Kirk Cameron’s Christian nation doesn’t exist

Kirk Cameron's new movie, Saving Christmas, is meant to send a message to all the atheists out there: You're wrong. About everything. Merry Christmas!

The poster for

Atheists get Christmas all wrong, according to Kirk Cameron. “I assume they’re going to get frustrated to see some of their best arguments deflated by this movie,” he told The Blaze in an interview earlier this week about his upcoming film, Saving Christmas. 

Well, you’ve been warned. Just as he thwarted your atheistic logic with the banana video, so he has set out to shatter assumptions about the birth of our Lord. The opening line of the trailer for the film asks if you, the potential viewer, ever feel like Christmas is being hijacked by commercialism, or by people who want to “replace ‘Merry Christmas’ with ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Season’s Greetings’–whatever that means.” That is a really good point. Who knows what “Happy Holidays” even means?? It would make sense if there were multiple holidays celebrated by all kinds of people  that happened to fall around the same time, like if Hannukah and Kwanzaa were maybe also celebrated in December.


The poster for "Saving Christmas."

The poster for “Saving Christmas.”

Oh, they are?

Okay, but surely there are some other, appropriate objections to the Christmas season. That Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th, for instance, or that Christmas trees are actually pagan in origin, or that gross commercialism has taken over a spirit of religious generosity.

Nope. At least, that’s what Cameron tells a friend who spouts off all those protests in one scene. “Everything you see in there?” Cameron asks, pointing to a cozy, well-lit house at Christmastime. “It’s all about Christmas. It’s all about Jesus.”

Then Cameron leads his friend inside, to a house stuffed with (almost all white) people, a table piled high with food, and so many presents under the tree that the friend runs into them when his new joy leads him to slide, belly-first, on the foyer floor.

Cameron went on in his interview with The Blaze: “It’s obvious that there is a deliberate attempt to snuff out the holy root that has produced all this wonderful Christmas-time fruit. I think it’s about time someone spoke out and made a movie about this…Christianity…is the ideology that built this country.”

Now, up until a certain point, it’s all fun and games. I think it’s absolutely ludicrous that people believe being pushy about which holiday greeting to use is going to make any kind of positive difference in public perception of a religion. Getting snippy at cashiers who say “Happy Holidays!” instead of your preferred greeting isn your right, even if it is un-Christian to do so.

But.

Once you start making claims about America being built on Christian ideology, we’ve got a problem. I’m not even quite sure why so many conservative Christians feel the need to beat this drum, because if they, as I, believe Christianity to be true, it isn’t contingent on how long it’s been around or whether a wealthy country was founded on its principles. It isn’t contingent on anything. Capitalism and Christianity, thank God, are not the same thing.

AND! Our founding fathers were not exactly what you would call Christian people, at least not by today’s standards. Whether that speaks more to the changing nature of communal definitions of religion or a sense of we’re-wrong-they’re-right is a debate I’ll leave for another day. But these are people, many of whom used Scripture to justify owning actual people. Thomas Jefferson was more like a Unitarian than a conservative evangelical Christian–the man literally made his own version of the Bible. He denied the Trinity. George Washington was a deist who avoided answering public questions about his faith and who affirmed the legitimacy of the practice of all religions. Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Puritan and Episcopal churches for a time, but later in life confessed he was a deist and expressed significant doubts about Jesus’s divinity. And Franklin was one of the more famously devout of the bunch. Our country may have been founded on principles having to do with Christianity, but we were not founded by or in the name of Jesus. That would lead to a theocracy the kind of which would preclude the need for a film like Saving Christmas, which is the only benefit to that form of government I can see.


It’s obviously way too early in the year to be talking about Christmas, so I’m going to step off my soapbox and hope that someone, somewhere, volunteers to give Cameron a history lesson or two. But in the meantime, don’t forget–Labor Day is coming up. Happy Holidays .

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