A Disneo-Christian XMas Service at Disney World

Post #4 of my family and my trip to Florida features a very unexpectedly religious vibe at a holiday celebration where Disney puts the Magi in the Magic Kingdom (#dadjoke).

NOTE: Last week and this week, I’m blogging my experiences in Florida, which includes several days at the anti-worker, pro-corporate mecca Disney World as part of a family trip (which I didn’t want to go on, but was outvoted on). Here are my previous posts: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3.

The most infuriating experience so far during my time visiting Disney World was the very pro-Christian church service called the “EPCOT International Festival of the Holidays.”

The title of this event is a euphemism for something that can accurately be called a Disneo-Christian Christmas Eve church service. (btw I’m borrowing the term “Disneo-Christian” from a segment by Ellen’s brother Vance DeGeneres during his time on the Daily Show in the early 2000s).

The event “International Festival of the Holidays” incorrectly makes it sound to me like an inclusive look at different holiday celebrations across the world, which would be in line with the spirit of Epcot, which features “worlds” with attractions and foods from several countries’ cultures, ranging from Morocco to China with several in-between.

But instead, it was a very Western Christian church service featuring the same songs (performed by an orchestra with new arrangements) and cherry-picked readings of Bible verses about the Christian Christmas story (conveniently eliminating the dozens of fundamental contradictions between Matthew and John’s stories about Jesus’s birth) that I was indoctrinated with growing up. Plus less importantly, it meant I had the “pleasure” to see narrator Marie Osmond of Donny and Marie Osmond fame in person.

Let me briefly be fair to Disney about this before additional critique. The full description of the event on Disney’s website, which I read afterwards, does suggest it’s a religious event. The even includes a “recounting the biblical tale of a savior born in Bethlehem.” Even this wording is deceiving in my opinion by saying “a” savior when it was clear that the approach was celebrating what the narrator was presenting as “the” Savior.

My wife apparently knew this would be a religious service, which is part of the reason she and my in-laws wanted to attend it. It would have been nice if someone had mentioned this to me, since my wife knows I’m an atheist and I think my in-laws at least suspect this based on comments they make sometimes.

So why is there a church service at Disney? A large number of Disney visitors are likely Christian and there’s obviously a demand for it, with the event running for several weeks and being full the night we went despite it being (almost literally) uncharacteristically freezing outside in the Orlando area. But it goes against the intercultural atmosphere of the rest of Epcot and the increasing secularization of Christmas which, through its various TV and film depictions of the holiday, Disney has been central in spreading.

The media’s broadening of the Christian Christmas message to represent peace and love, with Santa often thrown in, is seen by many as watering down the religious aspects of it. This pro-Christian “international festival” was definitely not part of the alleged War on Christmas, and was very different from another secular Disney World Christmas event I’ll describe in tomorrow’s post

So in addition to me personally objecting to Christianity (the whole “a father deity sending his son to be murdered by humans to somehow make sure we get into heaven in an afterlife or else you’ll burn for eternity” story is a cultish fiction I no longer believe in), I think to kids this might send a message that Mickey is okay with Christianity.

I’d like to think kids would put it in the same category of genies making flying carpets and talking tea kettles, but the vibe is different from those attractions and it was presented IMO as being factual, not just one possible religious belief. So I’m upset about my daughter attending this, in addition to other kids who may have a Christian message introduced to or reinforced in them.

Maybe many will think I’m overreacting to this. And perhaps I am to some extent. But that was NOT was I was expecting at Disney World. The celebration of materialism rampant in Disney World isn’t enough; the promoting, or at least allowing, of religious indoctrination is also sanctioned by the folks at Disney.

Which for some I’m sure shows that Disney isn’t all that bad after all, but for me gives me an even more negative opinion of Disney than I already had. The fact that I’m a minority in seeing it this was is a reminder of why for a while I didn’t really celebrate Christmas. The peace, love, and family aspect of the holiday is important; the anti-science, judgmental religion that many (falsely?) still associate with it is still a problem.

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