Disneyworld religion vs. Christ the crucified

Disneyworld exists.

Think about that. It’s a thing. I’ve lived less than forty five minutes away on the other side Orlando for long enough, now, that I forget how strange it is. But this last week, when my wife and I hosted two very good friends of ours and their vacationing family, I was able to see it again through their eyes. One of these friends happens to be an Ivy League trained philosopher and the other a theologian, so it’s fair to say that they had a conflicted time at “the happiest place on earth” (the trip was more or less a concession to some eager grandparents).

I’m not proud of the mere fact of sitting around a dining room table with a couple of professional thinkers and deconstructing the Disneyworld ideology, which is a bit like playing tee-ball with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, but I do note one oddity that the philosopher pointed out. She mentioned the History of the World According to EPCOT ride (I forget the actual name) and noted the strangely anonymous use of the first person, plural pronoun in its description of how the Greek classics were restored to the Western world.

The actual history: For most of the 6th-11^th centuries-ish, aside from a handful of monasteries and convents where scholarship was still valued, Europe dawdled its way through the dark ages with almost non-existent literacy and an almost total devaluing of non-religious study. Meanwhile, it was Islamic culture that considered learning to be an act of obedience of the mind to God, that made huge strides in mathematics, astronomy, governance, and medicine, to name a few, that prototyped the modern library after importing the craft of paper-making from China, and that boasted great scholars like Avicenna (Ibn-Sīnā) and Averroës (Ibn Rushd) who preserved and wrote commentaries on the Greek classics, including Aristotle and Plato, thus making them available when the West would again deem them valuable in the 12^th and 13^th centuries.  

The EPCOT version of that same history: For a while “we” lost the great Greek works, but eventually “we” recovered them from the Arabs.

Still coming to terms with ride’s imperialistic reduction of everything that has ever happened, my friend asked the very penetrating question, “Who is this ‘we’?” Who, indeed, in the context of a theme park that is visited by tens of millions of people every year from all over the world.

It was a rhetorical question, of course. “We” all kind of know who “we” are. “We” are the ones who were able to out-muscle and out-disease the native peoples. “We” are the ones on this side of the divide between East and West. “We” are the nominally Christian, defined as a narrow set of private moral qualms, and “we” believe that people should have the freedom to determine their own religion so long as it is also nominally Christian, defined as the same narrow set of private moral qualms. “We” are the ones who benignly wish for what’s best throughout the rest of the world, so long as it doesn’t bother our own way of life or our supply chain. And if “we” so choose, “we” can educate and sensitize ourselves and eventually opt out of being the “we,” but “they” can never opt in.

And subtly betrayed by that simple pronoun is this less than happiest truth on earth of which Disneyworld is hardly the only culprit but more like a cultural emblem. If “we” are designing the script and standing in line for these rides, who are they? “They” can be found stitching 101 Dalmations T-Shirts in a sweatshop in Haiti for 30 cents a day (just as unliveable a sum in Haiti as it is in the US).

Happy it is for “us” so long as the whole thing can be sustained by an inexhaustible supply of “them.”

This is neither a subtle nor a new insight. That great empires like Disneyworld are sustained by cheap labor is an observation that would be so commonplace as to be banal. And yet, “we” keep buying T-shirts and tickets. Why? Because humans are very good at sealing off the highly volatile stuff of unwanted information in the bomb containers of our brains.


For this reason, exposés, a documentary on sweatshops, for instance, are effective not because they teach us new information but because they break open those compartments where we had sealed off the information that we already know. By visuals and exposure, they amplify the cognitive dissonance between all the information that we know and the subset of information that we want to know.  But experiencing an exposé is itself unpleasant, so they don’t work on people who have no intention of changing and so would never give them a hearing in the first place. The function of exposés, instead, is to give affirmation to people who were already headed in the direction of acknowledging what they know. When my wife recently bought a book on factory farming, I knew that we were more than likely becoming vegetarians by fact of her buying the book, not by fact of her reading it. “We” visit Disneyworld for the same reason that “we” don’t visit factory farms and Bangladeshi fishing communities displaced by rising ocean levels: pleasant untruths are preferred to unpleasant truths until the cognitive dissonance of suppressing the truth becomes more uncomfortable than the truth itself.


