It’s the holiday season once again, and Americans everywhere are settling in to watch their favorite classic Christmas movies. But I’d like to go off the beaten path and highlight a holiday film you might not have heard of: “Saving Christmas,” a 2014 tract starring and executive produced by evangelist Kirk Cameron.
Formerly a child actor known for his role in Growing Pains, Cameron’s adult life has largely revolved around Christian activism, including distributing altered, pro-creationism copies of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” across U.S. college campuses in 2009. During the 2020 COVID lockdowns, Cameron became a figurehead in the conservative anti-lockdown movement. Christmas celebrations were a major sticking point for him – he organized multiple Christmas caroling protests in defiance of public health officials, arguing that the “psychological harm” of COVID lockdowns was worse than the actual disease.
In the years since, Cameron has moved on to the conservative culture war on education, including a children’s book tour visiting libraries across the nation. He recently launched a Christian children’s show starring himself, titled “Adventures of Iggy and Mr. Kirk.”
Discussing the show, Cameron told Fox News that parents are “not looking for gay dinosaurs and trans ducks to teach their children morality. They want wholesome values and morals to be taught to their kids by people that they trust.”
“Saving Christmas” is effectively a footnote in Cameron’s long career as a culture warrior – and a very silly footnote at that. But 2024 marks its 10-year anniversary, so there’s really no better time than now to look back at it.
The poster seems to imply that “Saving Christmas” is some kind of holiday action-adventure romp. This implication is only bolstered by the scene immediately following Cameron’s introduction, which purports to show a gritty historical St. Nicholas going off to defend the faith. Both of these things indicate that the film you’re about to watch will be something exciting and entertaining. It isn’t. In fact, it’s all downhill from here.
The opening credits, set over an animated pastiche of Biblical Christmas scenes, seem to alternatively imply that the film is some sort of zany comedy, like “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” but with more Jesus. This is closer to being accurate – I did laugh a lot while watching “Saving Christmas,” but probably not for the intended reasons.
One might assume, given Cameron’s faith, that this is part of the right-wing counteroffensive against secular liberals’ alleged “War on Christmas.” That’s not entirely wrong, as he does take a few shots at the left early on. But Cameron spends most of the film trying to save Christmas from other Christians, specifically those who reject trees, gifts, Santa, etc. as detracting from the religious meaning of the holiday.
“You know, what’s next, are they going to tell us hot chocolate is bad for us? That the Druids invented it?” Cameron says in his opening narration. He talks about hot chocolate a lot in this movie.
But far from defending the more secular aspects of the holiday, many of which have roots in pagan tradition, Cameron instead takes the pseudohistorical stance that these things were Christian all along.
“Maybe we need a word from outside. A voice, someone who can remind us of the true meaning of Christmas,” Cameron says. “Because maybe somewhere along the way we lost sight of the real story. … Or maybe just maybe someone like Santa Claus is actually on the team.”
The bulk of the film centers around Cameron (Kirk) sitting in a car, debating the true meaning of the holiday with his brother-in-law Christian (played by director Darren Doane). Christian, true to his name, is meant to represent every Christian who has criticized the modern Christmas celebration from a faith-based perspective. He rattles off concerns about the celebration of Jesus’ birth being sidelined by Christmas trees and Santa; excessive holiday spending that could be directed to charity; overemphasis on material goods and commercialism; the holiday’s pagan roots; and so on.
As the film’s resident strawman, Christian brings up these concerns in nonsensical ways that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually saying. In doing so, he tees Cameron up to knock these concerns down one by one with interpretations of scripture that are unorthodox to say the least.
There’s one such exchange that I think is especially telling: when the two main characters debate the value of Christmas trees. “Christmas tree, not in the Bible!” Christian shouts. “That’s a pagan idol symbol worshippy thingy!”
Cameron (Kirk) goes on to explain the joy he personally gets from his family Christmas tradition. “I make my kids wait at the top of the staircase. I don’t let them come down the stairs until my wife and I get everything ready, the tree, and the anticipation builds, and they run down the stairs when I tell them they can and they run out to the tree and they just are blown away by all the presents sitting at the base of the tree.”
To which Christian responds, a half-crazed look in his eyes: “That’s exactly what the Druids did.”
What follows next is Cameron justifying the tree’s place in a Christian home through a series of Gish gallop-esque faulty logical leaps:
- 1. The Garden of Eden was full of trees, so it’s basically the same thing as a Christmas tree lot, right?
- 2. In Genesis, humanity fell from grace when Adam stole a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
- 3. “Now when you steal something you’re required to put it back. … The only way Adam could put the fruit back on the tree would be … to put himself on the tree.”
- 4. Because a crucifix is tall and made of wood, it’s basically the same thing as a living tree, right?
- 5. “Now think, what did Jesus do? … He put himself on a tree making us right with God.”
- 6. Therefore, because some important moments in the Bible involved trees (if you squint enough), Christmas trees are Biblical.
