This Religion is Destroying Disney

And that's why I'll never write for them.

After another post-breakfast chat about my book, 27, and how it’s written like a movie, my husband shared this article with me and remarked, “Disney should hire you to write their movies.”

I laughed and said, “Maybe, but they’d rather die first. It would be against their religion.”

Disney CEO Bob Iger is reportedly taken aback and exhausted by the multiple box office failures the company has experienced this year. For several decades, Disney has been one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, especially when it comes to films, releasing countless animated and live-action movies that have raked in millions and have also gained much critical acclaim. However, this year, Disney has struggled to keep up with its success from previous years, with a significant number of its movies bombing at the box office. Reports suggest that the company has lost an estimated $900 million across several underperforming movies this year.

To prosper again, Disney and all of Hollywood, actually, would have to shun their religion. It’s their attempts at proselytizing in films which is making their films boring as heck. They’re too busy making sure they have non-problematic plots.

“Princesses these days do not need princes to come save them. It’s just not done anymore. Instead, we have to have feminist princess who goes and saves her own self while expounding on dull, woke platitudes at integral points in the story.”

Disney is so busy taking the problems out of things, that they can’t seem to write character driven stories that people are compelled to watch to the end.

A few days later, I made the same observation about these smutty books in school libraries. I stumbled across an oft-read passage from All Boys Aren’t Blue on Twitter. This passage has been made famous by angry parents at school board meetings.

It’s gross. It depicts graphic incestuous sex acts between two boys among many other sexual encounters. The pro-nasty-books-in-school crowd like to say that these books merely raise awareness about abuse. But my book raises awareness about abuse without any graphic sex. All Boys Aren’t Blue and books like it are meant to create sexually confused young people. They are meant to titillate.

Pro-nasty-book people also like to say that these books help queer kids feel that they’re not alone. But, honestly, I’m not sure kids who engage in the sort of behavior described in these books need to feel any camaraderie. I think they need therapy and a bunch of interventions from people who genuinely love them and want their best.

If you disagree, I guess you should read the book in question, and get back to me. Because if you disagree, you have more in common with the middle-aged school board members sitting uncomfortably in their seats while these passages are being read by angry parents who then ask, “If this is making you queasy, why do you think my underage kids should have access to this?”

Anyway, I read the passage again. Then I chuckled to myself.

“This is our saving grace,” I thought. “It’s so appallingly boring.”

Once I got past the shock value, the obvious attempts at titillating the reader with the pornographic insistence of using almost every sexual term known to man, I realized it was written incredibly poorly. As if, some 12-year-old kid got ahold of a sexual lexicon and just pieced together a couple paragraphs with a few sparse and necessary words between the terms and phrases. Dull, dull stuff.

Allow me to quote from the book while removing all the smut and you’ll see what I mean:

You told me to [sexual reference], which I did. You then [sexual reference, sexual reference.] There you stood in front of me [sexual reference] and said, [“sexual reference.”] At first I laughed and refused. But then you said, “Come on, Matt, [sexual reference.] This is what other boys like us do when we like each other.” I finally listened to you. The whole time I knew it was wrong, not because I was having sexual intercourse with a guy, but that you were my family. I only did that for about forty-five seconds before you had me stop. Then you [sexual reference.] That’s when you began [sexual reference] as well… After a minute or so, you stopped. You then [sexual reference and sexual reference.] You began [sexual reference, sexual reference, sexual reference] never [sexual reference] though. It was just [sexual reference] while the music on the TV played in the background…Arethra Franklin was singing “A Rose Is Still a Rose. The irony of a song playing in the background about the deflowering of a young girl being used by a man.

All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson

Contrast this with a clip from my book where a character decides she must become sexually active to convince the authorities that she has fully assimilated into the culture.

Jessica stopped walking and looked into his eyes.

“Are you my new Shane?”

“Huh?”

“Did someone ask you to pay attention to me?” she asked.

Kevin shuffled his feet and then nodded.

“I think you’re really hot, though. I just didn’t notice before.”

She stared back at him without blinking.

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“Um, I think I’m just supposed to make you feel better. Make you feel good.”

Jessica waited. Kevin kicked a clod of dirt and then grinned.

“I think I’m supposed to get you interested in…you know, sex. Because you’ve never had sex before. I think we’re supposed to have sex. Maybe?”

Jessica’s face went white, but she only nodded.

“I see.”

She began walking slowly, eyes darting back and forth.

“Only if you want to,” Kevin said.

“I see,” she said with a little more assurance. “And who asked you to do this?”

“Principal.”

“And you report back to Principal about what happens between us?” Jessica asked.

“Yes. Well, I’d rather not, but she’ll get me in her office and…I’ll tell her whether I want to or not.”

A little shadow of fear flickered over his face and was gone.

“Here’s my house,” he said, pointing to a house that was the imitation of every house on the street. “It’s just us. Mom’s working. She’ll be gone until noon tomorrow.”

“And no dad,” Jessica mused.

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” Jessica said, waving her hand.

She stood staring at the house, hands shaking.

“So…you want to come in?” he said.

