Kirk Cameron is that rare breed of human who can keep smiling even when the world is ranged against him. iBelieve found out more about the actor Hollywood loves to hate…

 

Child star Kirk Cameron had it all and no-one to thank. So convinced was he that there was no God that he counted himself an atheist and laughed at religious types – right up until he invited God into his sports car at 17.

“I was not always a good little Christian guy. I grew up in a family where we did not go to church and I was a staunch atheist,” he explains.

“I thought I was too clever to believe in God. When I was about 14, I had been in the entertainment industry for a few years and I got the part of Mike Seager in the sitcom Growing Pains.

“I thought I had everything. I had all the money I wanted to spend and I travelled the world meeting famous people. I was a famous person. Was I a wild animal? No, I never was. I think God was saving me from a lot of trouble, without me even knowing it, which was really cool.

“It was like helping someone who doesn’t even acknowledge your existence. I think my biggest problem was as a celebrity on a TV show, you get an inflated ego and you think you’re the centre of the universe.

“Then I met this guy – who was the father of a girl I liked – who said, ‘You have a lot, but you don’t have the Lord.’

“I thought, ‘I’d better not turn down his invitation to church – after all, he was the father of a girl I liked! I heard the gospel for the first time and it wasn’t what I thought it was. He opened up a Bible, which I thought was a big dusty book of rules designed to suck all the fun out of life, and explained that it was the Word of God.”

It was this encounter that changed the course of Kirk’s young life and immediately marked him out as different.

“The decisions that I made really affected my relationships on set. Looking back I think I could have handled the change with a bit more grace. You’re 17 years old, the pressure’s on and you have to make decisions quickly.”

From that point on, Kirk has had the courage to back up his convictions and to own them, whatever the reception, and in a 2012 interview, Piers Morgan exploited this openness to ask about the political hot potato gay marriage.

“Marriage was defined by God a long time ago,” Kirk said in the interview. “[It’s] almost as old as dirt, and it was defined in the garden between Adam and Eve – one man, one woman for life till death do you part. So I would never attempt to try to redefine marriage.”

In the furore that followed, Kirk was vilified for his honesty and found himself in need of a bodyguard. He sees the issues that liberal democracies face as a symptom, rather than a sickness, though, claiming that apathy in the church is the world’s biggest problem. The rest is just the result of that,” he adds, “and a symptom of the root problem.

“If you’ve got rotten apples hanging on your tree, you have to go down and examine the roots. Someone once said the only thing necessary for evil to advance is for good men to do nothing. And while we believe in the sovereignty of God, we understand also that God uses human beings – preachers, pastors, mums, dads, businessmen, scientists, artists, writers – as his agents of transformation. So if we want to ‘heavenise’ the world, we need to get busy.”

Admirably, Kirk is still producing challenging, biblical material with his latest work, Unstoppable, dealing with the emotive problem of evil. What makes his work engaging is the emotional investment he puts into it.

“To be honest, I wanted people to see in the film that the questions presented in Unstoppable are mine, and that this film isn’t just a philosophical or artistic exercise for me.

“I question God a lot when bad things happen and children die. My wife and I have a camp for kids with terminal illnesses, so I face these sorts of stories on a day-to-day basis. This is part of the reason I made the film.”

For Kirk, this personal openness is of prime importance to life. “I can smell a hypocrite a mile away and I can’t stand them,” he notes.

“And the hard part is, I have been one before in my life. And people are really looking for something without hypocrisy – everywhere I go I find people desperate for that. I just think of myself as one little guy who can maybe help them find it.”

For Kirk, it all comes down to his own relationship with God. “I’m trying to mature and grow in the way I express my faith through being an artist. I mean, it’s not easy trying to figure out how to be faithful to God while being an actor/director/ writer or whatever,” he says.

“I think I’ve gotten a lot better in the last five years. When I make a piece of art, the message used to take precedence. Now, I’m realising, if you sub-create, imitate God in his creation, you can’t help but reflect the truth of the gospel.

“Let’s face it, God didn’t write John 3:16 on the world, did he? I get it wrong sometimes, I know. But, I’m trying to be faithful. And there are times when I’ll still shout for the deaf to hear.”

Not only is Kirk still creating, he’s still hoping to help Hollywood despite the way he’s been treated.

“I live here, I work here, my family is here,” he adds. “I pray for everybody that I know. I pray for people that I don’t know. I pray not just for my family but for my TV family. Who couldn’t use blessings from heaven?

“When I look and see the opportunities I have here in Hollywood to spread some light and some life in a place that is notorious for exporting so much moral filth and darkness, it’s exciting.”

 

iBelieve Magazine

Print | Digital | Articles | Advertise | Mailing list