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The Disneyland Report > Disney News > Walt Disney's guide to spirituality Disney NewsWalt Disney's guide to spiritualityBy Cathy Lynn Grossman For nearly seven decades, generations have been schooled by a flickering movie, TV, or video screen in the lessons of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." "Welcome the stranger, respect and accept those who are different, pray when you are in need," Mark Pinsky writes in his new book, "The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust and Pixie Dust." "And avoid the temptation of the easy solution — eating a magic apple will never solve your problems." Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, uses "gospel" in the generic sense — a body of values and ethics — to examine the global cultural force of the Walt Disney Co. Looking at 31 animated movies, Disneyland and Disney World, Pinsky finds a vision of mainline American Protestantism where, he writes, "good is always rewarded; evil is always punished." But it's missing one critical feature: God. Walt Disney, who grew up in a fundamentalist home, never set foot in a church as an adult. And he never wanted belief to be a barrier to any potential viewer or visitor, Pinsky says in a phone interview. The company's contemporary managers — Jews and Christians, gays and straights, men and women — carry on the founder's worldview. In the Disney classics, Pinsky finds: • It's magic that answers prayers, mostly. You must, of course, believe — but believe in yourself, your friends and family. "It's faith in faith itself or a higher power," Pinsky says. "Some evangelicals (who claim a Christian content for the cartoons) have an idealized memory of the early Disney films, but they forgot or 'misremembered' what they had seen. The Disney gospel didn't change. And magic is more universal than Judeo-Christian beliefs." • Happiness is an entitlement. "It's the 'Church of the Here and Now,' the 'Nothing Too Hard,' and there's none of that tedious deferred-gratification stuff, either." • Salvation lies in moral behavior — bravery, truthfulness and unselfish acts — not belief in the grace of God. Theologians have been feuding for centuries over this, but surveys show "most Americans are theologically illiterate, anyway," Pinsky says. They believe that good people earn their place in heaven: no sacrament, Sunday services or submission to Jesus required. Moral behavior also includes a canon of old-fashioned care for the poor and the downtrodden. Disney heroes favor gun control and environmentalism ("Bambi"), the nobility of the poor ("Robin Hood"), marriages based on love despite differences ("Lady and the Tramp," "The Little Mermaid") and unconditional love ("Lilo & Stitch"). The first explicitly Christian Disney film, 1996's "Hunchback of Notre Dame," subverts the novel's anti-clericalism to celebrate a "loving, forgiving God," he says, and to condemn abortion, racism, euthanasia and genocide. • Certain conventions, such as beauty equals goodness and evil is always ugly, a staple of early Disney works such as "Snow White," vanish in later films. In one of Pinsky's favorites, "Lilo & Stitch," "the heroine is a fat little girl with an attitude problem at the beginning and at the end. She's not transformed into a princess. In 'Beauty and the Beast,' it's the beautiful fellow, Gaston, who embodies evil and dies." It all adds up to a Disney credo Pinsky calls "secular 'toonism" — a play on "secular humanism." To read the rest of this article, click here. Return to Disney News. |
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