Christians, it’s time to talk to Disney

I attended The Walt Disney Company’s annual shareholder meeting last week and listened to the discussion about Florida’s woefully misnamed “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disney CEO Bob Chapek was pressed by a questioner about what was deemed an inadequate response to the proposed law. Chapek revealed that though the company had not taken a strong public stance against the bill, he and members of his executive team had been meeting privately with Florida officials, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Chapek’s objective, he said, was to work with the state to see that the law would not be “weaponized against gay and trans youth.”

Disney is under pressure from one subsection of its employee group, some vocal shareholders, and outside activist groups such as the Human Rights Campaign to take a much harder stance against the bill. Chapek argued for a collaborative approach. Since Gov. DeSantis has been quite clear about his commitment to sign the bill into law, the team at Disney wanted to focus on making sure the implementation would not be harmful to the groups the activists claim to be protecting.

Chapek promised to continue meeting with the governor and later announced a commitment to make a grant of $5 million to pro-LGTBQ groups such as the HRC. But the HRC publicly refused to accept Disney’s money unless the company took a more aggressive stance against the bill. Disney pleaded that it has supported the HRC and listed the many initiatives it had supported in the past, including the Equality Act, and noted its previous statements against various state laws that were being portrayed as homophobic or transphobic. As of this writing, however, the HRC has not reversed itself despite Chapek’s profuse apologies. Disney has even frozen political contributions to Florida officials just to avoid links with any of the bill’s supporters. Nevertheless, the company continues to suffer a backlash from activists and left-wing infotainment warriors such as John Oliver. Why haven’t the numerous acts of ideological self-abasement by the company been enough? Because with ideologues, it’s never enough—ever. Ideologies by nature tend to be unappeasable.

But not all ideologies are equally expansive in their demands. Progressive ideologies, being based on the idea of the plasticity of human nature, tend to overstate the ability of politics to remake mankind. Conservatives conserve: This is an inherently limited action. Progressives progress (or at least claim to): This is an inherently unlimited action. Anyone who ignores that fact will find themselves in the same no-win scenario that Disney is in now, attempting to appease the unappeasable.

The opponents of creation order and Biblical morality show up. They’ve been showing up for decades. They attend shareholder meetings, where they talk to management and they vote their shares. They built a feeder system for board members while conservatives, in blissful ignorance, took corporations for granted as members of their coalition.

It’s time for Christians to start showing up. And this is the perfect time to do so. It seems clear that in this particular case, Disney was reluctant to engage in the usual public preening over the cause du jour. In Chapek’s own words, “As we have seen time and again, corporate statements do very little to change outcomes or minds. … Instead, they are often weaponized by one side or the other to further divide and inflame.” This restraint occurred even when there was essentially zero conservative input on the issue from shareholders to the board. But after Disney decided not to make a big public statement, the pressure was ramped up, and it all came from one side. Once again, a CEO caved.

This seems like a perfect opportunity for Chapek’s bosses to step in and engage and persuade. His bosses are the shareholders. Think about how a small group of shareholder activists has had the field to itself simply by being organized and bold. It has outmaneuvered the generally more conservative shareholder base by knowing and using the rules effectively. Christians need to step up. Gov. DeSantis isn’t going to move on the issue and Disney won’t move Disney World out of Orlando. It’s time for the church to employ truth to try to move hearts and minds in the right direction.