We Must Pathologize Disney Adults

                                                                      

Jewish studies professor of Religion Jodi Eichler-Levine is researching Disney, she believes it functions like a religion and we ought to stop pathologizing it, she writes HERE, :

"I'm a religion studies professor researching Disney and I'm here to tell you why to stop pathologizing Disney adults...

"Disney Fairytale Weddings have been a thing since the 1990s. Disney already had a huge honeymoon market and decided to go for weddings. Thousands if not millions have married or honeymooned at a Disney park or on a cruise. What does this have to do with religion?

Many of the Disney fans I have observed in person and online find immense meaning in the parks. People don't just marry at Disney. They mourn lost relatives at Disney. They go to Disney to celebrate surviving cancer. They go there for one last trip before they die.

Religion is a way of making meaning in the world... It is about making homes and confronting suffering...

All of this happens at Disney. Cast members literally welcome you "home."

                                                      

                                                              

She continues :

"Is this capitalism? Sure it is. Is it also at least quasi-religious? Yes. (And by the way, most religions are intertwined with capitalism. Just ask one of the founders of sociology, Max Weber).

Disney owns our stories. For some people-- both those who have another "traditional" religion and those who don't-- the promise of magic at Disney and the feelings they get there are powerful. I've seen people cry at the fireworks. Many times.
Incidentally, the latest firework show goes "The magic is calling-- answer the call!" an altar call if ever there was one.

                                             

Would I want to go to a wedding with no food because the bride and groom wanted photos with Mickey? No, no I would not. But when they say Disney is a big part of their lives I take that seriously. Maybe they met there. Maybe the IDEAS the Mouse stands for bring them joy.

Maybe it's the only place their parents ever acted happy. Or, yeah, maybe they are selfish. But if we measure religion not by its truth-claims-- because we CAN'T assess those unless we have something much more powerful than a Ph.D-- but by its power in people's lives, then Disney is as much a religion as anything. It is at the very least a site of meaning and human fellowship, even you hate it...."

                              

Seraphim Rose HERE offers another assessment:

"When such a child becomes an adult, he naturally surrounds himself with the same things he was used to in his childhood: comforts, amusements, and grown-up toys. Life becomes a constant search for "fun" which, by the way, is a word totally unheard of in any other vocabulary; in 19th century Russia they wouldn't have understood what this word meant, or any serious civilization.


Life is a constant search for "fun" which is so empty of any serious meaning that a visitor from any 19th-century country, looking at our popular television programs, amusement parks, advertisements, movies, music—at almost any aspect of our popular culture—would think he had stumbled across a land of imbeciles who have lost all contact with normal reality. We don't often take that into consideration, because we are living in this society and we take it for granted.....


One might take, as a symbol of our carefree, fun-loving, self-worshipping times, our American "Disneyland"; if so, we should not neglect to see behind it the more sinister symbol that shows where the "me generation" is really heading: the Soviet Gulag, the chain of concentration camps that already governs the life of nearly half the world's population.

Listen to Seraphim Rose Here :