The Age-old Catholic Mastery of Disneyfication

How the Church sanitized Roman polytheism and neutralized esoteric Christianity

Isn’t it discombobulating to notice that the Catholic Church practiced the insidious art of disneyfication long before Walt Disney co-created Mickey Mouse?

Not only is the Catholic Church the oldest Western institution, but that church mastered this kind of propaganda centuries before corporate advertising.

What, then, is disneyfication? One encyclopedia article defines it well as “the commercial transformation of things (e.g. entertainment) or environments into something simplified, controlled, and ‘safe’ — reminiscent of the Walt Disney brand.” More broadly, this includes “the processes of stripping a real place or thing of its original character, and representing it in a sanitized format: references to anything negative or inconvenient are removed, and the facts are dumbed down with the intent of rendering the subject more pleasant and easily grasped.”

The Walt Disney Company has done this for decades with its animated movies which sanitize fairy tales, fables, and folklores, including tales from Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson. Having acquired Marvel Comics and the Star Wars franchise, Disney has done the same with its movies that adapt or extend those source materials. As simplistic as comic book stories may be, you can count on a Disney adaptation to be simpler, which is to say friendlier to families and to business interests.

For example, Disney’s The Little Mermaid movie ends happily, with the mermaid Ariel getting her voice back and marrying Eric on a boat, surrounded by her friends and family. But Anderson’s original 1837 story is tragic: Ariel’s transformation into a human causes her constant agony and when offered the choice to kill the prince who falls in love with someone else, so that she can turn back into a mermaid and live, Ariel instead sacrifices herself and preserves the prince’s life. She throws herself into the sea and dissolves into sea foam.

In the arts, there’s an old distinction between the avant-garde and the hacks, between those who push the boundaries of what’s expected, based on an artistic vision rather than on a calculation of what would sell the best, and those who subordinate artistic concerns to business ones. Plato saw a similar distinction long before even that, between philosophers and sophists.

Disneyfication, then, is firmly on the hacky, sophistical side of these divides. It’s a question not just of pleasing the masses, whose tastes are bound to be less sophisticated than those of the elite intellectuals who are typically in the minority of any society. As a kind of demagogue or panderer, the disneyfier does so with a monstrous lie by omission, domesticating reality with an inoffensive simulacrum.

But the Catholic Church got there first. I’ll explore two core ways in which that’s so.

How the Incarnation moralized Roman amorality

The essence of Christianity is a synthesis of Jewish monotheism with Greco-Roman polytheism. The two sides are contrary in lots of ways, and that cultural conflict came to a head in the Jewish-Roman wars, which knocked Judea off the map and carved out room for the Christian “spiritualization” of both cultures.

Indeed, “spiritualization” is already almost a synonym for “disneyfication.” What it means to have spiritualized Jews’ earthly concerns with Roman occupation of their land and with interference with their culture is to have replaced that failed mission of throwing off the Roman imperial yoke with a more nebulous goal of uniting humanity by a less onerous religion or in the afterlife.

The Jesus of the canonical gospels said, in effect, that the spirit of the law mattered more than the letter, that the rituals aren’t as important as the mindset. Moreover, you could have the right mindset and still lose in earthly terms; indeed, sacrificing your earthly welfare was practically a demonstration that you had the right mindset, that you were “spiritually poor,” as Jesus put it.

The height of righteousness isn’t just ascetic practice or withdrawal from the degrading norms of public life, but the profound knowledge of why material success doesn’t matter. That knowledge was supposed to be equivalent to the love of what Jews called a transcendent God, a deity that was nowhere fully present in any idol, temple, or people.

Christianity took that Jewish emphasis on uncompromising righteousness and married it to the vastly different, much more pragmatic, and industrious Roman imperial mindset. The Roman Empire was multicultural in that Rome didn’t concern itself with replacing the religions of the numerous societies it “liberated” by conquering them. Rome kept the peace by requiring only minimal acts of fealty to the ruling Roman society. Jews, for instance, didn’t have to convert to Roman polytheism.

