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Coercion in Augustine and Disney

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

William T. Cavanaugh
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Abstract

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“He’s way into the merchandising. It makes me crazy because you can’t escape it.” This is the way the mother of a four-year-old described herself faced with 1997’s blitzkrieg of product tie-ins associated with Disney’s movie Hercules. The same syndicated newspaper article from which the above quote is taken introduces a selection of this merchandise (which includes such must-haves as glow-in-the-dark Hercules shorts and an official Hercules silver coin) with the following: “OK, maybe you can’t afford to shower your offspring with all 7,000 official ‘Hercules’ tie-in products. But here’s a sample of the superhero merchandise that your kid’s best friend soon will be bringing to show and tell. Not that you should feel guilty, of course...”

Wink wink, ha ha. Surely the woman who claims Hercules is inescapable is indulging in hyperbole, as am I when I tell my students that Disney merchandising is evidence that we do not live in a free country. Nevertheless, one can observe that the woman quoted above is not alone in feeling coerced by Disney magic. I was struck, for example, by the reaction of the press last year to the boycott of Disney launched by the Southern Baptist Convention. One article begins with a long list of Disney owned networks, publishers, sports franchises, music producers, etc., capped by the categorical statement from a Smith Barney analyst, “Disney blankets our culture, and it’s impossible to avoid.” Even many of the Baptists interviewed acknowledged that they felt compelled to continue frequenting many of the heads of the Disney hydra.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 80 , Issue 940 , June 1999 , pp. 283 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Janet Weeks, “Make no myth-stake: ‘Hercules’ means business,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 27, 1997, 9B.

2 John Horn, “Jousting with a Giant,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 19, 1997, section A.

3 Bowlin, John, “Augustine on Justifying Coercion,” The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, vol. 17 (1997), 49-70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 St. Augustine, Letter 93, 16, in Paolucci, Henry, ed., The Political Writings of St. Augustine (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1962). 203Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 202-3.

6 St. Augustine, Letter 87, in Paolucci, ed., 190.

7 St. Augustine, Letter 93, in Paolucci, ed. 195.

8 Ibid.

9 St. Augustine, Letter 93, in Paolucci, ed., 205; and Treatise on the Correction of the Donatists, in paolucci, ed., 227.

10 See the “Introduction” in Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, and Ward, Graham, ed., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1998), 9Google Scholar. In his letter to Vicentius, Augustine rejects the possibility that he could simply allow the Donatists to exercise their will perversely, “that the gift which the God of gods has bestowed upon His children, called from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, might become invalid”; St. Augustine, Letter 93, in Paolucci, ed., 206.

11 Michael Hanby, “Desire,” in Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, ed., 116.

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13 Bob Garfield, “How I Spent (and Spent and Spent) My Disney Vacation,” Washington Post-Outlook, July 7, 1991, B5.

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