Op:Ed: Snow White -And They All Danced Happily Ever After

By James Wilson • April 30, 2025

The following Op-Ed was submitted by James Wilson. Op-Eds do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of those at the Idaho Dispatch.

The moment I found out my eight-year-old daughter had seen the new Snow White I knew I had to see it – to see how much protection I might need to offer her. What I found was more mindless than malevolent. But it was not pretty.

Snow White is a tribute to the pop psych drivel that has done more damage to public education than DEI and CRT combined – and I am no apologist for them. Early on our titular character practices active listening, mainstay of coffee house therapy since the sixties. She addresses Grumpy, who says nobody listens to him, “You feel like no one is listening?” The therapeutic point is that by repeating his statement as a question your client – and everybody is a client – thinks you at least are listening.

Snow mentors Dopey, eventually learning he is silent from fear. He finally speaks – owning his fear while he jettisons it – and at the end he becomes the spokesperson for the kingdom, and the story’s narrator because, “We’re not afraid anymore.” All this is due to Snow’s nurturing presence. It is by no means all the pop psych we get.

Snow misses – out loud – the good old days, when everybody helped everybody, share and share alike, and peace and plenty for all. Such cultures and communities are indeed possible, but they have things to be shared because they first busted their butts with hard work. That work was voluntary – for their families and their advancement – sharing was from surplus and voluntarily devoted to the common good. At no time is the work shown – except the dwarfs – only sharing as the real people laugh and dance their days away.

Snow’s memoir is not just of easy living when there is no wicked queen to spoil things; it is of a socialist utopia like George Pal’s 1950’s version of The Time Machine, in which an Eloi man answers a question from George about sourcing the abundance of food, “It grows. It always grows.” Of course, the Eloi has no clue that it is Morlock labor that grows it, and George has no idea that the Morlocks raise the Eloi like cattle – for Morlock tables. Sooner or later the socialist vision always terminates at the table.

America’s Pilgrims discovered the bankruptcy of involuntary sharing in the 1620s; they nearly starved to death before junking Snow’s vision for a competitive economy in which all really did prosper.

Even Snow’s love interest – no handsome prince he – is the socialist ideal of a criminal who diverts his criminal talents to the revolution. (Hitler was a gangster in the 1920s; Stalin robbed trains before ruling Russia.) Jonathan is a robber who lives in the woods and pretends he serves the memory of the late king, endowed by his daughter with messianic qualities – a virtual god of truth and justice – until she and Jonathan agree that “We’ll just have to do it ourselves. It’s up to us now.” If the old god is dead the next generation must become – not serve – him.

The movie just keeps blowing sunshine at us. All we the people need do is look on with smiling faces as Snow White alone – but channeling her father’s god-ness – confronts the evil queen, who has the attributes and appearance of a goddess herself, but is really nothing but a faux beautiful demon. Snow beats her in a contest of rhetoric and will, emphasis on the I-am-no-longer-afraid will.

The queen is drawn as a demon for whom failure carries no consequences; her beauty is restored after she becomes a hag and dupes Snow into biting the apple. At least the 1937 film displayed the wages of sin; once the queen became a hag she was trapped in her ugliness forever. Evil has consequences for perps in the real world.

The Christian tradition – unapologetically grounded in reality – envisions something called repentance as a necessary first step when we find our conception of God – as opposed to God Himself – bankrupted. Repentance is simply a shrugging off of the discredited vision and a re-focus on the authentic Lord who creates us, and Whom we are called to serve as an expression of gratitude for His gift of abundant life. The reality of the process – depending on how far lost we have gotten ourselves – can be a lot more painful than my description, but the abundant life into which we are led by that re-focus (repeat as needed) is well worth the cost to us. This is because King Jesus has already done the heavy lifting on the Cross. And it is precisely because of these dynamics that the Christ depicted in The Chosen so forcefully argues for repentance as a lifestyle.

The best repentance from Jonathan is, “I forgot my hope.” That’s repentance – sort of – but he has no clue that he might need to repent lying and robbing. Forgetting his hope could account for a clinical depression – remember Snow is an amazing therapist – but not for robbery and the rest.

Reality is, Americans do stick together – because we choose to, and because nobody forces us – and share. Our tradition lives in Elon Musk’s rescue of stranded astronauts. It thrives in a multitude of faith-based ministries like Samaritan’s Purse and all the private parties who responded to flood victims in North Carolina and fire survivors in California. A cherished memory is joining with my new neighbors to put up our fences when we bought our first homes on Calle Pavana – the street of the dance – contributing lots of sweat to establishing real and lasting relationships. The dancing came after the hard work; the friendships lasted. None of us imagined we could just dance happily ever after and let the CGI generated dwarfs do the work for us.

None of us were Socialists.

James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships, The Holy Spirit and the End Times, Kingdom in Pursuit, and his first novel, Generation – available at Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, or at praynorthstate@gmail.com