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What's up, everybody.
My name is Michael Burns,
and today for the first time ever,
I'm gonna open up about my greatest fear.
- Disney.
- I'm absolutely terrified of Disney adults.
Let me explain.
A couple years back,
we casually discussed the phenomenon of adults
who are super enthusiastic about Disney
on our podcast Culture Binge,
and I shared some tongue in cheek thoughts
about the unaccompanied old to Disney World.
I get a little judgey
when I see like legit adults get hella emotional
about going to a kid's park.
If I was a parent, let's say,
and I'm taking my kids to Disney,
and we had to wait to get on a ride
'cause a bunch of (beep) 37 year olds
are all like getting emotional
to get on the tea cups or whatever.
I'm just a little pissed.
Maybe get out of the way right now
or go to like, I don't know, the zone
where they have like alcoholic beverages and churros
and just chill there while the kids go on the rides.
Now I moved on with my life,
but a few days later,
a Disney YouTuber posted an entire reaction video
that took umbrage with my comments.
- I started to watch it, and it deeply disturbed me.
- And ever since, I get regular DMs from dummy accounts,
threatening my life or making fun of me
or implying that I hate anyone
who didn't have a great childhood.
And while sometimes annoying,
this experience has mostly left me wondering why.
And this fiery reaction to very same criticism
has led the team at Wisecrack
to investigating an important question
are Disney adults kind of a cult,
or put more nicely,
are they inadvertently practicing their own religion?
And if so, can their zealotry tell us anything interesting
about modern society at large?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack edition on Disney Adults,
is Disney a religion part one.
Oh, and if you decide to make a reaction video to this one,
just tag us in it.
And before we get into it,
just a quick note while researching this topic,
we found way more interesting stuff
than could possibly fit into just one video.
So we're splitting this one into a two-parter.
Sort of like a godfather godfather part two situation,
except I'm not gonna kill my own brother in part two.
- I know it was you, Fredo.
- This video is going to cover
some recent Disney adult drama
and then contextualize what we actually mean when we ask
if Disney is a religion.
Then in part two,
we'll look at the intricacies of how Disney
maybe functions as a religion.
And don't worry, unlike Francis Ford Coppola,
we know when to end something great after two parts.
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Now back to the show.
Now for a little bit of story time
starring ye olde internet.
last month, Reddit's amitheasshole forum
bot-lighted a recently married couple
who invited their nearest and dearest
to a lavish Disney World wedding,
where they allegedly instructed their guests
to buy their own food at nearby facilities
or vending machines.
Yeah, they expected guests to purchase their own food
at a wedding reception.
Why so stingy?
Oh, just because the happy couple
had decided to spend their entire food budget on appearances
by official Minnie and Mickey Mouse costumed cast members.
As many were quick to point out,
weddings at Disney come with a minimum catering budget,
so it's likely the story was fabricated or exaggerated.
But it nonetheless struck a nerve with the Twitter-verse
because if there's one place
the internet loves to aim its collective ire,
it's at the Disney extended universe's
enthusiastic adult acolytes.
From Disney bounders who go to the park
in outfits inspired by their favorite characters
to rich TikTokers moving into a gated community
of Disney world mansions,
the folks at karaoke night
who bring the mood down
with a passionate rendition of "God Helped the Outcast
from the Hunchback of Notre Dame."
♪ God ♪
Enthusiasm for Disney
just seems to rub the general public the wrong way,
and to be fair and balanced,
I confess to once singing this song
"I'll Make a Man Out of You
from the movie Mulan"
at a karaoke bar in Northfield, Minnesota.
I think it was the summer of 2009,
and to all who were in attendance,
I formally apologize.
So the backlash over this food less Disney wedding
eventually spurred professor of religious studies
Dr. Jodi Eichler-Levine to bravely step into the discourse.
She urged the very online folks
to have a little compassion for Disney adults. Why?
Because according to Eichler-Levine,
Disney adulting is akin to practicing a religion,
and we ought to be a little more sensitive
to people's sacred experiences
at the church of Mickey Mouse.
