There is so much to respond to in Kirk Cameron’s Beliefnet interview, it’s hard to know where to begin. Not least is the notion that we need to ask ourselves why we care so much about what a former sit-com actor has to say about complex issues of theology, global politics and biblical interpretation? Of course we know the answer. Fame has become a substitute for expertise.
That is not to say that every person is not entitled to form their own spiritual opinions and impressions based primarily upon their own life experiences. In fact, that trend is among the healthiest things going on in spirituality today. To be sure, radical democratization has its downsides, but in the end, all of our faiths function best, not when they are in the hands of some small elite group of so-called leaders, but when they are in the hands of the faithful who stake their lives on the communities in which they live.
And to be perfectly frank, there is nothing shocking about Cameron’s approach to reading God’s hand in nature, history or politics — dangerous perhaps, but not all that unusual. And if anything, that is what we should find disturbing about some of his theories i.e. not how unusual they are, but how typical.
When asked “if God is angry with how things are going (in the world) and (if) He is punishing us?” Cameron responded with some pretty unambiguous statements indicating his ability to know the mind of God. My experience is that anyone who is too clear about knowing what God thinks, either thinks they are God, or that the God in which they believe thinks suspiciously like they already do. The first group is guilty of dangerous arrogance and the second is guilty of equally dangerous narcissism.

In either case, the humility which all faithful people espouse, including Cameron at the end of the interview, flies out the window. And with it goes the only corrective on the passions which engaged faith always generates. Oh yeah, that, and a great number of “non-believers” and “errant believers” who “don’t fit into God’s plans”. And that should worry all of us, especially if like me, you believe in a God that is revealed over time and in various holy scriptures.
The only thing which stands between us and becoming the nightmare that we think faith guards against, is that measure of humility which demands that we admit, we do not know it all – that the will of an infinite God is simply to big for any one faith or person to fully grasp.
Among the theories he shares, Cameron tells us:

….we can get a clue about the way God deals with nations by looking at the nation of Israel. If you go back into the Old Testament you’ll see that God promised this special nation of Israel [and] that if they would obey His commands that He would bless their crops and bless their nation and their children and their marriages and things would go well for them. But, that if they didn’t, if they turned and rebelled against Him and followed after other gods, that he’d remove that hand of blessing and they instead would inherit a curse and He would allow their enemies to overtake them.

Because I am sure that Kirk is a decent enough sort, I assume he doesn’t appreciate how toxic this read of history has been, literally causing the deaths of millions of Jews over the millennia. In fact, until Nostra Aetate (typically called Vatican II) one of the most powerful teachings shared by the Catholic Church and many Protestants was that Jewish suffering was proof of our being cursed by God for rejecting Him and killing His Son. The “fall of Israel” was proof of God’s rejection of the Jewish people and the creation of a new covenant through Jesus Christ which superseded the “old one”.
On that basis alone, he should probably ease up that interpretation of history. Not to mention that such reads of history might demand that, with the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, God is now done with Christians and returned to “His first love, the Jews”. No, I don’t believe that, but then I’m not Kirk Cameron and I don’t share his approach to interpreting history.
It also doesn’t help his case, that roughly the same arguments made by him, are espoused by Osama Bin Laden, the mullahs in Iran and a whole bunch of other folks who see our supposed downfall as a nation as proof that “God loves them more”. And unless that’s the company Kirk likes to keep, he might want to re-think this approach for that reason as well.
Finally, the Biblical line of reasoning which imagined a direct and unambiguous correlation between how we behaved and God causing crops to grow or die, nations to succeed or fail, and our personal lives to go well or badly, was predicated on a world with no hereafter. That’s right; most of the Hebrew Bible assumes that these things had to play out here, because there really wasn’t much after this life. The idea that there was, only caught on in the first century before Jesus, probably because the evidence for such a discernable calculus of divine reward and punishment was drying up fast in the face of repeated conquests and civil strife in the Holy land.
Not surprisingly, it was into this breach that both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, two traditions in which the eternal life of the soul and a system of rewards and punishments in the next world, emerged. So, for yet another reason, I would caution Cameron against the easy equation between the system of divine reward and punishment found in ancient Israel and the one in which he believes today – unless of course he wants to give up on ideas like the existence of heaven and return of Christ, which I am thinking he does not.
I won’t even touch his understanding of the relationship between Christian faith and the founding of our nation. I would however suggest that he pick up a copy of Steven Waldman’s book, Founding Faith. Suffice it to say that the role of religion in the founding and maintaining of this country is far more nuanced and interesting than the culture warriors on either side would have us believe.
So I wish Kirk well in both his life and his ministry — both seem to be successful works in progress. And I also wish him the ability to see that God’s hand is larger than any of us can fully see, and that His plan is certainly larger than our own understanding of what’s going in right now in the world. Believing that the hand exists and is working, is not the same as insisting you know precisely how.