Christian Crackpot Kirk Cameron Is Trying To Ruin Halloween For The Rest Of Us

kirk cameron saving christmasI love Halloween. I love cool costumes. I love candy (and I especially love November 1 candy sales at the grocery store). I love spiced cider, creepy house decorations, and skillfully carved pumpkins. But now, former Growing Pains star and current kook Kirk Cameron is trying to ruin all of that for me by being his usual Kirk Cameron self, and declaring Halloween yet another Christian holiday.

Historical revisionism is a pretty big thing with Cameron’s uber-evangelical crowd. According to them, the founding fathers all explicitly wanted us to be a Christian nation; Christians are a persecuted lot in the USA today; modern bananas occurred in the wild as God, and not years of careful cultivation, designed them specifically for human consumption; and Jesus was, of course, a white dude. And now, while flogging his latest crummy movie, Saving Christmas, Cameron’s adding Halloween to that list.  In an interview with the Christian Post, he states that the holiday originated from the Catholic Church and not from pagan traditions as, you know, you’ll read in any actual textbook on the matter. (The interview uses the word “debunks” in reference to Cameron’s off the wall statements, which is almost as much of a redefinition.) If you can find me a historian, one who didn’t get his degree from a special offer on the back of a cereal box, who’s willing to affix his name to Cameron’s Halloween theory, I will eat my black, pointy, witch-costume hat.

Most Christians are cool with a fun secular holiday like Halloween. But a lot of evangelical churches have been Halloween-averse for as long as I can remember, offering things like ‘harvest festivals’ to lure parishioners away from Satanic apple-bobbing and costume-wearing. Now, though, Cameron wants Christians to reclaim a holiday that he says is really theirs. In doing so, he also obliquely implies that the President of the United States is comparable to demons and evil spirits:

When you go out on Halloween and see all people dressed in costumes and see someone in a great big bobble head Obama costume with great big ears and an Obama face, are they honoring him or poking fun? They are poking fun at him[.] … Early on, Christians would dress up in costumes as the devil, ghosts, goblins and witches precisely to make the point that those things were defeated and overthrown by the resurrected Jesus Christ. The costumes poke fun at the fact that the devil and other evils were publicly humiliated by Christ at His resurrection.

I thought we were past the right-wing evangelical meme that President Obama was the Antichrist? I mean, come on, if he were really the Antichrist, he could have used his evil powers for some much more evangelical-terrifying legislation than Obamacare. Single payer health insurance CommieCare? Birth control dispensers next to public drinking fountains? Dream big, guys.

I’m trying not to let Cameron’s new-found joy in all things Halloween take away my own pumpkin-spice-flavored excitement, but it’s hard not to let him ruin my Halloween spirit. If my kids get a Jack Chick tract in their trick-or-treat bag on their first Halloween, I’m going to be annoyed; although since they’re still at the age where they spend half their reading time trying to put the books in their mouth, that could actually work out all right. I’ll always have cheap sale candy, and maybe I can bolster my enthusiasm by taking a page from Cameron’s book and dressing up as something creepy that I want to poke fun at. I think I have exactly the right former child star in mind, too.

(Image: YouTube)

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