Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch. And in today's episode, we're asking the question, can insecure people create art? This is prompted by a Wall Street Journal article that I read this week that was looking at Disney's remake of the classic film Snow White.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Disney in the last ten years or so has been remaking their animated classics into live action films. They're trading on nostalgia. Adults who grew up with movies can go back to the theater and see the same movie, only this time in adult version with real or at least computer generated images pretending to happen in the real world. It's been wildly successful for the most part, but not everyone has been a hit. And that's where Snow White is trending.

You see, Disney has spent about $300,000,000 to make Snow White, which, hey, is not that lot not that much money in the world of movies. You gotta spend money to make money except for projections are showing they're not gonna make money. The movie's projected to do about 50,000,000 at the box office, so they're gonna take a $250,000,000 loss. And what the article was examining is that the overwhelming reason for that loss is political. That's because from the beginning, this movie has been a political hot potato.

The two stars of the film, one playing Snow White and one playing the wicked stepmother, have been at odds on the Internet. One being pro Israel, the other pro Palestine. The girl playing Snow White is from Colombia, meaning she's not fair complected, which has kick started an argument about representation and being accurate to the source material. The movie uses CGI dwarves, Snow White and the seven dwarves, which has angered people in the little people community who feel as though they should have gotten the opportunity to play those parts. It's been woke versus not woke, representation versus accuracy, on and on we go.

And here's the big takeaway for me and the point of this podcast. As long as we are chasing identity through politics, in the end, we'll never be able to create any kind of art. Art challenges us. It challenges our boundaries. It challenges our world views.

And if we're all insecure, we're not open to challenge. What's going on with Snow White is not fundamentally a political problem. Believe it or not, it's a spiritual problem. You see, we were made in the image of God. That's where we were supposed to derive our identity and our worth from.

It is it is something that no one can change. No one can take away. No one can threaten. But when we turned away from God in our sin and turned towards anything else, we are, in the words of Jesus, building on a foundation of sand, and we know it subconsciously, intrinsically. So when someone says you're not being kind enough, you're not being political enough, you're not being fair enough, you're not being, you're not representing this people group well enough, it rattles us because we're so desperate for affirmation we were meant to get from God.

People pleasing is the zeitgeist of our day because we need everyone to tell us how great we are. Of course, the Bible warns us about people pleasing. Galatians one tells us that if we please people, we'll never please God. Proverbs 29 says that the fear of man is like a snare or a trap that will destroy our lives. It's destroying this movie.

It's destroying our culture. The only way back for each one of us individually and for companies and organizations at large is to go back to where we were supposed to get our worth and purpose from. When someone says, you aren't doing this good enough, it shouldn't rattle us if in fact we know we're doing what God has wanted us to do. Getting your identity from God isn't just about morality. It isn't even just about theology.

It's about being empowered to do the world shaping, world creating that we were meant to do. That's why some of the best art in human history was created by Christians. When j r r Tolkien is writing the lord of the rings, he's not worried about whether people will feel he underrepresented a particular people group. He's creating art from his identity, not for his identity. Listen, if we don't go back to God, it's not just that we'll one day face his judgment.

In the waiting room awaiting judgment, all the art will be terrible. Hey. Thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. And while you're here, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get further content or even download the CCC app where you'll find even more resources to help you grow in your faith and relationship with Jesus Christ.