In the name of the Minnie, Mickey, and Donald Duck. Amen.
Don't put that in the video.
In her sympathetic Twitter thread, she writes,
if we measure religion not by its truth-claims
but by its power in people's lives,
then Disney is as much a religion as anything.
It is, at the very least,
a sight of meaning and human fellowship,
even if you hate it.
She argues that people embrace Disney
for various personal reasons.
Maybe Disney World was the only place
where your parents ever seemed happy.
Maybe you watched frozen on your first date
with your spouse,
or maybe you found solace
dumping your favorite uncle's ashes on Splash Mountain.
Please don't try the last one.
It's very much illegal.
But this argument caused many to wonder.
Was Eichler Levine defending Disney adults
or offering an unflattering diagnosis
of their spiritual condition?
And does Disney fandom really have that much in common
with religious worship?
Let's take a step back
and start by approaching Disney adults as a fandom.
Scholar Cornel Sandvoss writes that fandom is defined
by the regular emotionally involved consumption
of a given popular narrative or text.
So Disney lovers who have cried
over Mufasa's death 3000 times
certainly would seem to fit the bill.
Now, the link between fandom and religion
has long been discussed in academic circles.
In fact, the word fan even has religious etymology
coming from the Latin word fanaticus,
which meant attendant of the temple
or the fanus or fanus,
fan of, I'll say it, fan of the anus is what it sounds like,
and that's fine.
And, of course,
deeply religious people are often called fanatics.
It's also the name
of the Philadelphia Phillie's very chaotic looking mascot.
As scholar Vernon Chadwick argues,
the Latin root of religion, religio,
is defined not in terms of the truth of dogma
but the strength of communal bonds forms by shared belief.
Such a community can manifest
around shared rights of worship or sacred objects or sites.
Chadwick explains that taking care of
and maintaining these elements of a religion
easily become ends in themselves,
independent of explicitly defined
and defended articles of belief.
This is all to say religion could be viewed
less as what you believe and more as what you do,
and this makes sense as many organized religions
place a big emphasis on religion
being about acts of service and lived virtues.
Friend of the channel soaring character guard
also help this view calling Christianity a practice
rather than just being a system
of like bullet pointed beliefs.
And folks have long been squeaked out
by what intense fans do in their communities
specifically because of the seeming proximity
to religious experience.
For example, when Elvis's gyrating hips
made children fall into tearful hysterics,
some parents got real nervous
because huge emotional reactions
were ideally meant for church revivals,
not sexual awakenings via the Ed Sullivan Show.
Christian groups even worried
that Christian contemporary music
would distract its fans from worshiping God
and lead them towards secularism.
Instead it just made millions and millions of dollars
and produce gems like this.
♪ If you do drugs and you think you're cool, ♪
you need to come to sunday school.
What's more, the conventional language we use
to talk about fandom certainly invokes religion.
We call niche fandoms, cults,
and talk about our culture of celebrity worship.
So it's no wonder scholars of religion,
media, and fandom alike
have grappled for decades with the question,
do fandoms constitute a religion?
A scholar Mark Duffett put it because fan phenomena
can sometimes look similar to moments of religious ecstasy,
the idea that fandom is like a religion
is a ready-made metaphor.
I also like the notion of religious ecstasy,
like going to church on ecstasy,
that sounds fun.
Don't do it, but do it.
Duffett notes that some academic researchers
who subscribe to this interpretation of fandom
treated fans with empathy
while others use the analogy
to stereotype and lambaste fans as servile and misguided;
that is to say to treat fandom as a religious practice
sometimes means to pathologize the fan.
IE to regard or treat them
as psychologically abnormal or unhealthy.
It's worth noting that some forms of fandom
are basically treated as normal by our society,
while others are viewed with skepticism.
Nobody's gonna call you a cultist
for wearing your Tom Brady Jersey for a week
leading up to the super bowl,
but if you carry around your replica of Thor's hammer
for a week leading up to the new MCU movie,
people will probably have thoughts.
