Pop pulpits: Mickey's gospel, Buffy's spirituality

The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust.

By Mark Pinsky. Westminster John Knox, 280 pp., $14.95 paperback.

What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide.

By Jana Riess. Jossey-Bass, 208 pp., $14.95 paperback.

I KNOW WHAT it's like to be a preacher desperate for some point of contact with an otherwise inert congregation. You can't stand the thought of another Sunday facing the same blank faces, the distracted fidgeting, and the outright snoozing. As fascinating as you think the doctrine of perichoresis is, you know it's not likely to draw Amens. So you turn away from dusty old churchspeak toward pop culture. People love TV; they watch hours of it. Maybe if you refer to some TV shows or movies they like, or even act a little more like Letterman, they'll be right with you. Or at least not nod off this time.

I take it that pastors with such a longing to be hip form part of the intended audience for books like The Gospel According to Disney and What Would Buffy Do? The author of the first book, Mark I. Pinsky, is a religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel with a justly earned reputation for offering clear and lively, commentary on the intersections between religion and popular culture. As in his earlier book, The Gospel According to the Simpsons, Pinsky outlines the "values" present in entertainment, values that viewers might have overlooked.

This work is more encyclopedic than the one on the Simpsons in that it methodically details the religious themes in each of some 30 films. It includes a religious biography of the Disney brothers and the recent Disney helmsmen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. Pinsky also offers brief essays on the theme parks and an insightful account of the Southern Baptist Convention's quarrel with Disney, over giving marriage benefits to same-sex employees and holding "Gay Days" at the theme parks.

Pinsky calls Disney's faith "secular 'toonism'--a play on the "secular humanism" that fundamentalists complain about. He argues that Disney films present "a consistent set of moral and human values" that are "identifiably Judeo-Christian." That is not to say they are explicitly religious. There is "scarcely a mention of God" in the films, and nary sign of "explicit Judeo Christian symbolism or substance." (Indeed, the more recent Disney films have drawn more on non-Western religious themes than on Judaism or Christianity.) The explicit religious motif is that of "magic"--a "far more universal device" to entertain children worldwide.

Nevertheless, there is a "Disney gospel" that amounts to this: "Good is always rewarded: evil is always punished. Faith is an essential element--faith in yourself and, even more, faith in something greater than yourself, some higher power. Optimism and hard work complete the basic canon."

Pinsky has a few qualms about some details of this gospel. He is also aware that the early Disney movies were often full of stereotypes of minorities, and that even in the recent movies one finds goodness equated with physical beauty. The notion that good always triumphs, he notes, is "dangerously unrealistic." Parents should deal with such issues, Pinsky counsels, by turning off the VCR and discussing them with children. But for the most part Disney can lye trusted to impart valuable lessons about respect for differences, tolerance for others, and the basic compatibility between being good and being happy.

From the beginning there has been a vital link between Disney productions and the theme parks the former are advertisements for the latter. When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, he announced his intention to create a place that would be "a source of joy and inspiration to all the world." The novelist and literary theorist Umberto Eco has called Disneyland "America's Sistine Chapel" the place where the faithful must flock, pilgrim-like, at least once a year.

Pinsky notes that since American families tend to live far away from relatives, trips to Disneyland or Disneyworld with grandparents and cousins have come to offer the sort of happy family gatherings most of us lack but long for. He tells the story of Billy, Graham complimenting Disney on his new park, "Walt, you have a great fantasy land here." Walt replied, "You preachers get it all wrong. This is reality in here. Out there is fantasy."

The Magic Kingdom (like the City of God in Revelation) has no churches. The Disney brothers had what Pinsky calls an "ambivalent relationship with organized religion" along with their "strong, personal faith in God." Still, it was primarily" a "commercial" decision not to endorse it single church or religion, since Disney had worldwide sales ambitions from the beginning.

The lack of emphasis on a single religion does not stop Disney from taking up at catechizing role, Pinsky notes. "In the Western world in particular, the number of hours children spend receiving moral instruction in houses of worship is dwarfed by the amount of time spent sitting in front of screens large and small, learning values from Disney movies." Disney's evangelistic entrepreneurship has been extraordinarily successful. Pinsky says images of Disney characters are "far more recognizable around the world than images of Jesus or the Buddha."