DATE: Wednesday, June 25, 1997              TAG: 9706250001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B13  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott 

                                            LENGTH:   87 lines

SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION VS. DISNEY MODERNITY IS FUNDAMENTALISTS' TARGET

The Southern Baptist Convention recommends that Southern Baptists - numbering 15.7 million - shun all things Disney.

The SBC wants Baptists to boycott the megabillion-dollar conglomerate for granting benefits to the partners of homosexual personnel, holding Magic Kingdom Gay Days and producing films and TV shows depicting homosexuals sympathetically. The SBC objects to Disney's embrace of adult entertainment.

Well, the United States is the freest of countries. The Southern Baptist Convention - 12,000 messengers attended the gathering that urged the Disney boycott - is free to register distaste for Disney's personnel policies and for releasing the eponymous star of the ``Ellen'' sitcom from the closet. The SBC is free to exhort Baptists to slam Mickey Mouse in the pocketbook.

Meanwhile, Disney is free to set its own personnel policies. Disney can also accommodate the significant others of unmarried heterosexual couples, if it concludes that will strengthen its work force.

Disney stockholders are free to sell their shares, if the boycott proposed by the SBC alarms them or they agree that Disney's threat to wholesomeness is severe.

How many Southern Baptists will follow the SBC's counsel is an open question. Disengaging from Disney isn't simple. Disney is all around us - on television and Broadway, at the movies, in retail stores, including the company's own, and, of course, theme parks. Disney is a real estate developer and owner and operator of hotels, recording company and gobs else. Mickey Mouse's empire grows and grows.

The SBC recognizes that it picked a fight with the mightiest of business giants.

But, hey, civil rights boycotts compelled U.S. corporations to expand employment and promotion opportunities for African Americans.

The international boycott of South Africa, which included getting U.S.-based multinationals to cut ties with the country, helped bring down apartheid.

Didn't a band of environmentalists and historians quash Disney's plan to develop a chunk of Northern Virginia?

If millions of the faithful heed the SBC's advice, Disney's bottom line might suffer. But don't count on that outcome. The whole wide world is Disney's oyster.

And the boycott could founder because the SBC is run by fundamentalist Southern Baptists who believe in biblical inerrancy, spurn female ministers and trace the beginning of a host of socioeconomic ills to the banishment of officially prescribed classroom prayers and Bible readings. Not all Southern Baptists are in step with the SBC; indeed, many are openly at odds with it.

There's plenty to lament about life in these United States: failing schools, coarse media, inner-city squalor, illicit drugs, violent crime, the pornography explosion, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortion, divorce, homegrown terrorists. The fundamentalists - and not they alone - see an out-of-control America hurtling toward the cliff.

The fundamentalists - and not they alone - blame ``godlessness'' (in this most churchgoingest of nations), ``liberalism,'' ``big government,'' ``immorality,'' ``feminism,'' ``the gay agenda'' - and now Disney.

But most Americans, including most U.S. Christians, are not fundamentalist anything. Many Southern Baptists aren't fundamentalists, although the fundamentalists who took over the SBC several years back have purged SBC-sponsored institutions of nonfundamentalists.

The courageous Baptist tradition of independent congregations bars any SBC takeover of all Southern Baptist churches - an aim the SBC leadership disclaims.

The fundamentalists' quarrel has always been with modernity. But modernity keeps on winning. And modernity is synonymous with U.S.A.

Relentless modernizing makes the United States the most revolutionary society anywhere. Lives, relationships, occupations, institutions and expectations are constantly rearranged at an accelerating pace, to general discomfort.

Free enterprise, not politics, is the revolutionary force that never lets us rest. It builds, abandons, crushes. It eradicates the familiar - the corner grocery, the small drugstore, the family farm - and installs bigness. It enriches some, impoverishes others.

Disney is free enterprise of galactic proportions and nuclear power - an endlessly enlarging universe. That a universe built on appealing to families has embraced the sensationalism that pervades popular entertainment is, as the SBC sees it, betrayal most foul. Disney's signing on to ``the gay agenda'' is too much.

The SBC perhaps thinks that if it compels Disney to retreat, wickedness will be set back on its heels and virtue advanced.

But don't look for that to happen. The SBC tilts against a torrent. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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