So it must surely be a self-referential insight of meta-profundity when Disney premises itself on “imagination.” And perhaps this is why people of a certain comfort and class are so fiercely loyal to it. It is something like an ideological bomb shelter away from the relentless questioning of postmodernity—an entire zip code devoted to mirroring back for “us” only the most pleasant compartments of “our” own brains. It unapologetically gives “us” the permission to enjoy the world on stage, created in “our” own image, without ever pressuring us to look behind the curtain. The spotless streets and detailed buildings encourage us not to ponder, for instance, why there are so many immigrants changing out garbage bags and so few enjoying the rides. In the decline of Euro-American modernity, Disney fulfills the role of that string quartet in the movie Titanic, still playing merrily as the ship goes down.

When you do take a moment, though, to engage the often very kind men and women mopping the bathroom floors and sweeping those spick and span streets, it quickly becomes a rather ham-fisted example of what Lacanian philosophers (named for Jacques Lacan) call the breaking in of “the real.” The breaking in of the real describes a rupture in the network of symbols that we normally use as a sort of spackling to cover over the eyesores and flaws in all of reality’s unimproved rawness. Our symbols give a continuity to our world that helps us avert the crisis of meaninglessness, and the real is a threat to that continuity.

But if it’s low-hanging fruit to point out where the real breaks into “The Happiest Place On Earth,” what are we to say of “The Villages,” a retirement community in central Florida, which has insightfully been described as “Disneyworld for grown ups.” The streets are immaculate, every restaurant is themed, and like the beginning of an episode of the Twilight Zone, everything seems kosher at first. But then you start to notice some things: “Why has that young couple just walked their dog by this window three times in the same direction? And is it just me, or is everybody here Caucasian?” And if we might be curious what’s behind the curtain in “The Villages,” do we not have to suspect the same, albeit in a less heavy-handed way, of any gated community or “nice part of town.” What is the nice part of town other than the absence of that which is less than nice? Is it not that same “we” who determine what’s nice? And ever since the twenties when Eugenics (selective breeding and sterilization) was all the rage, and the fear of genetic contamination brought about a swift end to the United States’ open immigration policy, has not “our” country become quite literally a gated community?

That leaves me just a few words to make my point in this blog. It’s precisely at the breaking in of the real where we find that the authentic story of Christianity is not just a slight variance from so much nominal religion that parades beneath the Christian banner; it is precisely the opposite. The authentic story of Christ crucified may in fact be the shadow side of any “happiest place on Earth”-type construct. Like Lazarus in the rich man’s driveway (Lk. 16:19-31) or a Haitian child at a sewing machine, our authentic story is the real, which upsets the carefully filtered truths and straight up lies of the gated community called “we.”

This is what brings me to Lent, which in many ways is an anti-religion. If religion is that which gives meaning and continuity to one’s experience and “the real” turns out to be a desolate place with the very real possibility of meaninglessness, Jesus chooses the real and not religion. And for that reason, I hesitate to add as it is so primed for misunderstanding, it paradoxically becomes there and only there in the meaninglessness that one can find authentic meaning—only in the meaningless real can one share community with the creator of meaning.   

Here’s the thing about Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Saturday and all that is somber and brooding about Lent. I can pretend not to see the Haitian man bagging the garbage at Disneyland. I can even pretend that I’m not pretending. But never again can I both not pretend and not see. But if I can find some way to enter the story of a God who engages that Haitian man to the extent that he is no longer “that Haitian man” but Lazaraus or Jean-Pierre—to the extent that he is “we”—then, and only then, can I both not pretend and see and become a part of that love which creates meaning.

let's start by at least telling the truth

When I asked the CEO how he came to own so much wealth, he told me, “Unlike some overpaid exec who gets a nice salary just for showing up, I had the idea and took the risk that made the wealth possible.” When I asked the overpaid exec, she told me, “Unlike some yes-man in middle management, I secure the wealth through my big picture vision and forecasting.” When I asked the yes-man in middle management, he told me, “Unlike the whiny foreman, I earn my living through cheerful dedication to the company.” When I asked the whiny foreman, he told me, “I’m not some lazy union worker; I don’t expect something for nothing.” When I asked the lazy union worker, she told me, “Unlike the woman on food stamps, I have a job.” When I asked the woman on food stamps, she told me, “Unlike the good-for-nothing beggar, I go legitimately through the system and only take what I need to support my family.” When I asked the good-for-nothing beggar, he told me this:

“I own nothing. Everything I have is but a gift that God has entrusted me to use for the sake of the world. Give up everything that you own, come follow me, and you will experience my wealth.”

