Pastor Seth Hedman.

Shrek is a 2001 animated comedy movie featuring the voice acting of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy. The movie begins with a telling of a fairy tale from a beautiful gilded book, much like the beginning of Disney’s Snow White and Cinderella.The story is the traditional St. George fairy tale: the knight kills the dragon, rescues the princess, and they all live happily ever after. The sequence ends, however, with the narrator declaring “what a bunch of crock,” and tearing out the page, followed by the big, green ogre Shrek emerging from an outhouse. This movie makes clear its intentions from the outset: to wipe it’s butt with traditional fairy tales.

It accomplishes this in a couple ways. First, the main characters are simply flipped: the monster is the good guy and the prince is the bad guy. Shrek, it is clear, is not really evil, simply misunderstood and lonely, thus losing the entire purpose for monsters as icons of moral evil. Second, Shrek is the one that goes to defeat the dragon and rescue the princess, showing the courage and strength that we ought to expect from the prince, who is an impotent and foolish tyrant. Third, while the princess is under a curse that turns her into an ogre every night, a curse which can only be broken by “true love’s kiss,” a fine plot device, the curse is only broken by kissing Shrek. In a direct reference to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, she twirls in the air surrounded by sparks. But instead of turning back into a beautiful princess, she remains an ugly ogre. This makes the climax of the story not a moment of logical and satisfying redemption and restoration but of illogical and unnatural degradation and distortion. She was born a little girl, why would the curse win and she remain a monster? Lastly, the movie finishes with the dragon returning to crash through the window of the church and eat the prince. With the castle in shambles, the two ogres elope, returning to marry and live in the swamp. Even the dragon and the talking donkey marry, creating hybrid dragon-donkey chimeras. The sacrilege and abominations go down smooth with a pop song and silly dancing over the credits. And they all lived happily ever after.

Now, I must admit, most humor is built on unexpected subversion and many of the twists on fairy tale tropes in Shrek are quite clever. But at what cost? What happens when an entire generation’s imagination is only encountering these stories through Shrek?

The St. George story of a knight killing a dragon to save a princess captured the imagination of Europe in the Medieval era. It helped convert Viking warrios into Christian Knights by teaching them to use their masculine strength not to rape and pillage, but to kill the wicked and protect the innocent. The St. George flag, red cross on white background, became prominent, including on the shields of the crusading Knights Templar and the flag of England itself, from whom we get the colors of our own American flag.

The St. George story resonates because it is God’s story. The Bible ends with a King (Jesus) defeating a witch (Babylon), a monster-beast (antichrist), and a dragon (the devil), throwing them into a swamp (lake of fire), to save and marry His Bride (The Church). In Shrek’s telling of Revelation, the devil eats Jesus and the antichrist perverts and marries the Church. By subverting traditional fairy tales, Shrek subverts Western Civilization and, in turn, the story of the Gospel itself. Yeesh. This funny kids movie is deeply anti-Western and anti-Christian.

With only Shrek-style stories, this generation lacks the moral imagination to distinguish between good and evil. It’s all been deconstructed and turned inside out. On a deeper level, they lack the conviction of loyalty to their own civilization. They don’t know their own story. We must fight for and tell these Medieval fairy tales, otherwise our children will be vulnerable to other stories. Shrek may have torn down through humor, but other, darker stories are rebuilding.