Candace Cameron Bure’s ‘Great American Family’ Christmas Movies Miss the Point of Faith

Bah, humbug, reader! It’s December 27th and Christmas is but a distant memory. I’m nursing a holiday hangover and trying not to obsess over how no one in my SO’s family wanted my Yankee Swap gift. All of my shows are on hiatus until the new year, so I have nothing better to do than comb the headlines, desperate for some novel information to drown out the sound of my existential dread. And lo, my least-favorite woman, Candace Cameron Bure has something to say! Let’s see what she’s been up to lately.

“When you’re deciding on a new Christmas project, are you looking for something that you haven’t yet gotten to do, or is it more about knowing what works for your audience?” Bure was asked by The Hollywood Reporter. Remember, Bure is Christmas’s PR person, and she spends her days making heartfelt films about the holiday season for her television network, The Great American Family.

“It’s a little bit of both. I read so many Christmas scripts all year long. I’m looking for something that feels fresh to me and will resonate with the audience. Especially for Great American Family channel—where we lean into faith in our movies, and our tagline for the channel is, ‘Christmas as it’s meant to be’—I’m looking for things that really touch the heart and have more purpose to them than just the magic of Christmas or the Santa Claus of Christmas.”

This is a classic CCB answer. She just can’t help but alienate anyone who doesn’t have an Evangelical relationship with her lord and savior, even though she’s gotten into bushels of trouble for it. Of those troubles, she said:

“Most networks are not trying to be all things to all people. What really differentiates our channel from some of the other ones out there is that we’re not afraid to talk about God and God’s hand in our lives instead of fate or providence.”

The thing Bure doesn’t seem to understand is that no one is coming for her God. That dude’s been around a whole lot longer than we whimpering liberals have, and I don’t think he’s going anywhere anytime soon. For a lot of us, it feels like the other way around. This is why I’ve never understood the “fear” that she and other people of the same intensity of faith speak of. I feel fear—I’m afraid of my rights being taken away more than they already have been, of society as I know it crumbling and crushing me into the dust. I guess her fear of not being able to make bad movies doesn’t feel as scary as my fear.

But of course, I would say that, right? I’m a godless liberal who complains for a living. That’s why I wanted to go to mass with my boyfriend’s family this Christmas. I wasn’t raised with religion—my parents tried to take us to the Unitarian Universalist services for holidays when we were growing up, but even that was a little too much for them—but my boyfriend was; he was baptized and confirmed and all the rest. He has the kind of faith I admire: the belief in something bigger and better than himself, without the “as it’s meant to be” and the “fear.” The live and let live kind.

That’s what I found when I went to a Catholic mass on Christmas Eve. With Miller High Life on my breath from the pre-mass bar hop, I sang along to familiar carols. I shook hands with strangers and told them, “Peace be with you.” I listened to the homily about Mary finding the manger on Christmas Eve, about what she must have been thinking or feeling at that moment. I marveled at the efficiency of the communion ceremony. No one said anything about fear or enemies, no one tried to convert me, and no act of God smote me down. And then we went home, ate spaghetti, and watched the kind of Christmas movies Bure would hate, the ones about magic and Santa Claus.

I know going to one nice church service doesn’t fix all of the evils of religion that have been used to oppress people for as long as religion and people have existed, and I’m not claiming that anyone off the street could have walked into the same service I did and felt the same welcome. I’m just saying that maybe if people like Candace Cameron Bure stopped trying so hard to shove their faith down everyone’s throats, they’d realize there’s already enough of it.