No Church On Main Street

J.R.R. Tolkien was a deeply religious man, but for artistic reasons, chose not to explicitly include Christian religious references in his work.  He imagined his world as existing in a pre-Christian time when there was no real organized religion even though everyone shared a common faith in the creator God.

The absence of religion in Walt Disney’s stories and parks is for a different reason.  Throughout his adult life, Walt was never known to go to church.  He did once write (or had written for him) a piece for Guideposts discussing his Christian commitment, but as to evidence of it in his life, there seems to have been little.

This absence of religious practice in his life was certainly not the intention of his parents.  His Father was an active member of a fundamentalist congregation.  Walt’s name actually comes from the first name of the minister of the congregation where Walt’s parents attended.

His Father was a hard and unrelenting man.  He treated his children in such a way that two of Walt’s older brother’s hopped on trains and ran away from home before they were 16 and never came back.  It is probably no surprise that given the harsh and unforgiving nature of his Father’s religion and parenting that Walt rebelled against it.  His brother Roy, on the other hand, chose to become active in a main-line congregation rather than continuing in the very conservative tradition in which he had been raised.

While Walt in many ways reflected the values of his Midwestern upbringing, emphasizing hard work and perseverance as the keys to success, he was not a perfect mirror.  He embraced the protestant work-ethic, but replaced the protestant reliance on God with hope in magic and pixie dust.

Mark Pinsky has made the keen observation that Main Street USA is the only Main Street in America that lacks a church.  Disney did not do this as Tolkien did to emphasize a pre-Christian world.  Nor did he chose this omission because the ideal city presented in the book of Revelation has no church or temple because everyone is always at worship.

Disney, when asked about the absent church on Main Street, responded that there was no church there because if he put in a Lutheran Church the Methodists would be mad.  A Baptist Church would infuriate the Catholics.  Any church would be a negative for people who weren’t Christians.

There is no church on Main Street for economic not religious reasons.  While Walt wasn’t hesitant to push his idealized Marceline on the public, he believed that the church was just too divisive to include.  After all people from all religions have money, and he was keen to get it from them all.

So lining Main Street there are wall to wall store fronts and no church.  Disney didn’t have a strong public faith, but he certainly had faith in commerce.