The Romans were more interested in the mechanics of expanding and of running their empire than in ideological warfare. Roman citizens were educated, skeptical, and often cynical in their appraisal of weaker people’s cultures. If Rome conquered you, chances are, they figured, your religious beliefs were nonsensical at any rate, and your rituals were ineffectual. What mattered were military prowess, infrastructural planning, and industrial know-how, not abstract philosophy or theology. Indeed, Rome was expedient in adapting the gods of various cultures, including those of the Greeks and eventually that of the Jews (in the Christian form of Jesus Christ).

In conflating Jewish righteousness with Roman pragmatism, the early Church put a moral spin on the empire that the Church eventually inherited. Christianity used Jesus’s counterculture of spiritualization as propaganda to mask or to justify Roman imperialism which soon became Christian imperialism (in the fourth century CE).

Take, then, the Incarnation doctrine that Jesus was both God and man. Here we see the mind-numbing union of Jewish monotheism with pagan polytheism. Jesus was both essentially the God that was supposed to transcend the material world and a mortal man who taught on earth and died by crucifixion. Jews were appalled and they split from this emerging faith. But plenty of others were attracted to this compromise. You could have Jewish righteousness without the circumcision and the baggage of Jews’ aloofness from pagan societies. You could worship Jesus in plainly polytheistic terms while crediting yourself with the prestige of Jewish monotheism and prophetic vision.

Remember that for polytheists, there was nothing unusual in saying that gods could take mortal form. Greco-Roman myths abounded with tales of gods assuming various physical bodies and even copulating with humans to produce demigod offspring. Indeed, lots of polytheistic societies featured tales of heroic demigods who were partly divine and partly human, including in ancient Egypt, India, and Africa.

But Greece was especially prolific in this regard. The Greek gods frolicked like the Greek elites, treating mortals in the way that those elites treated women and slaves. And the Romans adopted the same outlook. According to the myths, Hercules, for instance, was the son of Jupiter and Alcmene, and Romulus and Remus were the sons of Mars and Rhea Silvia.

The subtext of these polytheistic liaisons was that the powerful elites’ natural exploitation of the powerless masses was sanctified, meaning that it was in line with what the gods did. Indeed, the gods were practically mascots that branded the patriarchal and imperial practices by boasting about them.

But although Christians plainly worshipped Jesus as a demigod, as the son of Yahweh and Mary, the Church wasn’t just polytheistic, and here we see an ancient genius for disneyfication. The Church adopted the polytheistic trope of demigods, and thus of the sordid affairs of amoral gods, but sanitized that mytheme by Judaizing it.

Yahweh was no amoral, licentious Roman god, but was the God of the Jews, the righteous deity who somehow kept Jews alive to serve as self-sacrificing beacons of moral purity, who were conquered numerous times but who never lost their faith despite their deity’s immateriality, that is, the Jewish God’s hiddenness. Of course, Jesus inherited that moral purity, according to Christians, in part because his mother Mary was supposed to have been a virgin.

Thus, the figure of Jesus Christ was the embodiment of disneyfication, a Jewish sanitizing of Roman imperialism, a moralizing of Roman pragmatism and amorality.

Mimesis and the loss of Christianity’s satirical power

We can think of this also in Dennis MacDonald’s terms of mimesis criticism. There were often intertextual relationships between ancient myths. One myth would implicitly comment on another by partially imitating it and thus by leaving out or modifying certain elements of the story. Some of these myths functioned as parodies or satires. I’ve argued elsewhere that by removing divine power from the material plane, Jewish monotheism implicitly satirized all polytheistic religions. The mightiest God one-upped the boastful gods that were identified with this or with that idol because the idols faded into obscurity, but Jewish purity remained.

The Incarnation myth likewise satirizes Roman polytheism by substituting a warrior hero like Hercules with the humble carpenter Jesus who, far from besting his enemies in battle died in humiliation. This was parody with a subtle criticism of Greco-Roman and imperial values: the weak will inherit the earth, and the moral idealism of Jesus’s visionary counterculture — of his pacifism, alienation from mass culture, and his indifference to romantic love, family life, and material possessions — ought to replace the amorality of traditional dominance hierarchies and empires.

