Prepare to Meet Thy Maker... of Tracts

The granite-colored clouds massed above the Free Tract Society in Highland Park look threatening this gloomy winter day. But they are nothing next to the dire warnings blaring from the hundreds of religious pamphlets stacked neatly along the whitewashed shelves of the 104-year-old Los Angeles institution.

“Beware 666,” says one tract, in florid red, warning of the alarming growth of the “Mark of the Beast”--that is to say, Satan. “Doomsday: Truth or Fiction?” another asks rhetorically. (The doomsday verdict: It’s true, it’s coming--and it’s not going to be pretty.)

Pundits crow we’ve entered a new information age dominated by e-mail, PDAs, cell phones and other instant communication. But religious tract societies--the nation’s first mass publishers--continue to churn out the crudely illustrated and produced single-sheet communiques that began proselytizing for Christianity before this nation was formed. Few people have escaped having a Bible tract pressed on them, on a street corner or at a gas station, and fewer still know where they come from.

The Free Tract Society was founded in 1897 in Salt Lake City by William M. Bowen, who moved it to San Francisco and eventually to Los Angeles in 1900. Located on 7th Street opposite MacArthur Park until 1985, the society is one of the oldest purveyors continuously publishing in its city of origin, religious historians believe. And it’s one of the rare tract publishers remaining in a major metropolitan area. Ernest E. Soady, Free Tract Society director for 20 years, says he doesn’t know how the organization survives.

“If the Lord isn’t doing it, I don’t have the slightest idea how it’s being done,” says Soady.

Free Tract is not a member society; it has no official archive or historian, being focused more on saving souls now than on the past. Sandwiched between a Carrows coffee shop and a shop on York Boulevard, the group’s storefront operation relies on volunteer labor and donations, says Soady.

The tracts are printed for free in a shop in Apple Valley. They’re translated into 20 languages and shipped around the world by the pound and half-pound (the first half pound is free, and beyond that, the suggested donation is $6 for a pound, about 200 pieces.) Some churches stamp tracts with their pastor’s name and address and use them to advertise their services. Others keep them in racks in the back of the sanctuary for members to peruse. Individual evangelists also stop by for blocks of 1,000, which they hand out at bus stations, street corners, airports and gas stations, Soady says.

“You have to have something to catch the eye and mind all in one glance,” Soady says. “I had a former gang member in here just two or three days ago. He met this guy from the opposite gang, and because their background was so identical, even though they were enemies, now they go out together and pass out tracts.”

Belief in the power of the word, and specifically religious tracts, to convert the “lost” arrived in the New World from Europe. Tract purveyors “were the first publishers to imagine a true universal mass media,” says David Nord, a professor of journalism, American studies and history at Indiana University in Bloomington. “They resolved to place their text [with] everybody in the country, and they did an amazing job. By the late 1820s, they were printing about five pages of tracts for every man, woman and child in the country.”

By the mid-19th century, the original fire-and-brimstone tone gave way to treacle, as publishers sought to win over children with heartwarming moral tales.

But as a new century dawned, the independent, nondenominational tract societies came to be associated with an apocalyptic, pre-millennial strain of conservative Christianity. In the 3-by-5-inch missives they distribute to the public, pre-millennialists preach that tomorrow may never come because Jesus is arriving now. Some believe Christ’s 1,000-year reign on Earth will be preceded by a one-world government presided over by the anti-Christ. The message is often harsh: We wretched sinners are soon to suffer a fiery descent into hell unless we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

And it’s not always delivered or received kindly. One tract, which refers to the host used in Catholic communion as “the death cookie” and suggests that the Masons practice witchcraft, was the focus of a protest last year when students at Vista High School in San Diego County demanded that a local church stop distributing it across from their campus.

Among the fringe-culture, ironic set, tracts have become a potent pop culture icon. Juggler James Jay, a former Mennonite, collects the most lurid, bloody ones he can find. A Web site spoofing the distinctive cartoon style of Ontario, Calif.-based publisher Jack T. Chick, an evangelist associated with the Southern California Jesus movement of the ‘70s, contains a dozen parodies of the artist’s anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual tracts.

