Kirk Cameron

Kirk Cameron told his fellow anti-Obama activists Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association that Christians must use the election to “hold back the flood of moral and spiritual evil that has been pouring into the country and give moms and dads and grandparents the opportunity to begin rebuilding morality and spirituality.” Wildmon added that Obama must be defeated for “freedom to reign.”

Perkins, who once claimed Obama voters must “repent,” described a conversation he had with prominent conservative pastor Jim Garlow about how God will grant America a “reprieve” and delay judgment if Obama is ousted. “I see what could happen here today if we are successful in removing someone from office who has basically set themselves in defiance to everything that is biblically oriented in terms of the history of our country and the word of God,” Perkins said, “that it’s a reprieve, it’s not a solution.”

He claimed that voters in 2008 “chose the economy over the moral foundation of the country when we selected Barack Obama as president,” arguing that an Obama defeat now could allow the church to “begin focusing on the moral and spiritual condition of our nation.”

• Focus on the Family has spent over $50,000 on behalf of Todd Akin's run for Senate.
• Kirk Cameron will be speaking at Liberty University's Convocation on Friday.
• Speaking of Liberty U, Jerry Falwell, Jr. continues to defend Donald Trump's recent speech there, saying it was all a part of the "free exchange of ideas." Because everyone knows that LU is all about free speech and diversity.
• The organizers of the America for Jesus rally need your help in paying off the $98,000 deficit they now face.
•  Finally, Matt Barber declares that President Obama is "a white-hating racist."

History has never been Kirk Cameron's strong suit, which can probably be partly attributed to the fact that he relies on "experts" like David Barton for his information.

So it didn't come as much of a surprise when Cameron delivered another rather strange history lesson today while speaking at the Values Voter Summit when he proclaimed that America has been so successful because our Founding Fathers relied "on the very eternal principles that had not been tested and tried from the ground up for three thousand years since the ancient Hebrew republic under Moses":

Last night, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council hosted a nationwide simulcast entitled "iPledge Sunday: A Call to Faith, Family, and Freedom" that featured Religious Right leaders like Rick Santorum, Harry Jackson, Jim Garlow, Rick Scarborough and others "celebrating Christian citizenship and exhorting Christians to rise up on Election Day to make our voices heard."

Among the featured speakers was Kirk Cameron who essentially just recounted the story he laid out in his documentary "Monumental" which eventually prompted him to declare that while today's Democratic Party is wondering whether God should be mentioned in its platform, "according to our Forefathers, God is the platform!"

Cameron then went on to marvel that the Founding Fathers would be appalled  and  "rolling over in their graves" if they knew that we were even discussing things like abortion or marriage equality: 

After a whirlwind media tour where he warned that his freedom of speech and religion are under attack and compared his experience to being publicly stoned, Kirk Cameron hosted Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Praise the Lord last week where he again promoted his new film, Monumental, and stoked fears of America’s coming demise. While interviewing evangelist Ray Comfort about his anti-abortion rights film, 180, which likens legal abortion to the Holocaust, Cameron found it “chilling” how “our country right now” has “sort of the conditions that could provide the platform for someone,” like Adolf Hitler, “to step up like that and say I’ll give you back your dignity, I’ll give you back your this and your that.”

Watch:

After a tour of both mainstream and right-wing media outlets that largely focused on Kirk Cameron’s denigration of gays and lesbians, last night his “documentary” Monumental premiered in select theatres with little public attention.

The premiere included a live stream of Cameron in his living room right before and after the film, where he listened to praise music, gazed over food and mingled with family members and friends, while recounting how “truly sick” America has become.

Cameron admitted that he is no history buff, telling his pastor, “I feel like a dry sponge when I learn all these things.”

Just as Cameron was a “dry sponge” when learning lessons about how the banana disproves evolution, he accepted the claims of Religious Right activists posing as historians at face value.

One of whom was Glenn Beck, who appeared via satellite feed. Cameron and Beck took turns complimenting each other, with the former Fox News host lauding Cameron, “You were in Left Behind while I was reading it.” Curiously, Cameron decided against attending Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally after Brannon Howse, among others, warned evangelicals about joining forces with Beck, a Mormon.

Beck told Cameron that God told him that their mission to “wake up” America is a path they can’t veer from. “Return to me and I will protect you,” Beck says was God’s message, adding that God wants to be America’s “sword and shield.”

