Southern Baptists must decide.
I have watched constantly that in our work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether my productions deal with fable or with stories of living action.
—Walt Disney—
[A]s a new father, I have decided not to expose my baby to any of Disney’s products — anything they stream, or the theme parks. There are so many other wholesome options for her. [But I will allow her to] watch the older Disney films on DVD that I was raised on — they taught values that kids need and can understand, things like loyalty, friendship, working through obstacles, and the love of family. Disney doesn’t seem to understand that parents have so many options now. Ultimately, I think they’re going to lose on this wokeness gamble.
—a man in Tennessee who is father to a 10-month old baby girl—
Key point: Christians cannot remain neutral when the culture, corporations, and people around them are declaring war on God and His created order. In such a scenario, it is inconceivable that committed Christians would practice “business as usual.”
This article is part of a series of articles, available here.
The Walt Disney Company has gone off the rail. Last time we highlighted various ways in which Disney has rejected God’s created order and is promoting homosexuality and other LGBT-related sexual and asexual causes. This includes transgenderism. One manifestation of this is that the company is now refusing to acknowledge its audiences are composed of “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” even though every member of their audiences fits into one of these four categories.
In this article and the next (and possibly a third), with the help of two pro-family leaders at the Family Research Council (FRC), I want to explore further the immoral actions and intentions of the Disney Company. Of particular interest for us in Part 2 will be how America’s largest protestant evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is responding, and not responding, to Disney.
Here are the two gentlemen who will be guiding us on our investigative journey. Joseph Backholm is FRC’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement. One of Joseph’s colleagues, David Closson, is the Director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at FRC.
On Friday, April 1, 2022, Mr. Backholm served as the guest host of Washington Watch with Tony Perkins. He interviewed several individuals, the last of which was Mr. Closson. The two men talked about Disney and Disney’s recent push against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which has been derided by its opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Yet in reality, the new law is quite benign. It only
prohibits classroom instruction regarding “sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade “or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” for those in higher grades.
On Monday, April 4, FRC posted a video of Backholm’s and Closson’s Washington Watch conversation. I’ve embedded it at the end of this article. There you can watch the entire 16-minute segment of the program without interruption. Meanwhile, to make it easier to digest the entire exchange, I’ve broken up Mr. Backholm’s and Mr. Closson’s conversation into six short audio clips. We’ll consider the first three here. Each clip highlights an extremely important aspect the ongoing debate over Disney and the Disney Company’s departure from its value-rich roots.
Section 1: Is Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill a Form of Bullying? White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says it Is, but Few Lies Are More Glaringly False.
Listen carefully to David Clossen’s comments about White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s characterization of Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education Law.
David Clossen: [Jen Psaki’s comments show] just how out of touch the Biden White House is when they’re characterizing this bill the way she is. If you were to listen out-of-context to the press secretary’s comments, you would think she was talking about some bill that would allow people to do horrible things to children and to mislead them and misguide them and to maybe even inflict harm on children. This bill — all it does is say that children in the State of Florida, my home state of Florida, that are in kindergarten through third grade can’t be taught about gender, and sexual orientation, gender identity — things that even 52 percent of Democrats in the State of Florida don’t want children to be learning. So it’s a complete mischaracterization. But it does show, unfortunately, the priorities of this White House.
While Ms. Psaki tries to come off as compassionate by casting herself and the Biden Administration as defenders of those being bullied, do not be misled. As we indicated last time,
Once an individual or entity starts with a false premise, that which flows from it also is false or counterfeit. Moreover, you can be certain that the ideas supporting it also are totally false. The faulty premise here is that people don’t exist as men, women, boys, or girls, or that one’s sex is irrelevant to who he or she is. This, of course, is hogwash!
Further, as we said, the so-called “compassion” also is fake. Militant advocates of the LGBT agenda, Disney, and the Biden Administration — all of these and every other individual and institution on the bandwagon of “inclusiveness and diversity” — aren’t focused on others, but on themselves and the agenda that drives them. And significantly, their devotion to the cause increasingly looks like a religion.
Section 2: Enacting and Upholding Good Public Policy Demands Courage, but People Hunger to See Courageous and Principled Leadership.
Here are some takeaways from this two-minute segment.
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- Enacting good and even common sense policy takes courage.
- It increasingly means standing against large corporations, because the trend has been for large corporations to adopt leftist, woke, agendas, even if doing so puts their main missions at risk.
- People are waking up to just how extreme leftism and wokeism really are.
- In fact, people long for strong leadership that will effectively push back against leftist extremism.
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Section 3: The LGBT Agenda Defies Reality, and at Great Cost.
The Disney employee whose voice you will hear in this clip is Vivian Ware, diversity and inclusion manager for Disney. You can hear all of Vivian Ware’s statement here, but you’ll hear enough of it in this clip to understand clearly what she and her company are trying to accomplish.
David Clossen: They are being very intentional about moving forward the goals of the moral revolutionaries.
Joseph Backholm’s reply is extremely important for us to understand.
Joseph Backholm: And keep in mind, by refusing to use [the] terms “boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen,” they are defying, they are standing in direct opposition to the created order as God described it in Genesis 1 when He said, “male and female He created them.” And it wasn’t controversial to say that for most of human history, but now it is; and the Disney Company has specifically said, Did God make them male and female? No! And that should bring up memories of a familiar biblical story in Genesis chapter 3. ’Cause the entire problem that we’re dealing with is the human desire and tendency to be gods ourselves, and to believe that we know better than what God said.
By refusing to use the terms “boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen,” they are…standing in direct opposition to the created order as God described it in Genesis 1 when He said, “male and female He created them.”
—Joseph Backholm—
Mark it down. When people and society enter into a war with reality, reality is certain to win — every time. The executives at the Disney Company can no more change the fact that every human being is either a male or a female any more than they can safely defy the law of gravity by jumping out of an open window on the 15th story of a high-rise building. There’s a huge price to be paid for acting as though basic fundamental and foundational truths are false. In our last post, we acknowledged the inescapable nature of the reality of biological sex in the human experience. We said,
News flash! Biological sex is an inseparable part off who every individual is, without exception. This doesn’t mean that biological sex is a determinative factor in absolutely everything about every person, but that it is tied to and even woven into the fabric of every individual and every person’s identity. The fact that human beings have been made by God in His image means they possess creativity, preferences, inclinations, desires, insights, a free will, and preferences (to name a few of many human attributes and traits), but it it also means each one of them is either a male or female.
Christians must understand the implications of this stance against the created order. I would simply ask every reader who considers himself or herself to be a God-fearing individual, Are you willing to support a company that is taking such a stance, and that is doing so publicly?
Let’s elaborate a bit. It is time for every believer in America to ask, How much do I respect the created order God put into place? In the midst of a culture defying God by defying His created order, what measures am I willing to take to show the world my love for God and my respect for His creative design?
It never can be compassionate to participate in a lie.
While those parroting the cultural narrative will portray themselves as compassionate, it never can be compassionate to participate in a lie — and that’s exactly what they’re doing, whether they realize it or not. We find fulfillment and freedom only by cooperating with God and the real world in which we live, and we can be compassionate only if we’re willing to acknowledge and affirm reality, or truth.
Hang tight! More to Come!
Having now examined three of the six parts of Joseph’s and David’s insightful conversation, we’re halfway through. Get ready! The information upcoming may be the most important we address in this 2-part series.
Stay tuned!
Copyright © 2022 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
top image credit: Photo by Gui Avelar on Unsplash
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture has been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Disney puts us at a crossroads. We have decisions to make.
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