Oh, Jews were admired for the antiquity of their tradition in the Hellenistic period.

The masses always buy the disneyfied presentation (kitsch), which means there's a trivial version of my thesis, as I pointed out in the article's last section. Whenever you have a distinction between intellectual elites and less reflective masses, the latter engage mainly with popular, dumbed-down versions of things. You see this across the board.

What makes Catholic disneyfication more interesting is the deeper comparison between the political and neoliberal fears of subversive (Gnostic or ascetic and anti-consumerist) messages.