Trending on Facebook this week is the #GiveElsaAGirlfriend hashtag, a campaign lobbying to give Disney’s Frozen star a female love interest in the upcoming sequel. Idina Menzel, the actress who plays Elsa’s voice, made headlines when asked in an Entertainment Weekly interview about the campaign,
“I think it’s great,” she told ET on Sunday of the online campaign. “Disney’s just gotta contend with that. I’ll let them figure that out.”
While the quote was taken a little out of context (click to view the actual video below, you’ll be directed to Entertainment Tonight’s website), it was an answer expected of any Hollywood star with a live camera shoved in front of their face, and it certainly gave #GiveElsaAGirlfriend all the fuel needed to push their campaign more and more into the public spotlight.
I have 2-year-old and 4-year-old daughters, both who love the Frozen movie (and yes, I have every word of every song memorized). Almost every young girl in America loves the Frozen movie, and almost every girl’s favorite character is Elsa.
Here’s what I find so interesting about Elsa and the new #GiveElsaAGirlfriend campaign. Elsa is single; she has no love interest in Frozen, yet she is still beloved by little girls everywhere. A lack of a love interest didn’t slow Elsa down, nor did it slow down Frozen‘s huge box office rake. The campaign to give Elsa a love interest at all speaks so loudly most don’t hear it because we’re already deaf.
What is so wrong with being single?
Or celibate?
If someone isn’t interested in the opposite sex, why must it be campaigned by their friends and their society that they must find a same sex love interest in order to be whole and happy?
Why isn’t the sister-love Elsa shares with Anna enough? The love that ends up being the “act of true love” that saves the kingdom at the end of the movie. What made Frozen such a unique and deep message is that the entire movie the viewer is led on a chase for an “act of true love” which will save the kingdom. We are led to think, like the countless Disney movies before it, that act of true love will come between prince and princess: romantic love. First it’s Prince Hans and Princess Anna who we think will save all. Once Hans’s true motives are revealed and no love is to be found, ruggedly handsome Kristoff steps in as the one who must be the true love we’ve been anticipating. The one with the supernatural power of true love to break the curse.
But that supernatural true love isn’t found in Kristoff’s love for Anna either, to all of our surprise it’s found in the sisterly love of Anna and Elsa. It’s not erotic. It’s not homosexual. It’s not romantic.
There’s something so deep here that reveals something so shallow about us.
I’m not just talking about culture’s need to make a single person gay and then make that gay person hitched. I’m talking about how all of culture, Christian culture included, has defined love as something expressed between the legs rather than from the heart.
Sex is so cheap nowadays. Teens are trading sexual favors as if they were baseball cards. It’s much more normal to shack up as a young couple than it is to get married. The porn-generation has now become the sex-generation.
But one thing it is not is the love-generation. It doesn’t even know how to define love except as something that happens between the sheets. In fact, this might be the most loveless generation and society this world has ever known.
Jesus didn’t need a girlfriend.
Or a boyfriend for that matter.
Neither does Elsa.
Stop buying the lie that romantic sex is the utopia of society. If it were, wouldn’t we all (Christian, non-Christian, gay, straight, married, unmarried) be so much happier? Never in history has there been a time with sex so accessible, so highly-consumed, and so worshiped, yet simultaneously so many people broken, lost, insecure and in despair. This correlation is not coincidental.
For those who don’t care about following Jesus, do your thing (and I pray someday you’ll see how beautiful and worth it Jesus’s love is for you). But for those who do, a road must be cut, and cut deeply and permanently into the earth for singleness to be upheld the way Jesus and the Apostle Paul upheld it. For friendship and community to be upheld. For the love of a Perfect Father, given to us through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, to be enough to make us whole. This perfect love is what will save the kingdom, not anything any human can give us.
The gay Christian seeking to follow God’s will in the Scriptures has the same battle as the married person whose spouse ignores them, neglects them or keeps sex from them. They have the same battle as the single person who has never found a spouse or who has chosen to stay single. They have the same battle with the same solution: The grace-filled love of a holy, merciful God to an undeserving people is a well of living water, satisfying our thirst, making us whole, and giving us true life. No other water and no other well will ever give us this.
Is it fair?
No.
Neither is having a spouse who doesn’t love you.
Neither is getting cancer.
Neither is receiving mercy and getting to go heaven.
It’s not about what’s fair. It’s about what’s true, as that’s all we can bank on. We can continue living in the fantasy world that sex will save us, or that Elsa having a girlfriend will save us, but in the end only one thing will. C.S. Lewis was on point in his book The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses:
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FYI. . . there’s a campaign for Captain America too : #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend is trending on Twitter. Crazy how quickly what’s sinful is not even considered weird anymore but has gone mainstream. I’m not sure what this culture considers sinful anymore, or even if there is a concept of sin. Anything negative gets justified as positive or explained as something else.
Also, it’s not the whole book, but someone posted The Weight of Glory as a PDF:
http://www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf
It’s amazing how something so profound can be packed into so few pages.
I saw that after the fact. Which honestly I thought was pretty dumb considering Captain America has had a female love interest throughout his entire plot, it was Agent Carter, his love interest during his pre-freeze days and then he reconnects with her when she’s old and he’s been unfrozen. (I’m a Marvel comic nerd). As well as the flirting he does with the blond girl who’s his next door neighbor, but actually an undercover agent sent to keep an eye on him. It makes zero sense that he’d then randomly go get a boyfriend.
#GiveElsaACaptainAmerica