Darla Hamilton remembers the exact instant when the power of secular culture's graven imagery -- particularly that purveyed by the Walt Disney Co. -- was revealed to her.
It happened just last week. She and her husband, Mark, had returned from an ice cream social at Montrose Baptist Church and were sitting in the rec room of their Rockville home, chatting with Darla's visiting brother, when she noticed that her 2-year-old, Garrett, seemed to be chanting something as he sat on her lap.
There was a movie on the tube, "Awakenings," with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams. The adults weren't really watching, but Garrett was.
"Genie," the child said repeatedly. "Genie . . . genie . . ."
It took Darla a while to realize that her son had recognized Williams's voice from "Aladdin," the Disney animated feature film that they had on videocassette right there on the bookshelf near a non-Disney tape, "The Miracles of Jesus."
Advertisement
"It was," Darla says, "kinda scary."
After the Southern Baptist Convention voted in its annual meeting last month to boycott Disney's films, parks and products because the corporation is extending health benefits to partners of gay employees, among other things, it took the Hamiltons a while to learn of the action -- and then only through news reports.
This was because the Southern Baptists, the nation's largest Protestant church body, can be more open-minded than their image in some quarters, and the resolution -- as was the case in many Southern Baptist churches -- was not preached from the pulpit at Montrose.
In fact, a Southern Baptist regional spokeswoman emphasized, the resolution is a "suggestion" only.
While the resolution has a clear-cut and even theologically pristine ring to it, it is only an abstraction. For a real family like the Hamiltons, struggling to raise their children (their other boy, Marshall, is 5) as loving, moral beings, things get a lot messier. They even find themselves objecting to the resolution on certain tactical grounds -- it makes ministering to gays more difficult -- while agreeing with its general effort to make a stand against what they see as sin. If nothing else, it has certainly stimulated their thinking.
Advertisement
"I understand why they did it," Mark says, "but it's almost superfluous to what we as Christians are to be about. . . . When Jesus said to be salt and light, I don't believe it was for the purpose of judging other people. I consider myself a Christian first, and a Baptist way down the list. We're to be about calling people to that life in Christ; we're asked to be ministers of reconciliation." Says Darla: "We're not going to hold up any sinful lifestyle as worse than any other. With the boycott, it does sort of say {that} we're sending a subliminal message that as Southern Baptists we are anti-homosexual: This may present a problem in sharing. . . . As the Word says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."
Mark warms to the theme:
"If your primary goal is to go out and picket and boycott and almost have a hateful vengeance toward these people," he adds, "then that's not a ministry of reconciliation. It's a ministry of alienation."
Advertisement
Sin, the Hamiltons say, is something they are all too familiar with. As Mark, 34, puts it, they were "living together in sin for three years" before they married in 1986. They'd met while working at a Rockville printing shop where he was a printer (he now owns a custom auto parts store and is a Bible teacher) and Darla, 33, was a graphic designer. At the time, Mark was also a long-haired hard-rock musician who "did a lot of drugs" and "knew in my heart I didn't want to marry her" even after they moved in together.
Speaking of secular imagery, Mark, a guitarist, recalls a gig one night when another guitarist, drunk, put his hand up into a ceiling fan that appeared -- because of the strobe lights -- to be moving slowly. It wasn't, and Mark remembers how the rain of blood seemed to splay deliberately out over the room in strobe-lighted slow motion.
Share this articleShareFrom that darkness, he emerged in a 1985 conversion into the light of the Lord; Darla, at first more suspicious of his late-night Bible studies than she'd been of his late-night drugging, followed a year later.
Advertisement
"I definitely saw a radical change in his heart and life," she recalls with a smile. Not only did Mark want to get married, he wanted children, too.
On a recent morning, Marshall is roaring around throwing a paper airplane. Little Garrett is moving from one colorful toy to the next.
"Boys just seem to be this way," their mother says with a chuckle; she doesn't exactly understand it but accepts their speed and energy, and considers herself "blessed" to be able to work in a home studio in close contact with them.
"It's an awesome task," she says. "We're called to civilize our children."
"One reason I had kids was so I could go see Disney movies," jokes Mark, who remembers having treasured his own personal LP recording of "Lady and the Tramp," complete with its beautiful color cover, when he was a kid growing up in Texas.
Advertisement
Now, in his basement rec room, the evidences of Disney influence are everywhere -- from an entire shelf of videotapes ("The Jungle Book," "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Dumbo," "The Aristocats," "Cinderella" and "Robin Hood," to name just a few), to the little made-in-China wooden ball with a Mickey Mouse figurine set into it, to the stuffed jolly gray "Hunchback of Notre Dame" gargoyle doll sitting in a child's rocking chair.
Most of the Disney items, the Hamiltons say, are gifts. Even before the boycott, they tended not to go out and buy such products -- just because of the limits of time and money, and their general effort to find the most wholesome things to do with their children.
"Yesterday we went to the zoo," Darla says, "and when Marshall saw the Komodo dragon he said, Does it breathe fire, Mommy?' It was an opportunity for me to explain that no, that was a fantasy." There are daily devotions and Bible readings in the Hamilton family, too.
Advertisement
Mark and Darla say the Disney videos actually come in handy sometimes. They can be used to teach the difference between good and bad -- the wicked witch in "Snow White" is a suitably negative image, for example.
Mark says he's personally more fond of the older Disney works, which sometimes had scripturally based moral messages -- " Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friend' in The Jungle Book' " is one he mentions -- than he is of "Pocahontas" or "The Lion King" with what he considers their new age, non-Christian themes of "animism and reincarnation."
A visit to Disney World, though, doesn't seem to be in the cards for the Hamiltons -- and even less so since the boycott. The more he thinks about it, Mark says, the more he realizes the message of the boycott is tending to push such a trip "way down the list." He compares it to the grape boycott in the '60s -- not that you absolutely won't eat a grape, but you tend more and more to avoid them.
Advertisement
In the end, he says, "old or new, you don't use Disney to teach your children morality or theology. It's something for me and my wife to do. Even our church would be, at best, secondary" in guiding them. "That's what a father and mother are for . . . to teach our children about God, and how to relate to others."
"It's a stewardship," Darla says, upstairs now at the kitchen table, presenting her lads with a pair of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which seems to quiet them temporarily.
On the table, the Bible is open to Philippians 2:5: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."
"People are supposed to see Christ in us," Darla says. "That's the challenging thing." CAPTION: Having the Mouse in the house hasn't been a huge issue for Baptists Mark and Darla Hamilton, with sons Marshall, 5, and Garrett, 2. Says Mark: "You don't use Disney to teach your children morality or theology. It's something for me and my wife to do." CAPTION: Mark Hamilton, with Marshall: "I consider myself a Christian first, and a Baptist way down the list."
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ2Fuhnd7j3Bma2hfqbWmecOeraKkXZa7pXnWmqOtZZSewK%2Bx2Ghpn5liZ66jfoxrnZudXWl%2Fca2Mmm5pal1msnmxkXBpbG6TZ4Bw