In recent years, some tract publishers have toned it down. The American Tract Society, founded in 1825, resulted from a merger of 50 smaller tract groups, including the leading ones in New York and Massachusetts. The organization has distributed 10 billion tracts during its lengthy tenure

Now located in Garland, Texas, American Tract turns out state-of-the-art, full-color sheets with up-to-the-minute themes. Its biggest client is Billy Graham, says marketing director Mark Brown. Like a few other giants in the field, it maintains staffs of writers, editors and artists and solicits works from well-known Christian speakers and writers, Brown says. Some 60% to 70% of American’s revenue comes from tract sales to large distributors, including the Gideons International, known for its Bibles.

It samples liberally from pop culture, with tracts called “Survivor” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and new ones that warn about the dangers of the witchcraft in the “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings” movies. Along with the sophisticated presentation, their salvation message is muted and tasteful. And e-tracts are available for sending on the group’s Web site.

In contrast, the Free Tract Society is one of about 50 smaller tract groups spread across the U.S., mostly in small towns or clustered in Christian centers like Michigan and Colorado, Brown says. The idiosyncratic groups operate independently, he adds, with little contact with the bigger societies or each other.

Within days of their deaths, the American Tract Society had tracts out on Princess Diana and John Kennedy Jr. But ripped from the headlines is just not the Free Tract Society’s style. Instead, it reflects the more traditional leanings of Soady, 82.

The longtime Free Tract director has a shock of leonine white hair and snowy eyebrows that turn up at the corners like little smiley faces. Dressed in a plaid shirt and sweater vest, with a sonorous delivery that makes his slightest remark sound like the beginning of a sermon, he appears every inch the evangelical minister he once was at Glad Tidings Tabernacle in the old York Theater, which now hosts Korean church services.

Growing up in Watts, Soady, as he tells it, was “a no-good rascal,” in and out of lockup, consorting with the most desperate of robbers, murderers and other unsavory characters, before meeting his first wife, a devout Pentecostal.

Her piety eventually won him over to Christianity, but Soady feels her early death from cancer was a result of her decision to marry a nonbeliever.

“God forbade her to marry me, and she was thrown into a lifestyle that brought stress and broken-heartedness until her own body gave out before she was 40 years old,” he said.

Soady’s current wife, Doris, happens to be one of Free Tract Society’s most popular authors, he says. A Free Tract distributor since the 1940s--”We had taken Spanish tracts all the way down the Pan American Highway to Panama”--Soady took over the faltering operation in the 1970s. He does not collect a salary but says he depends for income on Social Security, donations to his other ministries (including a children’s home in Guatemala), sales of Los Angeles properties he has held for many years and “the Lord.”

Free Tract authors include people who walk in off the street, such as Soady’s “dear black brother” Eugene Turner. Turner, now deceased, railed against the “murderers” who support abortion rights and preaches Jesus’ imminent return.

“Turner was a very humble man, he did janitorial work at the Angelus Temple downtown and wouldn’t charge them anything, just to do something for the Lord,” Soady says.

A number of tracts are by death row inmate Alfredo Vargas and feature distinctively Latino mural-style art, with Chicanos spinning fat chains, heroically muscled men and long-haired weeping beauties. “The Gay Lifestyle” was written by a former homosexual who claims to have been “cured” by Jesus.

Soady, however, says he doesn’t go in for the language of hate.

“There’s a lot of the gay ones they’ve brought in here I refuse to print,” Soady says. “I don’t want anything to do with them, and I have very little tolerance of those that do.”

He says that Free Tract Society’s most popular pamphlets are not the scare sheets but the old-fashioned ones, like “Four Things God Wants You to Know,” that outline a simple path to salvation.

“Tracts that go way back to D. L. Moody. ... You don’t know who Dwight Moody is?” Soady says in astonishment.

He goes on to explain that Moody, founder of Moody Bible College in Chicago, was one of the most prominent evangelical preachers of the last century. Other favorite authors include W.C. and Kathryn T. Moore, old-time revival leaders. “These are definitely written with the purpose in mind of winning souls to Christ,” Soady says. “If it were not that men and women were being converted to Christianity every day, we’d close our doors tomorrow.”