“Saving Christmas” makes many strange points like this. Cameron seems especially fixated on justifying the material iconography of the modern American Christmas celebration: the nutcrackers, the presents, the feasts. Rather than wholly reject Christian’s accusation that the holiday has become centered on vapid material things when it ought to celebrate Christ, Cameron tries to have it both ways, claiming the materialism itself is in celebration of Christ.
“This is a celebration of the eternal God taking on a material body,” Cameron narrates, with all the smugness of someone trying to win a Reddit debate on a technicality.
I get the sense, watching this, that Cameron has a lot of nostalgia and personal attachment to these things. As mentioned above, he seems to especially love giving presents, most of all to his children. Even if my Christmas celebrations are far more secular than his, I can sympathize with this: as I’ve come of age, I’ve started to take much more joy from giving gifts around the holidays than I do from receiving them. I think it’s fine to enjoy that for its own sake.
That being said, it’s difficult to ignore the way that “Saving Christmas” sweeps Christian’s concerns about holiday waste under the rug without ever really answering them. In the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, households generate approximately one million extra tons of landfill trash per week, owing to shopping bags, wrapping paper, and unwanted gifts. That’s just one aspect of how excessive, unsustainable holiday practices impact the environment – and it’s a conversation that Cameron et. al. seem unprepared to have. This does not mean that we should necessarily “throw it out the door because it’s all bad,” as Cameron suggests critics of Christmas want, but it does mean that, regardless of our faith (or lack thereof), we should take steps to prioritize sustainability.
I certainly don’t think you need to go to the lengths to justify giving presents that Cameron does in this film. As Christian, full of renewed holiday joy, rushes back inside to greet his family, he slides on his belly across the floor at the tree in gratuitous slow motion. I can only assume he gives himself a nasty head injury in the process, because Cameron’s narration shows him looking at the stacked presents in a frankly absurd new way:
“Look at the presents under the tree. When you look at them from this perspective see how they look like a city skyline,” Cameron says. “Imagine the new Jerusalem, a heavenly city whose architect and builder is God. … And what’s at the center of that city? A tree. The Tree of Life.”
“Saving Christmas” can’t quite seem to decide whether these reinterpretations are, in fact, revisions, or if these are how the Christian doctrine was always meant to be interpreted. At the start, Cameron says that the stories he’s about to tell are meant to “remind us of the true meaning of Christmas.” But closer to the end, he says “We need to make traditions of our own. We need to infuse old symbols with new meaning. We need to rearrange our lives and our homes so that every single thing points to Jesus.”
I’m not making any novel point by bringing up how Christian fundamentalists claim to advocate for the literal text of the Bible, then selectively center some passages and ignore others to serve their own purposes. Too many people before me have made that point. What I find so fascinating about “Saving Christmas” is that it doesn’t even try to hide that it’s doing this. Cameron’s film twists historical biblical scripture into a pretzel to justify modern American Christmas traditions, and says out loud that this is necessary to promote a more convenient vision of the faith.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the other Christian nationalist culture warriors who seem to have their fingerprints on this film. The opening title sequence shows that “Saving Christmas” is a production of three film studios, one of them being Liberty University – “Training Champions for Christ Since 1971.” Liberty University is on the Advisory Board of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition plan to fill U.S. government posts with conservative loyalists and end the separation of church and state.
In its closing credits, the film gives an “Extra Special Thanks” to four names: Douglas Wilson, James B. Jordan, Doug Jones, and William J. Federer. All of those are noteworthy evangelists and theologians, some of whom continue to be prominent to this day. Wilson is an advocate for classical Christian education, which seeks to integrate Christianity into all aspects of education. He also believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Federer, a board member of Colorado-based Truth & Liberty, has embraced wild conspiracies, claiming at one point that the “homosexual agenda” would turn America into an Islamic nation.
It’s easy to dismiss “Saving Christmas” as a ridiculous, incompetent, but ultimately amusing and harmless film. It’s definitely ridiculous, incompetent, and amusing, but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely harmless. Keeping these ties to Christian nationalism in mind, the movie can instead be read as an attempt to gain ground in the culture war. By rejecting and rewriting the pagan origins of the holiday, “Saving Christmas” tries to reclaim what has become an almost entirely secular celebration as having always been about Christianity.
On that subject, we shouldn’t forget the film’s tacit endorsement of religiously-motivated violence. A segment of “Saving Christmas” tells the story of Saint Nicholas of Myra, whose legend mutated over time into the modern Santa Claus. Though there is no direct evidence that he existed, historical tradition contends that he was at one point the Bishop of Myra, and that he attended the Council of Nicaea, where he struck one heretic across the face for rejecting the divinity of Jesus. “Saving Christmas” rewrites this into a full beatdown, with Nicholas throwing the heretic to the ground and beating him repeatedly with a staff while dubstep music plays in the background.
Cameron’s heavy-handed narration, playing over this violent scene, spins it into a parable against modern political correctness: “Those were difficult and desperate times. Truth was on the line. And it was not the time for this pastor to go soft on truth or stay quiet for the sake of being politically correct. … [Santa] is actually the defender of the faith you want to be.” To this film, violence to defend the faith against naysayers isn’t just permissible – it’s worthy of praise.
“Ho, ho, ho” indeed.
