As Baptists gear up for this year’s SBC annual meeting in Orlando (June 9-10), John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett with the Colson Center take a closer look at the search for that “nostalgic feeling.”
A recent essay in The New Yorker described the rise of “Disney Adults,” who take multiple trips to the various parks each year, even taking on serious debt to do so. One young woman who was described in the article spent over $15,000 on six park visits in two years.
That’s why, author Amelia Tate wrote the following:
“So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one. … It’s a genre of content that has become more popular, recently, with critics seizing on it as evidence that the Disney-obsessed are not only culturally but financially bankrupt.”
Behind the drive
Of course, Americans spend a lot of money on vacation, with many wanting to visit the same place over and over each year. But that is not what drives Disney adults.
According to a pop-culture historian quoted in a New York Post article about Disney adults, the parks are “very appealing to childless adults who’re looking for a way to recapture or keep alive that feeling of delight and comfort.” One woman told The New Yorker, “It’s the nostalgic feeling of what brought you joy when you were little and you didn’t have the stressors of adult life.”
Anyone who has visited a Disney park can attest to remarkable attention to detail in creating an alternative world. The safety, cleanliness, rides — and even the smells — are perfectly calibrated to produce an experience that is unmatched. One can walk through the gates and step back into childhood, and that’s nice sometimes.
Search for ‘meaning and fulfillment’
And Disney is not even close to being the only way people seek meaning and fulfillment.
From youth sports to fast cars to carefully built social media platforms to politics, humans can turn virtually anything into a focus of worship. What we live for become our gods. The practices we build to honor these things become our religion. And, as the Psalmist said, we will see ourselves in the image of whatever it is we worship.
The yearning of Disney adults is just one example of the new festivals, games and liturgies invented to give life meaning without God. But in the end, even the good things of this world are only vanity, if not built on what is ultimately true and good.
Like all human beings with eternity in their hearts, Disney adults are creatures of longing.
Filling the ‘God-shaped hole’
They may not know it, but nostalgia will not fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts. Neither will a scholarship or a Lexus or a million new followers.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Indeed, but Disney parks, though fun places to visit (at least on days that are not too hot or crowded), is not the world for which we were made.
Even the most committed and indebted Disney adults aren’t necessarily crazy. But they are looking for God in the wrong place.
Better instead to listen to St. Augustine, who, after many different attempts to fill his own longing, concluded: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett and originally published by the Colson Center.