But that criticism was lost because the Church maintained that its narrative wasn’t a mere literary myth but was a historical truth. Supposedly, Jesus was no mere branding exercise but was a real man who rose miraculously from the dead in the first century. That literalistic misreading of myth and of the nature of religion was itself a case of disneyfication.

The Church lost interest in pressing its spiritual reform of imperial policies, once the Church inherited the Roman Empire and had to prosecute those very policies, to spread the gospel to the four corners of the planet. In any case, the mimetic or satirical message might have been lost on the illiterate, superstitious masses. What the latter could understand was the crass miracle claim. By literalizing its chief myth, then, the Church dumbed down the satirical power of its creed. The purpose was no longer to resist all tyrannies out of love of an immaterial God, but to submit to the Christian tyranny because its mythos alone was true.

The Church’s neutralization of Gnosticism

A second case of early Catholic disneyfication was its handling of Christian Gnosticism. Christianity drew not only from Judaism and Roman polytheism, but from the mystery religions and thus indirectly from the upshot of the entire Axial Age. “Spiritualization” was the hallmark of mid-first millennium BCE cultural revolutions in Judaism (via the prophets), Greek philosophy (the Presocratics), India (Hindu mysticism), Persia (the cosmic morality of Zoroastrianism), and China (Daoist pantheism and Confucian humanism). Many of these new mentalities merged, thanks to Alexander the Great’s campaigns of globalization, and the secretive mystery cults spread the resulting spiritual reforms throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries leading up to Christianity.

What was secretive about these cults wasn’t that they were all exclusive, since some were open to everyone; rather, they featured a profound inner experience which was inherently private. Typically, that experience was generated by a psychedelic drug, and it was dramatized in a myth of a suffering or dying and rising savior god or hero who represented the initiate’s spiritual rebirth by that religious experience which unified the initiate with the savior.

One such mystery cult, for example, was Orphism or the Dionysian mysteries which reinterpreted the Greek myth of Dionysus along those lines. According to the Orphic reconstruction, humanity has a dual nature since we inherit our material form from the ashes of the Titans, and our creative spark, potential for moral growth, or “spirit” from Dionysus whom the Titans had consumed. This myth informed Plato’s dualism since the point was that our inner calling was higher, as it were, than any material norm. All of nature was a tomb for our soul, and our purpose was to be reborn as a spiritually awakened being, free from rebirth in this merely real and therefore not ideal realm.

Christian Gnostics took up this dualism and competed with the orthodox Church for Christian supremacy. The Gnostics promoted an elite form of Christianity, according to which our great purpose in life is to save ourselves with secret knowledge of the material world’s inferiority. “Gnosis,” a word that appears often in a proto-Gnostic context in Paul’s epistles, meant saving knowledge. For the Gnostics, Jesus, the dying and rising saviour god was a model of everyone’s potential to free themselves from imprisonment in a material realm that’s alienated from God.

In short, for the Gnostics, Christianity was a Jewish version of a mystery religion.

That Gnostic message was powerful, and it persisted in Christendom up to the Church’s massacre of the Cathars in the thirteenth century, after which the Gnostic message went under cover in the secular humanism that fuelled what we think of as European “modernity.” Indeed, although the orthodox Church excluded most Gnostic books from its canon in 367, the Gnostic adaptation of Platonism to Judeo-Christian theology was so potent in early Christianity that it made its way into the New Testament, in Paul’s epistles, which influenced Mark (and thus the other synoptic gospels), and in the Gospel of John. The Church accepted those texts so that it could assimilate a moderate form of that movement.

Still, Christian institutions regard Gnosticism as a failed heresy because Gnostics had the misfortune of competing with the hackery of the orthodox Church. Gnosticism was fit for underground cults and countercultures, but not for mainstream society or for imperial institutions. Catholicism won out against Gnosticism in organized Christianity precisely because the orthodox Church was “universal” in more than one sense.

