‘Monumental’ Mischief: Kirk Cameron’s History Boys Peddle Religious Extremism
Kirk Cameron’s new movie “Monumental” gets released tonight in select theaters around the country, and I don’t think it’s going to be a hit with people like you and me.
Cameron is an actor best known for his role in the ’80s TV sitcom “Growing Pains.” Today he’s a fundamentalist Christian best known for…well, not much of anything. He made news recently, however, when he went on CNN’s “Piers Morgan” to promote his new film and wound up bashing gays and gay marriage. (Homosexuality, he said, is “unnatural…. It’s detrimental and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”)
His remarks produced a well-deserved rebuke from the LGBT community and its allies, but largely overlooked in the discussion was the broader theocratic agenda Cameron seems to be peddling.
The full film hasn’t been released yet, but the trailers from it and the list of far-right “experts” involved in the production suggest we’re in for more “Christian nation” propaganda.
Among the cast of characters appearing in the movie is David Barton, the notorious fundamentalist myth-maker whose WallBuilders outfit has made a fortune selling Christian-nation claptrap - some of it so bogus even he has come to repudiate it.
Another featured “expert” is Herb Titus, a law professor so extreme that TV preacher Pat Robertson had to can him as head of Regent University Law School. In more recent times, Titus has distinguished himself as a B-list birther luminary.
And, for good measure, we have Marshall Foster, founder of the World History Institute (as well as the now apparently defunct Mayflower Institute). Foster rails against “post-modern tolerance,” thinks public schools should be shut down and wants everything to be governed by a “biblical worldview,” just as in the days of the Pilgrims and Puritans.
Foster is “co-writer” of the “Monumental” script. According to online sources, he met Cameron in an airport and the relationship developed from there.
The theme of the movie seems to be that the Pilgrims came to America seeking religious liberty, and they set up a model Christian community that we ought to emulate today.