If this reads like a cutesy little allegory with an intriguing, if ultimately impractical, punch line, and not like a somewhat obvious paraphrase of our core story, then it’s likely that we haven’t fully admitted how strange our story is.

Interesting factoid: did you know that your average middle-class American household owns more individual items, more material stuff, than did King Henry VIII?

So yes, I confess that I don’t know what to do with the Jesus story, really. I’d be lying if I said I can easily take a look at my position with a comfortable income, within the comfortable middle class of the most materially privileged society in human history, and honestly fit it somewhere in the narrative of the vagrant who advised that we take the “lowest place” at the banquet (Lk. 14:10), who told the priggish young man to sell everything (Mark 10:21), who told the parable of the rich man who had already received good things in his lifetime (Lk. 16:25).

No wonder charismatics tweak the story: Jesus became lowly in order to lift us up—it was a temporary stunt, you see, necessary only to get us the glory we deserve, but, fear not, it didn’t fundamentally change what sorts of things we ought to find glorious. No wonder preachers of the prosperity Gospel and “Christian values” just ignore Jesus entirely. No wonder the Catholics developed such a confusing labyrinth of philosophical arguments to show why the Almighty Christ enjoys a home in rich basilicas and cathedrals unlike Jesus who had “nowhere to lay his head” (Mt. 8:20). No wonder Lutherans prefer talking about Paul and his invisible forgiveness of sins to Jesus and his all too visible lifestyle.

Like I said, I also don’t know what to do with this story. I know how to build and promote organizations that try to “help” people living in Jesus’ circumstances. But I’ve never aspired to be in Jesus’ circumstances. I honestly don’t get what good would come from that. Look at me. Look at where I live. I’m just as hypocritical as anyone else.

That said, if I do have one strength as a preacher and teacher, it’s this: honesty. I may not know what to do with the story, but I at least refuse to lie about what the story is. Maybe in James and John’s shoes I might also have moments where I’m tempted to forget it and try to latch onto the son of God like he’s a show-pony, who can win me some glory-by-association (Mark 10:35-45). But in my better moments, I’ll collect myself and return to confessing that impulse as sin, not preaching it as Gospel. I won’t distort a theology of resurrection to show how it negates the Nazarene’s theology of mundane, day-to-day cross-carrying. I won’t start prattling nervously about how “times have changed, you see,” and “Capitalism, you see,” and “wealth generates wealth, you see,” as if Jesus’ lack of economic education is where he got off track.

And maybe that’s a good place for the faithful to start, if we’re serious about leading from the bottom in this society. Maybe we start by telling the truth:

“Please go to work on us, O God,

We don’t know where to start.

We live at a level of comfort unknown to even the rich people in Jesus’ day.

We own more stuff than King Henry VIII, for crying out loud.

We, all of us at some level, believe that there is some truth to ‘trickle-down’ economics.

We are convinced that, while billions are still left out, billions of others are better off than they

    would’ve been without an economic system that runs on personal acquisitiveness and envy.

So when you say, ‘Take up your cross’, we don’t really know what that means.

Or even worse, we know exactly what that means; we just don’t agree that that’s the way to go.

It just doesn’t seem that productive.

So we don’t do it.

Have mercy on us.

We, probably not so humbly, ask that you go to work on us anyway.

If we’ve proven ourselves incapable of going 0 to 60mph in our faithfulness, please help us to at

least get from 0 to 3 or 5.

And maybe next year, we can get to 6.

Who knows? Maybe we’re not the disciples you’d’ve hoped for, but we’re the ones you got.

So go to work on us, O God.”

Surely changing the world involves telling the truth about it. So let’s start by being truth-tellers this Lent and see what God can do with that.