And we certainly see plenty of pathologizing
when it comes to Disney adults,
especially on the internet.
Articles that titles like,
Disney adults are the most terrifying people on the planet,
and they need to be stopped, regularly pop up.
With assertions that Disney adults pension
for getting off on nostalgia
is worse than being an actual serial killer.
Though, come to think of it,
a serial killer who is also a Disney adult
would be the most nightmarish thing I could ever imagine.
But snarky Twitter users
didn't invent this kind of cultural pathologizing.
Many early scholars of then burgeoning mass culture
approached early fans much the same way,
specifically a Marxist powerhouse of German intellectuals
who formed what's called the Frankfurt school,
sort of like the goof troupe of cranky philosophers.
Members included dudes like Theodor Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, and Max Wertheimer,
who collectively pioneered the discipline
we now know as critical theory.
Critical theory views philosophy
and social theory's primary purposes
as being tools to critique social
and political structures of power,
and when several of these folks
fled Nazi Germany for America,
they found plenty to critique about its culture.
Writing for Vox,
Sean Illing explains,
they saw the yolk of capitalist ideology
wherever they looked in films, in radio,
in popular music, in literature,
Adorno called this the culture industry,
and Illing notes,
he cautioned that it blurred the distinction
between truth and fiction
between the commercial and the political.
As journalists and authors Stuart Jeffries explains,
these scholars wondered why a socialist revolution
had swept across Russia
while failing to manifest in advanced industrialized nations
like Germany and the United States.
He writes, "they concluded that culture
and the use of the media was the primary tool
for oppressing the masses
without the masses realizing that they're being oppressed."
And so the argument went mass culture with its flashy lights
and captivating narratives was indoctrinating people
into dominant ideologies.
IE ways of thinking
that wouldn't threaten or upset
those in physicians of economic and political power.
The culture industry thus caused people
to unconsciously and unquestioningly accept
what the people in power wanted them to believe.
In this way, these scholars thought
that culture was essentially taking the place of
and functioning like an organized religion.
Note that during this time,
religion was undergoing a decline in power
over the national psyche.
As Adorno and Wertheimer wrote,
"the sociological theory
that the loss of the support
of objectively established religion
has led to cultural chaos
is disproved every day;
for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything."
That is to say culture was indoctrinating people
into the sorts of dominant ideologies,
which were once exclusively the terrain of religion.
This development upset these guys to no end,
and Adorno even pen a hateful paper
about the insidious national disease of jazz music,
like who doesn't like jazz music.
It's it's really nice.
What's interesting though is,
is who made jazz music at that time?
(trumpet blaring)
So God only knows
what he would think of contemporary Disney culture
with all its mouse ears, season passes,
and Disney-themed funeral companies.
Oh, and we're not making that last one up,
if I ever die and you (beep) dare to bury me
in Mickey Mouse ears,
I'm gonna come back as a hybrid zombie and ghost,
and just haunt the (beep) outta you.
Anyway, going forward,
scholars wouldn't all share Adorno's scorn for mass culture.
In the sixties,
England's Birmingham School of Cultural Studies
started to take fans,
especially working class ones, more seriously.
And in the eighties and nineties,
fandom scholarship really took a turn away
from those old unflattering portraits.
That's thanks largely to the work of academics
like Henry Jenkins, who were also fans.
These acafans were already immersed
in the fandom cultures they were studying
and were thus more sympathetic.
Instead of diagnosing fans as docile
and semi brainwashed from afar,
these scholars asked fans how and why they interacted
with their chosen media texts.
Also, I would like to announce
that I'm officially now an acafan
of the television shows, "Scrubs."
- Okay, Sasha, let's see what your new engine can do.
(motor engine roaring)
- They asserted that fans
weren't uncritically absorbing ideologies
in mass media and blindly adhering to the status quo.
Rather, they saw the way fans
would poach ideas and characters and stories
from the things they liked.
They would then remake and remix them
to align with their own values,
often to tell us subversive countercultural stories.
If you lived through Tumblr in the 2010,
you've seen enough Dustin O and Kirken Splunk Splash
to know exactly what they mean,
even if I have no (beep) idea what I just said.