But the conservative celebrity appearances didn’t end there: Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and a Religious Right activist, was in Cameron’s living room as well. Cameron asked her what she thought her uncle would want people to do if he were here today, to which Alveda responded that King would want people to watch Monumental!

She seems to think that King would endorse a movie that whitewashes America’s past, as Cameron determines that America’s problems only began in the last few decades.

In the film, Cameron’s adventure starts in England, where we learn how Puritans were persecuted by the Church of England and ultimately, at great personal and familial sacrifice, made their way to Holland to find religious freedom and escape a society where the “government controlled the church.” It was a stark if simplistic look at religious persecution at a time when many on the Right are decrying the Obama administration’s “attacks on religious liberty.”

Visiting in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Cameron claims that the Pilgrims established a governmental “system of all men created equal under the law.” He then sets forth to find the Pilgrims’ “training manual” and the “secret sauce” that will be the key to stopping America’s plunge into moral and economic disarray.

He finds the “secret sauce” at Plymouth’s National Monument to the Forefathers, which was built in 1910 under the leadership of Freemasons, though from just watching Cameron’s documentary you would think the Pilgrims themselves helped construct it. The message from the monument is that faith leads to personal morality, spreading that faith creates a moral and therefore just society, and a just society produces mercy for the disadvantaged and education for the children. Cameron used the part about education to bemoan how parents can send their children to “government schools” where they are trained to be “slaves to the state,” generating an entitlement culture that breeds government dependence rather than reliance on faith. Ultimately, the “secret sauce” creates “Liberty Man,” who Cameron says is “not a wimpy religious man but a stud.”

Cameron, in seeking to find out how America went from a country of Liberty Men to a fallen people, glosses over how the mythical country of Liberty Men considered African Americans, Native Americans and women to be inferior and endorsed slavery, racism, and discriminatory and violent treatment of women. He also neglects to mention that in Plymouth religious liberty was nonexistent and religious dissenters were mercilessly persecuted. For instance, people were not allowed to become Quakers or even give aide Quakers and Quakers were even executed by the colony’s government.

Just as damning, Cameron conflates the Pilgrims with the Founders: the film gives the impression that the Founders had the same religious convictions and beliefs in the role of religion in government as the Pilgrims. Never mind that more than a few of the Founders were members of the Church of England, the very same church that Cameron noted persecuted the Pilgrims.

Cameron spoke to Christian Reconstructionist ‘historians’ David Barton and Herb Titus to find out how evil, atheist academics from Boston (scary music included) lied to Americans about the country’s Christian heritage. Barton said there is a “deliberate attempt” to hide the faith of the Founding Fathers by using “revisionism,” and Titus warned that “a nation that attempts to build a foundation not based on God’s law will ultimately self-destruct.”

The movie ended with warnings about secular government and democracy run amok, with one guest repeating the myth that Adolf Hitler was a democratically elected dictator, and Alveda King appearing once again to tell us that “America hasn’t been destroyed because we call upon the Lord.”

Accuracy shouldn’t have been expected from a film about American history made by someone who freely admits that he had little knowledge of history and was a “dry sponge” who didn’t think critically about the nation’s past. But since Cameron’s findings easily conformed to the Religious Right view of American history and government, Monumental will surely find a place along with David Barton books and episodes of Glenn Beck that feed faux-history to conservative audiences across the nation.

Kirk Cameron appeared on Washington Watch Weekly with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council today to promote “Monumental,” where he praised the conservative movement and warned that Americans are forgetting the ideas of their forefathers. Just as Cameron told David Barton and Rick Green on WallBuilders Live that people must either choose whether they believe in God or put their “faith in the idea that we all from evolved from slime,” Cameron warned that “the anti-Christian agenda” wants to trick people into thinking they are “evolved amoeba” in order for them to lose their religious faith and liberty.

Cameron: The bottom line is we have so enjoyed sitting in the shade of the trees planted by our forefathers that we have gotten lazy, we’re sitting under the tree, enjoying the shade, and we’re not planting their seed with our children. That’s beginning to change, thank God, I love seeing the homeschool movement, I love seeing these conservative movements and the gospel being proclaimed boldly and fearlessly, not just in America but around the world. And then there’s an agenda to want to cut us off from our past, there are those who want to hide the past and our Christian heritage and if you can do so people lose their identity and they are looking for a new identity. If the anti-Christian agenda will say, ‘here’s your identity, you’re an evolved amoeba who ought to just go do whatever you want and don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Then they can get you to throw your faith, your character, your courage, and your liberty right out the window.

