Book examines Disney credo

By Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA Today

For almost seven decades, generations have been schooled by a flickering movie, TV, or video screen in the lessons of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Disney's "Lilo & Stitch" showed an evolution in the company's traditional character roles. Gannett News Service

"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.

The book is part of a publishing trend that seeks to analyze the spiritual insights in popular entertainment: Peanuts, Harry Potter, even "The Sopranos." Pinsky's first pop-culture-meets-the-Bible book, "The Gospel According to The Simpsons," details a counterintuitive message of morality in the antics of Bart and Homer.

He isn't the first to examine Disney in spiritual terms. Scores of preachers, scholars and sociologists have studied the legendary cartoons and theme parks that draw families like quasi-religious pilgrimage sites. But Pinsky's book is for the ordinary ticket-buyer, not the academic or adamantly evangelical.

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.

"Walt would never do anything that would exclude children — or customers" by being culturally specific, says Pinsky, who honed his eye on Disney in a lifetime of viewing 'toons, first as a child, now as a parent, and in years of reporting on the theme parks in Los Angeles and Orlando.

• 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.

"Disney's credo is a Southern Baptist's nightmare, because it presents other systems of belief as equally valid and equally worthy of respect."

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."

"Once upon a time in this country, 'humanism' was not the red-flag word it has become," he says. "Mainline Protestants thought you could model your faith without necessarily preaching it. This infuriates some religious conservatives."

And it has led to a clash between Disney and some guardians of family values. In 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's second largest denomination, voted to boycott Disney parks and products.

Southern Baptist leaders were enraged by the Disney Co.'s decisions to offer domestic partnership benefits for gay employees and add Gay Days to the special-events calendar.

Surveys later showed many Baptists ignore the boycott.

Pinsky sticks so closely to journalistic neutrality in the book that so far neither the infamously thin-skinned Disney corporate honchos nor the equally zealous Baptists have complained.