“If I do this with you, you’ll have to tell Principal? Right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And then I never have to do it again because they’ll be satisfied? They’ll believe I’m fitting in?”

“Uh, I dunno. I guess?”

Kevin stared at her, confused.

“Promise you won’t tell her that I asked these questions?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

“But you don’t have to do this,” he said, looking at her white face. “I got in sooooo much trouble last time I bothered you. I don’t want to get…”

Jessica stared straight ahead of her and clenched her teeth.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

After a moment, she looked up in his face, took his hand and said, “Let’s go inside.”

He smiled and led her through the door.

Cut. No graphic details. After the fact, we pick back up with the effect this had had on Jessica.

Sunlight streamed through the window of Kevin’s room. Jessica stirred under the covers as the light fell across her face. She opened her eyes a crack and closed them again. She sat up and pulled the blankets around to cover herself. Kevin had long gone and the house was silent. Jessica stared out the window. The longer she sat and stared the more her face grew troubled until she drew her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, and laid her head down. She began to rock slowly back and forth. A low, mournful wail escaped her lips, then another, and another.

After an hour, she quieted. She wrapped herself in a robe, went looking for her clothes, and put them back on. She grabbed her bag and went into the bathroom in the hall. Looking in the mirror, a face smudged with makeup and tears looked back. She ran some water and splashed it over her face, scrubbing with a washcloth. She scrubbed hard and long until her face was angry and red. With trembling hands, she reached into her bag and pulled out some lipstick. It wouldn’t go on right. As she stood looking at her face, she suddenly bent in half, ran to the toilet, and vomited. After the convulsion, she sat on the floor breathing heavily. Getting to her feet, she rinsed her mouth out with water, wiped off the lipstick with some toilet paper and threw it in the trash.

Which book would you rather read? Which clip grabs your attention and holds it fast? And the bonus is that, while my clip is disturbing to be sure, I dare say no one feels the need to bathe their eyeballs in acid to feel clean after reading.

But the woke world around us cannot write or produce anything riveting. They’re too busy posturing and displaying their virtue to one another. And what are those virtues, exactly? Well, like all religions, they have their fundamental doctrines, their sacraments and their sacrifices.

I read a marvelous piece by Mary Harrington this week where she inadvertently summed up the most boring religion of all in such eloquent language, I just have to share it here:

…we don’t usually get to choose the moment or manner of our death. Nor do we get to choose our sex. And nor do we get to control the normal sexed developmental pathway from childhood to sexually mature adult. This in turn confronts us with the limitations to the worldview we now apply, not just to the natural world but also to ourselves: of technological control and exploitability…

…[Heidegger] he characterised the essence of technology as “enframing”: a refusal to encounter things as they are, instead viewing the world as resources ready to be exploited: the “standing-reserve”….But as I’ve argued, embracing biomedical control of human fertility extended the domain of the standing-reserve, from the natural world to humans ourselves. Half a century on, we increasingly (en)frame every component of the human organism as standing ready to be exploited, remodelled, or re-ordered in service to individual desire. This mindset encourages us to re-imagine what people are, in a way richly evoked by the header image: mechanically recovered meat, frivolously re-formed as a simulacrum of anything else we please.

…And this in turn reveals the lie at the heart of the transhumanist promise. In re-ordering humans to the standing-reserve, what we get is not the technological means of making ourselves into anything we desire. Rather, it’s a new order of pervasive substitution, in which we are forbidden to notice the difference between real and synthetic…Accordingly, we are now asked to accept that a section of skin and flesh sliced from a young woman’s thigh, rolled up, and then grafted to her groin, is as much a “penis” as the normally developing genitalia of an adult human male. And despite how patently false this is, cultural commitment to the order of total substitutability is now so mainstream it has assumed quasi-mystical qualities.

…In service to the Meat Lego quest for total control of human flesh, “transgender children” serve as something akin to saints: living sacrifices to the impossible dream that we could one day entirely mechanically recover and reform ourselves, and have the result be better than the original.

Read her full piece right here:

Ultra-Processed People

While this religion’s artistic work is boring in the extreme, it is by no means harmless. It is murdering, maiming, and devastating young people by the thousands in this country alone. Ironically, it has undoubtedly maimed the author of All Boys Aren’t Blue, and I pray God rescues his soul from its lies.

So, what is the best remedy against this dark and tedious boredom? The real, the true, the beautiful and good. The religion with the most startling plot twist of all:

That the God of the universe went to the cross and died…not so that we could do and become whatever we want, but that we could do and become exactly what He created us to be—dazzling creatures full of light and life.

Humans don’t conceive of plots like that on their own. But God does, and He stamps it deep in our souls. And that is why the best stories, written by Christians or not, are always some reiteration of the Gospel. We can’t put them down. We must read them to the end. Because deep down, they resonate at a level we may not even be able to comprehend or put into words.

In other news…

Many thanks to Allyson Horner for becoming a paid subscriber last week!

What a blessing! Jonathon and I have found the place we’re going to use to print up some review copies of 27, and we will be reaching out to all my paid subscribers in the next two weeks for your addresses so that we can send you a pre-published copy to enjoy!

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That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…