- I love you.
- This poaching can also be seen
in some activities of Disney adults.
Take Garrett Smith and Jason Bitner,
who dressed as Woody and Buzz
for their elaborate toy story themed wedding
remaking Disney cannon to fit their love story.
I can only hope it was officiated
by a friend in a Mr. Potato head outfit.
This wave of scholars took a utopian view of fandom,
and it felt it was important not to see fans
as cultish or worshipful
but as enthusiastic thoughtful consumers of media.
- A lot of us appreciate the fact
that it presents a very positive view of the future.
It doesn't show the earth being devastated by wars.
It shows us having finally figured out
how to solve our worst problems.
- That's because these scholars and fans
saw religiosity as equivalent to irrationality
and painted religion as an unfounded belief
in something supernatural and ultimately not real.
And Henry Jenkins's phrasing
calling fans religious paints them
as prone to false beliefs,
orgiastic excess, possession, and madness.
And clearly, he's talking
about Disney character cosplay orgys there,
and I would like to see it.
Labeling fans as religious fanatics, he said,
can also be inherently othering and stigmatizing.
It makes them out to be obsessive devotees
who look at Captain Kirk as a literal deity
and pray to Obi-Wan Kenobi for wisdom.
These scholars tried to distance fan culture from religion
and define fans
as rational autonomous media consumers and critics.
As Jenkins puts it,
"as a religion you bring back
in this notion of literal belief,
and it implies that fans are unable to separate fiction
from reality or that they supposedly act on the text
as if it were literally true."
However, this, according to many religious scholars,
is a problematic view of religion.
For one, it paints religious people as childish
or rational and disconnected from the real world.
It asserts that they don't question their text
and take them as absolute truth.
What's more, it maps Western conceptions of religion,
specifically Christianity,
onto hugely diverse cultural traditions
that may bear little to no resemblance to it.
Not all religious movements require literal beliefs
in the supernatural or deities.
Not all religions make grand truth-claims
or passing a metaphysical realm,
or even have a cohesive set of traditions.
Scholars Carole M. Cusack
and Venetia Laura Delano Robertson explains,
"religion is today studied
as not exclusively a tradition-based
or faith-based practice,
but a rationale, an experience.
So when scholars of religion
compare the experiences of Disney adults
to those of religious adherence,
they're not asserting that a Disney filed drinking water
from each of the parks fountains believes themself
to be consuming the literal trans substantiated blood
of his lord and savior Donald Duck
nor do they mean that someone brought to tears
by a fireworks display
truly believes themselves to be witnessing fairy magic.
Instead they see Disney lovers
as participating in a secularized version
of religious fervor
in which they encounter a deeply personal
and experiential connection
to something bigger than themselves.
So clearly, there's been some scholarly disagreement.
Some justify viewing fandoms embrasive culture
as a kind of replacement for religion,
others think that fans are doing something very different.
So with scholars disagreeing
on the question of whether or not Disney
can properly be considered a religion,
we think the best way to get to the bottom of this question
is to step back and reconsider the question,
what makes a religion anyway,
and then we can see how much overlap there is
between organized religion as it's commonly practiced
and the habits and practices of the Disney adult community.
One thing that's for sure
is that there's no organized religion
that says it's cool to leave menacing comments
on the wedding photos of a gentle YouTube post,
but we'll get to all that in part two,
where we'll also be asking,
is there anything that Disney adults
can tell us about contemporary society
other than that the most important thing you can do
when planning a wedding
is keep your guest well fed and with fresh drinks in hand.
So check back later this week to watch us try
and answer all those questions once and for all,
assuming, of course, that a gang of irate Disney adults
don't kidnap me first.
So if you see me blink twice in the next video,
I'm in trouble, call for help.
In the meantime,
let us know your thoughts on the church of Walt
in the comments.
A big thanks to our Patreons for all your support,
and be sure to check out our revamped Patreon page.
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hit that subscribe button
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As always thanks for watching,
and be sure to check out part two.
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