Reading Francis

Is Disney a cult?

I mentioned recently that, while I have spent time exploring the ways in which football is America’s true religious practice, I haven’t really given Disney the same treatment. So let me take a stab at fixing that.

For those who haven’t read Abandoning Temples, its premise is that one thing that trips us up in life is when we put things in God’s place as our ultimate source of meaning, purpose and belonging. Those things can be good or bad in themselves. They just aren’t God, and when we put them in God’s place, it screws up our priorities and their application in how we live our lives.

Sports in general, and football in particular, run the risk of becoming idols. For participants and attendees, football offers an experience that seems modeled on sociological definitions of religious ritual.  Fans, through their dress, actions, cheers, and the surrounding show of the game move from everyday life to an experience of transcendence, losing themselves in the larger whole of a stadium full of fellow fans, cheering their team on to victory.

I pointed out when I first wrote about this that football does not itself claim to be divine or transcendent. There isn’t an apparent creed or statement about how football articulates a new reality. It’s just a game, at the end of the day. When I first wrote about Disney, it was from the opposite perspective, because Disney (at least as represented in the scripts of its fireworks shows) does have a worldview, a framework of understanding ourselves and our purpose. 

It turns out, I was wrong. Upon further review, I think football also articulates a worldview, one that contrasts sharply with that of Disney’s, while Disney’s fans (particularly those of its theme parks) also participate in rituals that mark an entry into a transcendent reality “to all those who come to this happy place,” as Walt himself called Disneyland on its opening day. 

In some ways, the contrast between the rituals and worldviews of football and Disney align with the divisions we see in American culture. That isn’t to say that their fandoms are starkly divided along red and blue lines, though both essentially non-partisan institutions have been sucked into that partisan fight from time to time. Instead, I would offer that the things that each fandom values might be a window into the way that Americans can view the world through different lenses.

Football’s worldview emphasizes team loyalty, the authority of the coach and key players, adherence to rules, competition, and a meritocracy that is rewarded with victory. Disney’s worldview emphasizes universal connection, individuality, creativity, collaboration, and a celebration of the child in all of us.

Both football fans and Disney park guests wear unique clothes as part of their ritual. Football fans tend toward uniformity and team loyalty in their game clothes; I think of traditions like Penn State’s “white out” games in which every attendee wears white as an ultimate example, but more broadly, you tend to see football fans wearing team jerseys, other clothes with the team’s logo on it, or at least their team’s colors. 

Disney fans also wear special clothes to the parks. In some cases, individual groups will wear identical or thematically matched clothes; you see families dress alike, for instance, and groups that go “drinking around the world” at EPCOT will often wear shirts that build on a common theme. But the much broader emphasis for fan apparel is individuality and creativity: whether it shows up in t-shirts or backpacks or “Disney bounding”, in which fans wear clothes that match the colors of their favorite Disney character without crossing over into an actual character costume, fans express their allegiance through creativity and individuality. Even if your backpack comes from the same producer as every other backpack in the park, you want yours to be the only one of its kind, and the one that best expresses who you are as an individual.

The stories of football focus on those on the field, of course, and the themes that run through those stories emphasize obedience to authority, hard work, discipline, and a relentless pursuit of victory. Especially at the college level, head coaches and quarterbacks (and, to a lesser extent, defensive captains), stand at the top of a clear hierarchy of authority. When a team wins, it’s the coach and the quarterback that do postgame interviews. When a team loses, it’s the coach and the quarterback that face the pressure of unhappy boosters. Unlike other sports (like baseball, where sign-stealing and doctored baseballs have long been parts of the game), football has far less tolerance for cheating. Instead, the assumption is that teams win or lose because of their talent, hard work, solidarity and good coaching.

Disney theme parks are a completely different experience for fans. First of all, there is no “game”, per se, and no competition. Fans are free to create their own adventure within a park that combines rides, shows, stores, restaurants and other experiences in a format that is not hierarchical or sequential, allowing each participant (or group) to make their own choices on what experiences they want to prioritize. Even if the Disney characters themselves show occasional on-screen competition, Disney fans are encouraged to celebrate whatever character they want. There are no standings to mark which princess is most popular, for instance, and a Mickey shirt-wearing fan would have no thought of challenging a Stitch shirt-wearing fan to a fight. (You can’t say the same about, say, Auburn and Alabama fans.) Disney characters tend not to be the most talented, strongest, or hardest working. Instead, they tend to be the most childlike (and many, like the stars of Encanto and Coco, are themselves children). Within the stories of Disney’s films, there is competition and victory, but the experience of a Disney park is less like a facsimile of a first-hand experience of those dramas than it is the experience of a post-show celebration. If a football game ends with a shower of confetti upon the victors, a day at Disney World often seems to start with the confetti shower (metaphorical or real).

So what? As is true of football fans at games, there are Disney devotees for whom their experience of theme parks fills a role that more properly belongs to religious experience, and that is problematic. We are meant to understand ourselves and our world through the interpretive lens of our role as beloved children of a divine Creator, not as Buckeyes fans or Winnie the Pooh fans. You can be those, too, if you acknowledge that they are secondary allegiances.

But the contrast between these two American pseudo-religions is a helpful one in understanding how fellow Americans can see the world so differently. I am re-reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and though it is almost 15 years old, its insights have not aged. The culture of the American left grounds morality primarily on its interpretations of a few foundations (care for the poor and oppressed, liberty from oppressive social systems, and fairness), while the culture of the American right centers morality not only on its interpretations of those foundations, but also on more traditional ones such as loyalty, authority and sanctity. While Disney and football may not fully subscribe to those political cultures, their different worldviews play more toward the moral languages of one side of America’s divide than the other. 

Is Disney a cult? As much as football is. But maybe we can learn about each other by understanding the idols we each choose and the moral frameworks they reinforce.