Why Disney’s fall can help us

It came from, of all places, Disney. If you follow the news, you will know that in recent days, company executives have come forward, revealing their bold agenda. They have actively embraced alternate views of gender and sexuality, and they are actively injecting these views into their products and at their theme parks.

Their targets? Our children.

As unsettling and disturbing as it was to hear their plans spoken so bluntly from their own mouths, we can actually be glad that they aren’t hiding anymore. For years, many of us knew that something was rotten in Denmark in the culture at large, but we covered our eyes, and we covered our ears, and we didn’t want to believe it was this bad. We didn’t want to know. Now, though, we can’t un-see what we’ve seen. We can’t un-hear what we’ve heard, and the rotting boards that held it all up have splintered and given way. We’re in free fall, folks.

Sometimes, it’s in the falling that salvation comes. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know–or don’t want to know–is broken. Only the correct diagnosis, hard as it may be to hear, can bring forth the cure, so facing the truth is essential. The truth is, we’re messed up.

A former pastor used to say, “There are always two ditches. The goal is to aim for the middle.”

He was right. In so many things, there are two extremes. That includes sexuality. In one ditch, there is hedonism where everything goes, and nothing’s off limits. People are used and not valued, objects for one’s own pleasure with no regard for the wellbeing of the other. It lacks love and respect. In the other ditch, nothing goes, and everything’s off limits.

It was the latter ditch in which I was raised. In the modesty and purity culture, the messages are that one should, at the least, be suspicious of the human body. At the worst, it is deemed to be a source of temptation, an earthen husk, the container that houses the soul until one can shed this mortal coil for immortality. Sexuality is bad and dangerous until marriage; that’s what is taught. Then somehow, one must find the magic switch that makes it all come roaring to life, an approach that’s caused many marital casualties and great suffering.

Two ditches. Two belief systems about the body. Two different views of human sexuality, but both are sides of the same coin. 

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then it’s past time that we examine our beliefs about these issues. The hour is late, the need is urgent. Why? Because it’s hurting our families.

When we’re believing lies about our bodies and about sex as God intended it, things go sideways. Let it go long enough, and the fruit is terrible. These are not benign, innocuous misconceptions. They started small, but they have mutated, and now our children don’t know if they are boys or girls, gay or straight. We’ve been messing with the basic building blocks (our genders, biology, and sex), and it’s tearing us apart.

Whatever hurts the family, hurts the community. Hurts the state. Hurts the country. Hurts the world. The family is the basic building block of every society and culture that’s ever existed, and our biology is the basic building block of “us.” We cannot mess with these without grave consequences and serious fallout. We’ve tampered too long, and it’s hurt us.

So what is the answer? It’s complicated and many faceted, but the cure is always, always rooted in truth. The starting point is found in Genesis. “God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them; male and female, he created them. And God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.'” (Genesis 1:27-28a)

The answer lies back there “in the beginning.” It is there that we must return for healing, for wisdom, for the straightening of all the crooked places.

Thank God, He has not left us with no help and no solutions. May He intervene on behalf of our children, our families, and our own hearts. May we return to the truth, and to Him.