Southern Baptists to Press Disney Boycott

The Southern Baptists, whose 16 million members are the nation’s largest Protestant body, are expected next week to formally declare the boycott against the Walt Disney Co. they threatened a year ago to protest what they called “promotion of homosexuality.”

The Baptists, meeting Tuesday through Thursday in Dallas, are likely to vote in favor of a resolution urging churchgoers not to patronize the entertainment giant, church leaders say, contending Disney ignored their warning of a boycott if the company continued “this anti-Christian and anti-family trend.”

Many members of the conservative denomination are upset with the annual “Gay Day” at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and corporate policy by Burbank-based Disney extending insurance benefits to companions of gay employees. In the last year, Southern Baptists also criticized the Disney-owned ABC television network when the lead character in the “Ellen” sitcom came out as a lesbian, along with the actress playing her.

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Although church leaders reminded members last year that the resolution passed at that time carried only the threat of boycott unless changes occurred, Disney spokesman Tom Green said that the company thought a boycott had already been in place for 12 months.

That misimpression may have been fed partly by campaigns initiated by the nondenominational American Family Assn. (AFA), which advocates boycotts against companies perceived to be attacking Christian family values. A series of protest packets focused on Disney have been mailed to more than 25,000 Southern Baptist pastors since 1995, including a four-page brochure on the Burbank-based company sent out in the last month, according to AFA President Donald Wildmon of Tupelo, Miss.

The AFA director for Southern California, the Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, was the delegate at last year’s convention who introduced a successful amendment calling for a boycott if Disney did not make changes.

Despite the amendment’s tentative wording, Drake confirmed that he told both reporters and church members then that “we started the boycott the day the resolution passed.” As long as Disney was “continuing anti-Christian trends,” Drake said, the boycott was in force.

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But the resolution was only a warning, wrote editor Mark Wyatt in his California Southern Baptist newspaper last July. “The boycott was suggested as a possible future action, and the Christian Life Commission was charged with monitoring Disney’s actions,” Wyatt said.

When California Southern Baptists held their state convention in November, they passed a resolution criticizing Disney and unspecified other corporations for policies that disregard “Christian values.” But an attempt by Drake to initiate a boycott was rejected, Wyatt said.

This week, Drake said he thought that “an overwhelming number of Southern Baptists” had already decided to boycott Disney in the last year, rather than wait for a formal declaration. Citing information in a Hollywood trade paper, Drake contended it was “not a coincidence that 3 million people canceled their subscription to the Disney Channel” in late 1996.

In response, Tom Green, the Disney spokesman, said the cable channel has gone from 18.9 million subscribers in June, 1996, to 27 million on May 29, “and expects to pass 30 million soon.”

In fact, Disney enterprises have prospered, realizing millions in profits from films such as “Ransom,” “101 Dalmatians,” “The Rock” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” over the past year, a period in which many other movie studios found profits elusive.

As for next week’s annual meeting of Southern Baptists, Richard Land, president of the denomination’s Christian Life Commission, told reporters he will suggest to the resolutions committee a “targeted boycott” of Disney theme parks and stores rather than a sweeping call not to buy any Disney product.

“Some Southern Baptists think a targeted boycott may be too narrow,” said Bill Merrell, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Executive Committee. “But my sense is there is a very good likelihood that messengers [delegates] will approve a resolution calling for a boycott.”

Even if such a resolution were passed, however, the action is traditionally considered the will of that year’s convention messengers and not binding on individuals in the nationwide denomination.

Some clergy, like the Rev. Charles Cutney, pastor of First Southern Baptist of North Hollywood, said he would not, on principle, be part of any boycott. “It’s rather repugnant to me personally and it’s counterproductive because people begin to associate us with negativism,” he said.

An Orlando pastor, the Rev. Charles Horton of College Park Baptist Church, said he was disappointed with Disney’s “gay-friendly” employment practices. But in offering benefits, Horton said, Disney officials “simply join other major corporations which already have such policies. Disney is not perfect, but neither are Baptists.”

The Rev. Jim Henry, pastor of central Florida’s largest Baptist church and a former president of the denomination, said this week he had not yet decided how he would vote. “I’m still wrestling with the best way for us to be influential in bringing our message of faith to the total community, which includes the people at Disney,” Henry told Associated Baptist Press.

Some relatively small church bodies have called for a Disney boycott, including the Assemblies of God, which last year urged its 2.5 million members to censor the company for “abandoning the commitment to strong moral values.”

By contrast, Ted Baehr of Camarillo, publisher of Movieguide magazine, which has a largely evangelical Christian readership, contended that encouraging the good is more effective than focusing on the bad.

“I dislike the Gay Days at Disney World, but can they really exclude it from the park?” he added. “It’s not a Disney-sponsored event.

“I understand and respect what others are saying, but I feel Disney is still producing a lot of good material, such as ‘The Preacher’s Wife’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ and there are a lot of Christian people who work for Disney,” said Baehr.

An occasional studio consultant on religion, Baehr said he believes that “Disney people have been concerned that a boycott would tarnish the studio’s image”--despite the public show of lack of concern.

But Baehr also cautioned that church communications and responses are notoriously slow-moving. “If Southern Baptists actually vote to boycott, it will take a year to crank it up,” he said.

Likewise, the Rev. Dan Clark, a Presbyterian pastor in North Hollywood who grew up in the South, said he’d advise Disney to “be very careful and very solicitous” of Southern Baptists. “They cover Dixie like the dew, and the South is littered with politicians who are no longer in office because they were opposed by Southern Baptists,” Clark said.