Religious Tracts^39I knew a guy from work who stood in Times
Square every lunch hour holding a large
tattered sign that read: “Repent.” Unlike the
New Yorkercaricatures of doomsayers in
sackcloth and ashes, he wore regular street
clothes and—rain or shine—preached through
a bullhorn about the downside of eternal
damnation. He also handed leaflets to
passersby with such titles as,Are You In
Danger?, The Burning Hell,and The
Consequences of Sin.Returning to the office, he
would leave a few leafletsdu jouraround the
men’s room. And while he was a likeable sort,
there was something unsettling about his
proselytizing, and even more unnerving were
those crudely printed leaflets that accused
everyone of a multitude of unpardonable sins.
I tried to ignore the leaflets on the
grounds that they were pathetically designed,
but actually, they were disturbing and
compelling, precisely because they were so underdesigned (in fact, ugly as
hell). As designers, we are so used to being bombarded with slick graphics
and typography that when faced with crude missives like these, we
automatically reject them as though they are laced with anthrax.
Sure, from a distance, designers have come to celebrate so-called
vernacular design, but evangelical handouts have yet to be classified as such,
because their graphic quality and content is more forbidding than a
Chinese food menu or a Greek paper coffee cup. The rhetoric of persuasion
in getting one to repent for one’s sins is, arguably, more dour than menus
that persuade you to buy the sweet and sour pork special. Moreover, if one
does not believe in things like sin (original or otherwise), the Second
Coming (or the First, for that matter), the Devil (or anything satanic), or
the “vice of sexual immorality” (or any of the dozens of other prohibitions
based on scripture), then these flyers are, at first glance, decidedly crackpot.
Of course, not all printed matter of a religious nature is designed
as primitively as those—take Gutenberg’s finest piece of printing, the