It isn’t enough that Kirk Cameron tried to steal Halloween from pagans, now he wants to steal Christmas too.
Cameron tried to rewrite well-known history back before Halloween, when he declared that there was no pagan origin to the holiday now known as Halloween.
“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,” Cameron told The Christian Post. “The costumes poke fun at the fact that the devil and other evils were publicly humiliated by Christ at His resurrection. That’s what the Scriptures say, that He publicly humiliated the devil when He triumphed over power and principality and put them under his feet.
“Over time you get some pagans who want to go, ‘This is our day, high holy day of the Satanic church,’ that this is all about death, but Christians have always known since the first century that death was defeated, that the grave was overwhelmed, that ghosts, goblins, devils are foolish has-beens who used to be in power but not anymore. That’s the perspective Christians should have.”
“The real origins have a lot to do with All Saints Day and All Hallows Eve,” Cameron said. “If you go back to old church calendars, especially Catholic calendars, they recognize the holiday All Saints Day, with All Hallows Eve the day before, when they would remember the dead. That’s all tied in to Halloween.”
Cameron’s claim was met with loads of criticism, not by pagans, but by Evangelicals who are more offended that Cameron would encourage something with Catholic origins.
Now Cameron is trying to Grinch away Christmas from the poor pagans. He spoke to the Christian Post about this one by way of promoting his new limited-release film, Kirk Cameron Saves Christmas.
“It starts this time of year. You have people who want to pull down nativity scenes, you have lawsuits showing up in schools that can’t have Christmas performances … it has to be winter break or holiday break or sparkle season … they want to take that out of Christmas so they don’t offend people who hate Christmas. And then we have a new group who are telling us, convincingly, that Christmas is actually a celebration of paganism.”
“We don’t know this stuff, we kinda drink the Kool-Aid and believe pagans when they tell us they have ownership of these things.”
Cameron refers to a “new group” declaring that Christmas has pagan origins. This is far from new. Jehovah’s Witnesses used to celebrate Christmas, but dropped it in 1928 because of its pagan origins.
Cameron’s film also tries to use scripture to prove that the Bible talked about Christmas trees and other trappings of the holiday that have long been recognized by scholars and theologians to be originally pagan.
The Christian Post spoke with Biblical scholar Katie Hoyt McNabb about Cameron’s claims.
“There is nothing about Christmas in the Bible because it wasn’t celebrated while the Bible was written,” McNabb said.
“Christians brought forth all of the things that made them happy and joyful when they decided to celebrate the event of Jesus’ birth. I don’t know why we as Christians feel that those traditions are being threatened,” she added.
The post further linked to an infographic that they had run previously that analyzed the origins of Christmas and stated:
Pope Gregory I wrote to Mellitus, his missionary in England, telling him ‘not to stop such ancient Pagan festivities’, but to ‘adapt them to the rites of the Church, only changing the reason of them from a heathen to a Christian impulse.’
At the rate Cameron’s going, you might get more of the accurate spirit of Christmas by passing on his film and spending the holiday with the Griswolds. Maybe Cousin Edie can get enough of Cameron’s logic down the storm drain at the curb to salvage the season.