The very word “catholic” means broad-minded or universal, so that “catholic,” too, is practically a euphemism for “disneyfied,” a euphemism that hides in plain sight. The Catholic version of Christianity was universal and broad because it wasn’t as subversive and uncompromising as Gnosticism.

The Catholic Church inserted itself as a religious intermediary between Christians and their God, in that the Church was supposed to be led by the “Holy Spirit” to preserve the proper interpretation of Jesus’s message in the New Testament, and Christ’s authority in the lineage of popes. The Catholic hacks and charlatans (or institutionalists) fit well with the Roman Empire they came to run because they were more practical and ambitious than the Gnostics.

And by calling them “hacks and charlatans,” I mean that, to the extent we can learn about him from the early Christian writings, Jesus himself would have been opposed to any organized, imperial religion spread in his name. Thus, as far as any neutral observer can tell, Jesus would have condemned the Catholic clergy for the same reason he’s portrayed as having condemned the Pharisees.

Nevertheless, by demonizing the Gnostics, whose Christian mystery cult was ill-equipped to run the Roman Empire, just as the mysticism of any gaggle of bohemian artists would be unsuitable to rule over a modern European nation, the Catholic Church glossed over the fact that Gnosticism feels like the more authentic essence of Christianity. A religion’s esoteric formulation is typically more profound than its exoteric shell because the dramatic symbols, myths, and rituals that captivate the uneducated adherents are liable to lead them astray by serving as idols.

Precisely because they’re politically useless, the idealism, cynicism, and satirical vehemence of Gnosticism seem closer to Jesus’s heart, as it were, than the Scholastic rationalizations of the Church’s earthly domination. Gnosticism was a counterculture, as was the early Jesus movement, so if the Gnostics were heretics, so too was Jesus in so far as he was an outsider, as deemed by Jews and the Romans. By contrast, of course, Catholicism ruled the land, which set it in opposition to Jesus.

Again, though, to disguise that unpleasant fact, the Church resorted to disneyfication, to sanitizing the subversiveness of Jesus’s counterculture by demonizing the Gnostics who carried on that very tradition of condemning compromises, due to otherworldly suspicion of natural norms as being so many demiurgic traps.

True, the Catholic Church had its alienated elites as well, namely its saints, monks, and nuns. The Gnostics, then, were the freelance theologians that couldn’t be co-opted by Christendom, largely because the Gnostics were explicit in denigrating any religious allegory or institution that prevents the initiate from freeing himself or herself.

By contrast, the intellectual elites of the Catholic Church carried on their theological disputes, but they had to approve of Catholic disneyfication of the Christian message for the masses, to have any role in orthodox Christian politics. To criticize the Church or to dissent from its institutional message was to risk being persecuted as a heretic.

The essence of disneyfication

In so far as disneyfication is just the kind of simplification you’d expect to find in any propaganda, the comparison of the early Church to the Walt Disney Company would be trivial. To substantiate the comparison, we need to reflect more on Disney’s method.

What the Disney Company does is make what are often dark, tragic, or politically incorrect folk tales palatable to the broadest possible audience, purely for the purpose of maximizing sales of those contents. That is, the Disney movies neuter the folk lessons and repackage them specifically as sentimental or otherwise uplifting stories that appeal especially to Western families of well-off consumers.

What’s closer to the essence of disneyfication isn’t just a sanitization of messages that some powerful corporation happens not to like, but a translation of a dark, tragic perspective into a hack framework or into what Marx called an “opiate” for the masses.

Although capitalism wasn’t operative in the ancient world, the Church nevertheless conformed to that pattern of sanitizing a tragic religious perspective, in its Judaizing or moralizing of Roman cynicism (the Incarnation doctrine, and the conflation of monotheism and polytheism), and in its neutralizing of the Gnostic’s platonic pessimism about the natural universe.