicism is not only one of many social problems but is also cause of a number of them, (2) the subversive frame—the Catholic church is a political villain, and (3) the hidden agenda frame—Catholicism has not remained true to the authoritative teachings of Christianity and has embraced a secretly progressive worldview. Investigating a culture war claims maker like Chick, who purposely disrupts what presumably would be an orthodox or conservative alliance, reveals the process of symbolic boundary making within cultural/moral/religious conflicts.
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