MARCELINE – As former home to the historic entrepreneur Walter Elias Disney, the Missouri town of Marceline is heavily invested in the legacy of this man who created Mickey Mouse.
Less than a quarter mile from First Baptist Church, Marceline, The Walt Disney Hometown Museum has become a favorite destination for Walt Disney’s admirers.
MARCELINE – The Walt Disney Hometown Museum here has no connection with The Walt Disney Company’s LGBTQ+ agenda, Marceline pastor Brian Baker told The Pathway. (Pathway file photo)
“The Walt Disney Hometown Museum is a real gem,” said Pastor Brian Baker of FBC Marceline, who serves as a member of the city council. “It is an engine of our tourism industry here and attracts a steady stream of visitors, really devoted Disney fans from all over the world, every year.
“Its collection is only getting larger, and so is its fan base. So it is a gift to our community, and quite important in many ways to maintaining our community’s identity.”
Marceline’s museum, Baker said, is not owned by The Walt Disney Company, which (with multiple theme parks around the globe and its streaming video service, Disney+) is one of the world’s largest entertainment corporations.
Neither does the Marceline museum have anything to do with the Walt Disney Company’s increasingly vocal promotion of the LGBTQ+ agenda, Baker added. In recent weeks, he said, members of the Christian community in rural Marceline have expressed “serious disappointment in the stances that the Disney corporation has taken” regarding the LGBTQ+ agenda.
Brian Baker
And they’re not alone. The Walt Disney Company’s open advocacy of the LGBTQ+ agenda has drawn criticism from Southern Baptist leaders across the nation.
But such criticism of Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” is nothing new among Southern Baptists, who declared a boycott of Disney from 1997-2005 over issues related to homosexuality.
Now – 25 years after that boycott began and just as messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) are preparing to head to the home city of the Disney Land theme park (Anaheim, Calif.) for their 2022 annual meeting on June 12-15 – the national controversy about Disney’s LGBTQ+ agenda is heating up once again.
Meanwhile, in Marceline and other towns across the nation, Southern Baptist church members and families are asking exactly how they should respond to Disney.
Disney’s ‘not-at-all-secret gay agenda’
On March 29, City Journal contributing editor Christopher Rufo shared a leaked video, in which Disney executive producer Latoya Raveneau clearly spelled out The Walt Disney Company’s advocacy of the LGBTQ+ agenda. The video was exposed in the wake of Disney’s open opposition to Florida legislation that, as WORLD magazine reported, “protects schoolchildren in kindergarten through third grade from exposure to lessons about sexual orientation.”
In City Journal, Rufo described the content of the Raveneau’s statements in the video. “She said her team was implementing a ‘not-at-all-secret gay agenda’ and regularly ‘adding queerness’ to children’s programming,” Rufo wrote.
He added, “Another speaker, production coordinator Allen Martsch, said his team has created a ‘tracker’ to ensure that they are creating enough ‘canonical trans characters, canonical asexual characters, [and] canonical bisexual characters.’ Corporate president Karey Burke said she supported having ‘many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories’ and reaffirmed the company’s pledge to make at least 50 percent of its on-screen characters sexual and racial minorities.’”
Mohler: ‘This is a wake-up call’
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler spoke out against “attempts to normalize homosexuality” 25 years ago as the SBC began its 8-year boycott of Disney. More recently, after the release of these leaked videos, he once again criticized Disney’s pro-LGBTQ+ stance on his daily podcast, The Briefing, in WORLD Opinions, and in an April 7th correspondence with The Pathway.
R. Albert Mohler Jr.
“I think American Evangelicals in general, and Southern Baptists in particular, have to confess that we have often been far too naive when it comes to consuming culture and entertainment,” Mohler told The Pathway. “This is a wake-up call that entertainment has never come without a larger worldview and without teaching and conveying certain moral lessons. When it comes to the LGBTQ revolution and companies like Disney, there is a corporate enthusiasm for upending millennia of human moral wisdom and upending Christian morality when it comes to our understanding of sexuality, marriage, gender. Now, the most basic issues are being subverted.
“Therefore,” he added, “where we have a consumer choice, we have a responsibility. No one is forced to go to the theater, to go to a theme park, or to take our children to see these entertainments. We have to understand the responsibility of taking our Christian convictions into the marketplace, and that is perhaps most important when we think about the marketplace of entertainment. …”
Mohler told The Pathway that calling another official boycott may not be the “most effective” way to respond to Disney – though that’s not to say the SBC’s previous boycott was ineffective. The previous boycott made “an emphatic point that got a lot of national attention,” he said. But it’s difficult to document any boycott’s “financial impact,” particularly since Disney isn’t eager to release such information to the public.
Instead, Mohler said, “it is probably more effective to make clear our concerns … and call upon Christians to make informed decisions based upon those convictions. …
“Disney has pulled back the curtain and shown the world what is about to come,” he added. “Shame on us if we fail to make informed, convictional Christian decisions based upon that knowledge.”
‘God’s love for them looks like Calvary’
Back in Marceline, Baker agrees that families should pay attention to the media they watch. “We just have to have a much clearer set of eyes,” he said, “about what we’re letting children watch and be willing to have open discussion about the things that we see.”
At the same time, Baker said that, as Southern Baptists respond to Disney’s cultural agenda, they shouldn’t stop caring for individuals in the LGBTQ+ community, who need to hear the gospel.
“Even in a small town like Marceline,” Baker said, “more and more of them are friends and neighbors. And this is something of a litmus test for us, to determine what kind of neighbors we will be to them, while we stand uncompromisingly on the truth of God’s Word.”
Despite their sins, these LGBTQ+ friends and neighbors have been created in the image of God, Baker added. “And God’s love for them, just like God’s love for us, looks like Calvary.”
Meanwhile, if families crave some Disney magic without the risk of exposing their children to the LGBTQ+ agenda, Baker said they’re welcome to take a jaunt to Marceline and learn about the one-time Missourian who made Mickey Mouse.