Keeping the Faith at Disney

ANAHEIM —  Nearly 1,000 choir voices heralded Jesus’ birth as Disneyland’s Town Square was transformed for two nights into a church-like setting, continuing for the 40th consecutive year a little-publicized religious tradition at the Magic Kingdom.

“It’s awesome, isn’t it?” said George Strnad of Monarch Beach, who attended one of four 90-minute concerts Saturday and Sunday night and was a high school choir member in the ceremony 17 years before.

The biblical story of the first Christmas was read by actor Joseph Campanella, whose predecessors in that role have included Cary Grant, John Wayne, Pat Boone, Jimmy Stewart and James Earl Jones. The ceremony began and continues as a holiday favor to vendors and others with ties to the park. But those seated guests are joined each year by hundreds of park-goers who crowd into Town Square, said park publicists.

Despite this tradition, now staged often at the roomier Walt Disney World, and the company’s benevolent stance toward employees’ Bible study groups--nine at Burbank-area offices--the Walt Disney Co. is still the target of boycotts by some Protestants and Catholics.

The Disney empire has long curried an image as purveyor of wholesome, albeit secular, family entertainment. Keeping Disney theme parks and films virtually free of religious content may have avoided alienating audiences in an increasingly multifaith culture.

That secular front, however, may have also left the company vulnerable to suggestions that it lacks religious and moral sensitivity.

To be sure, boycotters define Disney as anti-Christian mostly because the company, in their view, has not treated gay and lesbian sexual behavior as sinful. The issue has remained unresolved at some major church conventions.

Protestant critics have denounced the Disney company for extending health-insurance benefits to partners of gay employees. They also have objected to what they called “pro-homosexual” themes in some books and movies turned out by Disney subsidiaries.

Southern Baptists voted in June to urge its 15.7 million members to shun all Disney-related products, saying that the last straw was actress Ellen DeGeneris coming out as a lesbian in real life as well as on her show, the Disney-owned ABC sitcom “Ellen.”

In a new attack on what it called the “Tragic Kingdom,” the Southern Baptists are selling a video with a cover showing two Mickey Mouse look-alikes holding each other under a Gay Pride flag. The fundamentalist Christian American Family Assn. produced the illustration from an Internet site about homosexual groups that promote the unofficial Gay Days at Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

But the video does not mention the Christmas candlelight procession and ceremony that started in 1971 at Disney World. The event has become so popular in recent years that it is now repeated 84 times over 33 days each year at the Florida park’s Epcot Center, said Disneyland publicist Joe Aguirre.

“Just like at Disneyland, where we really don’t have much space, they use a live orchestra and a choir formed mostly from outside choirs,” Aguirre said. “They use about eight celebrity narrators for the Christmas story.”

Some evangelical Christians in Southern California have been disappointed that Disneyland no longer holds special nights where Christian bands perform in hopes of drawing church youth to the park, an ongoing practice at Knott’s Berry Farm and Magic Mountain. The Anaheim park ended those events after 1987, “due to a change in sales strategies and the expansion of regular operating hours into the evening,” said Aguirre.

But Christian music rang throughout Disneyland one night in 1996, when the Rev. Greg Laurie, pastor of a 12,000-member church in Riverside, booked a semiprivate party with Christian bands and evangelistic preaching. Some 500 visitors who stayed for the church-run event made faith declarations and were counseled in the Golden Horseshoe Theater.

Laurie canceled a planned return to Disneyland last September because of the boycott, which has gathered allies such as broadcaster James Dobson’s Focus on the Family ministry and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an opponent of ABC’s “Nothing Sacred” show for its portrayal of a doubt-plagued, liberal priest.

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In an interview last week, Laurie said that he cannot take his congregation back to Disneyland just yet. “I would be spending more time explaining my decision than I would preaching the Gospel,” he said.

Reflecting many evangelicals’ misgivings about the wisdom of boycotts, Laurie added, “I think it’s unfortunate that we Christians are far too often known for what we’re against rather than for what we are for.”

The issue hits home with small Bible study groups of Disney employees in Anaheim and the San Fernando Valley.

“You don’t win people over to Christ by telling them how much of a jerk they are,’ said the Rev. Bill Hoganson, who was an operations manager during the final stretch of his 26 years at Disneyland until he became an associate minister at Calvary Chapel in Anaheim in 1994. Hoganson continues as a mentor to the 40-member Christian fellowship, one of two at the Anaheim park.

Hoganson attributed the boycott movement to “fear in the Christian community that things [in U.S. society] have changed in ways they don’t like.”

Despite the small numbers in fellowships, Christians at Disneyland, which employs about 8,500 people in the slack season, have a visible impact, contends park employee Gary Krall. “Non-Christian co-workers who know of our faith oftentimes seek us out for comfort and answers to their spiritual questions,” Krall said.

Krall said other believers should examine whether their own employers really measure up to the same family-minded criteria by which the Walt Disney Co. is being judged.

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That note was also struck last week by Tim Ramos, one of 11 people at a weekly Bible study session at a Disney office in Glendale. “I’m proud of my company,” said Ramos, who works in Disney’s home video division. “Nobody says to me, for instance, I can’t have a Bible on my desk.”

Craig Beckman, a Disney data-processing specialist who attends a Lutheran church in Norwalk, told the prayer meeting in the Glendale office that Disney Studios were the first in Hollywood to allow employees to form a Christian group. That group, which started in 1986, grew to 200 members at its height, Beckman said.

Disney spokesman John Dreyer said he could not verify that claim, adding, “We neither encourage nor discourage the groups.”

Asked about the secular face Disney presents to the public, Dreyer cited recent exceptions: the 1996 movie “The Preacher’s Wife,” starring Whitney Houston, and the ABC sitcom “Soul Man,” with Dan Aykroyd as an Episcopal priest.

Dreyer indicated that the Disney Co. is in an awkward position. If it were to start publicizing its religious elements, it might be accused of using faith as a public relations tool, he said.

The company, however, has maintained recently that it has a sense of moral direction. The official Disney statement after the Southern Baptists’ boycott announcement alluded to the company “promoting moral ideology,” which Dreyer later explained as the idea that good wins over evil in Disney story lines.

On CBS’ “60 Minutes” last month, Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner termed “ridiculous” the charges that his company is promoting an anti-Christian, pro-homosexual agenda. “We are pushing in our corporate marketplace tolerance and understanding,” he said. “We are totally onto an ethical compass, a moral compass.”