It’s actually a very different sort of promo. For a Christian movie.

When the film title and trailer released for Saving Christmas starring Kirk Cameron, all the cool-kid Christians and Christianity-critics alike laughed and laughed. So did I, a little bit.

But what if I told you … all the movie’s “keep Christmas in Christmas” and “war on Christmas” slogans, and cheesy marketing, could be a clever ploy to sneak past watchful dragons? That is, all that was a cover to make conservative Christians feel more comfortable with the film that’s actually about challenging them?¹ That’s what Christian provocateur Douglas Wilson believes about Saving Christmas.

The movie was not directly about saving Christmas from the Forces of Secularism (although that is related, at least indirectly). No, the movie is about saving Christmas from the forces of overly-precise Christians, who couldn’t find Christmas in their Bible search software, and who think we shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Now while this might seem kind of extra-Christiany, this is actually falling for one of the basic lies that the enemy is trying to tell us.

[…] It is not the path of discernment to judge things by what they used to be.

[…] Thor’s day is Thursday, but not anymore. I use that example because Thor’s name is not quite forgotten. […] And the reason you make a wish before you blow out your birthday candles is because back in the day a soothsayer would then come ambling up to the table and tell your fortune from the patterns that the smoke made. When was the last time you made a little smoke for the soothsayer at your birthday? Well, you made the smoke but it wasn’t for the soothsayer, because you’re a Christian and you don’t believe in soothsayers.²

I don’t always agree with Douglas Wilson. But when I do, it’s when I’m also possibly agreeing with Kirk Cameron.

And if you have a special interest in rejecting the way pagans try to “claim” fantasies, holidays, or ideas — and the way some Christians insist we ought to go along with it — then you may also agree with them. Or at least you may hope that this really was the actual idea behind the outlandishly titled and marketed Saving Christmas, starring a candy-cane and palantir-wielding Kirk Cameron.

The film arrives in theaters (for a limited run) starting this Friday.