Kirk Cameron’s latest Lie “Saving Christmas”

Kirk Cameron’s “Saving Christmas” is a cynical ploy masquerading as a movie aimed squarely at the faith-based demographic. And it’s political.  This is the opening shot in Fox’s fake “War on Christmas” pageant.

Cameron is an ideologue and right wing culture warrior. He’s partners with fellow far right fundamentalist trickster and “evangelist” Ray Comfort. Comfort is into tricks to lure the unwary into the kingdom of far right fundamentalist faith that I’ve seen before. I grew up as the son of fundamentalist missionaries. We too were trained to trick people into the Kingdom of God. We’d pretend to be interested in someone when all we wanted to do was propagandize them. But we never faked money.

Comfort did. He designed dozens of gospel tracts (little flyers selling Jesus) since the 1970s, and sells millions of so-called Living Waters tracts each year.Some of his tracts are designed to resemble paper money, including fake $100, $1000 and $1 million bills in order to sucker people into picking this Jesus litter up. Others employ novelties like a “ticket to heaven.”

In June 2006, agents of the US Secret Service confiscated thousands of Ray Comfort’s “Million Dollar Bill” gospel tracts from Darrel Rundus, president of Great News Network.

Bluntly these people are an embarrassment to all but far right evangelicals, and of course to Fox News. In October 2010, The New Zealand Herald reported that elderly people received “appointment cards” by Comfort’s California-based publishing company, Living Waters, asking them to fill out information regarding the date and time of their deaths, and advising them to contact evangelists in order to avoid hell. . In 2011, Comfort wrote and produced a 33-minute documentary film called 180: Changing the Heart of a Nation. The film was criticized by The Huffington Post for its comparison of abortion to the Holocaust.

Together, Cameron and Comfort founded the ministry of The Way of the Master, which is best known for the television show of the same name that Cameron co-hosts, and which won the National Religious Broadcasters’ (NRB) Best Program Award for two consecutive years. Remember that the NRB are the far right evangelicals led by Pat Robertson and Dr. Dobson who did so much to get Ronald Reagan and the Bush family elected…

Cameron is now going to save the holidays for Christians. You know it needs saving from all those Jews, gays and atheists… The film begins with Cameron, seated in a chair drinking hot chocolate and preaching to the camera. He says how some have put a wet blanket on the annual celebration. “This bickering is not good for our kids,” he says.

In other words this is a come-on for the annual Fox News’ : “War On Christmas” where Christians can bask in their insufferable myth of victimology.

Fox News is all over this. Fox is promoting at old Glenn Beck levels of hysteria. And Fox also gave the actor a chance to “explain” some recent comments he made in a Facebook post about women’s “role” in the home during the Christmas season:

“If you are a mom, if you are a wife, if you’re the keeper of your home, I want you to know that your joy is so important this Christmas,” Cameron told his fans, before urging women to “let your children, your family, see your joy in the way that you decorate your home this Christmas, in the food that you cook, the songs you sing, the stories you tell, and the traditions that you keep.” He added, “Invite your whole neighborhood into your Christmas.”

This stereotypical image of the Christian wife: in the kitchen with the kids, is part of right wing American evangelical fantasy.

The actual Jesus would hate it and the movie.

Stories about Jesus contain powerful and enlightened truths that would someday prove the undoing of bigots like Cameron. Let me explain. Like a futurist vindicated by events as yet undreamed, Jesus’ message of love was far more powerful than the magical thinking of the writers of the book he’s in. In Jesus’ day the institutions of religion, state, misogyny and myth were so deeply ingrained that the ultimate dangerousness of his life example to misogynists and bigots could not be imagined. For example his feminism, probably viewed as an eccentricity in his day, would prove transformational.

Jesus’ un-first-century antics went beyond coddling lepers and welcoming the touch of a bleeding woman. He held a dead girl’s hand, violating explicit commands. Jesus hung out with whores. Jesus was never sipping hot chocolate talking about Christmas, but telling people like Mary and Martha to get out of the kitchen and talk to him—as equals.

Embracing whores is a double rebuke to the scripture-thumpers because it put Jesus on the side of the pagan, prostitute-condoning Roman occupiers and made him a traitor in the culture wars of the day. Yet, the anointing of Jesus by a prostitute is one of the few events reported in all four gospels. As Jesus blessed and defended her, Matthew’s gospel says the disciples “were indignant” while Luke describes the woman who did the anointing as “a woman in that town who lived a sinful life,” which is a coded phrase for a filthy hooker who is certainly not one of us.

Jesus’ embrace of a woman from an enemy tribe in a culture where tribal belonging was paramount distressed both his followers and enemies. His attitude to the “other” was as incomprehensible as if he’d blurted “E=mc² is the equation of mass–energy equivalence.” The Samaritan woman at the well knew that his actions were shocking. When Jesus stopped to talk to her, she said, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9).

So much for Cameron’s message to good Christian moms everywhere: stay home!

Andrea Tantaros (conservative “analyst” Fox talking head) called out like Yahoo for “editorializing” Cameron’s comments.  “Wow, we are glad that you’re here,” Harris Faulkner said at the end of the segment.

Cameron and Comfort are far right fundamentalist ideologues. In November 2009, Cameron and others participated in yet another shady trick right up there with their fake money tracts: They distributed free copies of an altered version of Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species on college campuses in the United States.The book consisted of Darwin’s text with chapters of the book removed, and with an added introduction by Ray Comfort reiterating common creationist assertions about Darwin and evolution. They messed with the book just as they had printed fake money to lure people in.

Now Cameron has made a fake movie on Christmas that is really an opening shot against tolerance and diversity.  Make no mistake he’s a bigot. On March 2, 2012, Cameron stated on Piers Morgan Tonight that “homosexuality is unnatural, detrimental and ultimately destructive to foundations of civilization.”

It isn’t Christmas that needs defending. It’s Jesus that needs defending against right wing Fox News fakers.

Unlike the bigot Cameron and his dishonest sidekick, the actual Jesus decouples the credulous attachment to a tribal geography and religion-based identity. Jesus declares we’re all one family. Goodbye, anyone who wants to turn Christmas into a political battleground.  According to Jesus, there never was and never will be a “chosen people” or for that matter, saved Christians. There’s just us. Cameron’s movie is divisive and anti-Jesus.

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