Disney And The Tower Of BabelSample

Walt Disney’s World

Having grown up in Central Florida, I can’t help but love Disney World. As a kid, I fell in love with the larger-than-life characters, the rides, and the Mickey Mouse shaped ice cream bars. As an adult, I appreciate Disney on an entirely different level, marveling at the scale of the enterprise, and the palpable excellence you feel as you step onto the Magic Kingdom’s immaculately clean Main Street.

Disney World is a good thing that has positively impacted the lives of millions of people. So does it really matter why Walt Disney created it? Are his motivations and ambitions relevant? The Bible tells us in Proverbs 16:2 that “All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the Lord.” Throughout Scripture, God makes clear that the motives for our work matter a great deal.

So what motivated Walt Disney? As with all human beings, the evidence suggests that his motives were mixed. On the one hand, we know that his time spent with his daughters at Griffith Park in Los Angeles left Disney longing for a cleaner attraction that had activities for the whole family to enjoy together. Disney’s motivations to create a clean, safe place where families could come to have fun together were obviously good. But when one looks at the entirety of Disney’s life and career, it’s clear that these weren’t his primary motivations for his work. Disney’s life, like that of so many today, appears to have been lived to make a name for himself. According to Walt’s brother Roy, it was his name “that Walt cared more about than” anything else, including “his health or his finances.”

To this day, everything in the Disney empire points back to the company’s creator. Every product bears his name and signature. Even Disneyland and its sister theme park the Magic Kingdom were designed by Disney to serve as a monument to his life and legacy. As one Disney biographer points out, a walk down Main Street (essentially a replica of Walt’s hometown of Marceline, Kansas) takes you to the center of the park where park-goers are forced down the path of various lands (Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland), each intentionally symbolic of Walt’s own life and career.

Walt Disney designed a world that would reflect him. If the symbolic design of the park doesn’t make this clear enough, the next time you visit the Magic Kingdom, walk down any path until you reach the center of the park. There, at the center of the world he created, you will find a statue of Walt Disney, a not-so-subtle reminder that this world was designed by him and for his glory. Walt Disney, more than maybe any entrepreneur in the last century, succeeded in fulfilling the often unspoken dream of most of us today: to make a name for ourselves. But the Bible shows us that this dream is nothing new. As we will see tomorrow, it is something we have been wrestling with since the near beginning of time.