Recently, I hate-watched parts of Kirk Cameron’s 2014 “film” Saving Christmas (which you can find in full on Youtube). To call it a film would be somewhat misleading. It’s more of a treatise, in which Cameron, sitting by a crackling fire and donning a bright-red sweater, waxes sentimental about all the reasons he loves Christmas: “the fire, the lights, the presents, the carols and hymns, the children, the tree, even the hot chocolate!”
Based on the title, you would think that Cameron is saving Christmas from the atheists and the liberals, who, according to many fundamentalist Christians, are trying to destroy Christmas. Cameron vaguely refers to these folks as one of the two “camps” trying to harsh his Christmas mellow, but he doesn’t use specifics, which frees him from the burden of supplying facts for his thesis that Christmas is under attack. But Cameron’s real target for this “film” is Christians who dislike the commercial elements of the holiday season (basically all the elements).
In the movie, Cameron’s angry brother-in-law, subtly named “Christian,” is portrayed as a real Grinch because he dislikes how Christmas has been co-opted by pagan rituals and Capitalism. Kirk finds Christian hiding in the garage because Christian’s wife is throwing a Christmas party, and he just can’t handle all those people not getting Christmas right. Cameron proceeds to mansplain to Christian that he’s wrong: the tree is a symbol of Jesus’s death on the cross, and the giving of gifts a symbol of Jesus’s body being wrapped in cloths, and Santa Claus was actually a Christian who gave stuff to the poor and needy. No pagan shit here!
Saving Christmas dramatizes the thing I hate most about Christmas: the pressure to be happy, placed on us by arrogant, myopic blowhards like Kirk Cameron, who have wrapped their two favorite religions—Christianity and Capitalism—into one big dogma they can then valiantly “save” from non-existent threats. (I forgot Americanism, their other religion, which I guess turns it into a trinitarian dogma.)
When religious entities like Liberty University (who helped fund this piece of shit) tell us that Christmas is under attack, and then tell us that consumerism is totally fine, and here’s a biblical justification for it, I want to reject their religion altogether. If these people are right about things, I don’t want to spend eternity with them. That sounds like hell to me.
2 comments:
Is this a film review or vitriolic invective against American Christmas? Sounds like you're arguing with Cameron, not reviewing the film.
Why can't it be both a film review AND vitriolic invective? Although to be clear, it's not against Christmas, but against people like Kirk Cameron. Watch the movie and tell me what you think.
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