According to Kirk Cameron, criticizing him is an attack on freedom itself, so it was no surprise to hear him tell Janet Mefferd on Friday that he made his new documentary, Monumental, on the history of the US because he fears that “our freedoms are being taken away.” Mefferd said that the opposition to Cameron’s assertion that homosexuality is “destructive” is representative of the “sinful condition of our country,” which “was what drove you really to make Monumental.” Cameron agreed and maintained that the moral and spiritual fruits of America are “rotting”:

Mefferd: It’s sort of interesting, Kirk, it’s really fascinating to see how your experience this week really points out the sinful condition of our country, and that was what drove you really to make Monumental, your concern for the direction our country is headed.

Cameron: That’s right, and even deeper than my concern for my country and the way it’s headed, I’m concerned for the future of my children. I love my kids, I have friends who have children, and all of us are concerned with what we see—morally, spiritually—we think, wow, the fruit in America seems to be rotting…. All signs tell me that we are headed in the wrong direction; our freedoms are being taken away.

It appears that for the Religious Right, simply criticizing their anti-gay activism strips them of their freedoms. Echoing Kirk Cameron’s claim that his freedom of speech and religion are jeopardized by negative responses to his claim that homosexuality is “destructive,” David Krayden of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies writes on LifeSiteNews that GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is a “totalitarian” organization because it denounced Cameron. Of course, Krayden never shows how organizations that have decried Cameron are taking away any of Cameron or anyone else’s freedoms. He also claims that “the current trend towards acceptance and promotion of homosexual behaviour is in itself a throwback to the attitudes and opinions of ancient pagan civilizations,” and argued that supporters of the “gay agenda” are “completely at odds with basic democratic freedoms.”

The remarks engendered a swift counterattack by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which apparently is unaware that Cameron has continued to work as an actor and producer since he was a featured player on the sitcom Growing Pains. Said GLAAD’s senior director of programs Herndon Graddick, “In this interview, Kirk Cameron sounds even more dated than his 1980s TV character. Cameron is out of step with a growing majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation.”

OK, so you would not expect an organization that is actively pushing the gay agenda to either ignore Cameron’s comments or even to agree to disagree. Cameron said nothing about not loving gays and lesbians, but for GLAAD, anyone not of the fervent conviction that homosexuality is as natural as the rain falling is trapped in a medieval mindset and hopelessly out of step with progressive thought.

But does being “out of date” have anything to do with being right or wrong on an issue? For that matter, one could say that the current trend towards acceptance and promotion of homosexual behaviour is in itself a throwback to the attitudes and opinions of ancient pagan civilizations where same-sex couplings were not only an acceptable part of sexual expression but embedded in religious rites.

The demands of GLAAD and other similarly focussed groups that Christians accept homosexual activity may well be a rooted in the approval of that distant coupling of sex and religion, in a desire to have organized religion today sanction that behaviour just as it was in the distant past by pagan cultures. GLAAD desires a return to a religious conformity that might well be described as strangely nostalgic.

The “people of faith” that Graddick describes as accepting any sexual orientation must surely belong, as far as Biblically-based Christianity is concerned, to any apostate church that flatly rejects the clear moral dictates that may be found in preponderance in both the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, since “sexual orientation” is a term that can describe anything, and therefore ultimately means nothing, do we really believe that any sexual urge may be satiated, that any sexual calling must be applauded, that any sexual – dare we say – perversion is permissible?

Clearly we have reached a new level in society’s attitudes towards homosexuality. The yardstick of political correctness has subtly but undeniably been stretched from tolerance to acceptance to promotion – and now it is insistence, insistence that religious opinion and “people of faith” accept the homosexual lifestyle without question, without remorse, without further comments—especially to networks like CNN. At least no one – yet – is suggesting that Cameron should not be allowed to work in films because his opinions are too odious and corrosive for public viewing.

This insistence is profoundly totalitarian in scope and intent while being completely at odds with basic democratic freedoms – in particular a certain freedom which we used to have called freedom of religion. No one can demand that people think in a certain way or that the only acceptable “people of faith” are the ones who won’t disagree or “condemn” your lifestyle choices.