When Kirk Cameron’s production company released this new trailer for Saving Christmas a few weeks ago, I assumed it was more or less the same as the longer trailer that we’d already posted in August. Boy was I wrong. After the intro from Cameron, whose unctuous, transparently disingenuous line reads make him seem like some kind of Stepford Husband designed solely for smarm, he dives into a crazy story about some conspiracy by an “anti-Christian” group “out of Turkey, of all places” (this is obviously code for THEY WERE MUSLIMS! DIRTY GOAT F*CKING RAGHEADS WHO HATE CHRIST!) who allegedly…
“…hijacked our website and replaced our trailer with hate-filled propaganda, and promises to destroy everything… well, everything that Christmas is all about.”
Hmm. Why does this sound so familiar? Obviously, the most fundie wing of evangelical Christians banking on an intense persecution complex is nothing new (see: Heaven Is For Real). But lately it seems like this complex has taken an especially wackadoo turn. Last week there was a story going around of a Canadian woman who had supposedly been turned down for a job she applied for at a tour company, and received abusive emails from, all on account of her Christian beliefs.
“The way they treated me was pretty outrageous,” Bethany Paquette told Sun News Network on Wednesday.
The soft-spoken Paquette adds that she fears anti-Christian bigotry is becoming more acceptable in Canada.
“It would seem like it’s becoming quite common, and I know I’ve definitely faced a lot of it,” she said.
The only problem with her story, it seems, is that the tour guide company, “Amaruk Wilderness,” doesn’t actually seem to exist. No one knows quite who is behind the Amaruk hoax yet, and The Toronto Sun, who broke the initial story, wondered aloud if it was a case of Real Bigotry, Fake Company (a somewhat self-serving conclusion, to be sure). I’m not so sure. This persecution just seems to dovetail a little too perfectly with the extreme fundie worldview where everyone is trying to keep them from loving Jesus. An ambiguously Muslim group of anti-Christians is trying to kill Christmas? I’m not saying it’s fake, but it does seem like the all-too-perfect lead-in to the next part of Kirk Cameron’s pitch:
“Coincidence? Or does it actually PROVE THE TITLE of the movie? Will you and your family join me and my family this year in putting ‘Christ’ back in Christmas?”
I mean, I thought the Christ was already a firmly established component of Christmas, but if some dirty Muslims are trying to yank it out of there, I guess Kirk Cameron must really need my help! I’ll give you anything you need, starting with this Mini Cooper full of Subway sandwiches.
It seems that the radical fundies have found their new boogieman. Or they’ve gotten better at selling their old boogie man. The question remains, is it real? The way I see it, basically, either the radical fundies have gone full Catfish on us, or there really has sprung up a conspiracy of anti-Christian haxx0rs dedicated to trolling them with their own paranoid fantasies. Which, to be honest, doesn’t seem that far-fetched either. Either way, it is a supremely strange time to be alive.