How to say what you mean and not apologize and not care what people think of you
I have a lot of respect for Candace Cameron, a working actress who has been sweating it for like four decades and who has secured an odd but stable spot in the firmament of U.S. pop culture: She will be forever immortalized as D.J. Tanner from Full House in the 1980s and 90s, and she’s also been immortalized now as the “Queen of Christmas” after having produced like seven thousand Christmas movies for Hallmark. It’s not often someone is immortalized twice in one lifetime. David Duchovny tried to do with with Californication and he kind of failed at it; Patrick Stewart did it via both Star Trek and X-Men, although if we’re being honest he’s still more Picard than Xavier. It’s not easy to pull off.
Candace Cameron is also a conservative Christian, and in that she deserves a tremendous amount of admiration, because being a conservative Christian in showbusiness is a deeply difficult slog even on the best of days. That goes double for actors like Candace; she herself is outspoken and unapologetic in her conservative Christian convictions. It is my unfortunate experience that progressives on the whole tend to really not like outspoken conservatives, doubly so for those who are Christian; they might tolerate you if you hold those beliefs, they might even brook a little debate here and there, but if you get too comfortable voicing your opinions then something changes and you start to look more like an enemy. Believe me.
Candace Cameron got a double dose of it this week when she revealed that she was leaving her lordship over Hallmark and heading to the Christian-oriented Great American Family channel. Leaving a gravy train like Hallmark in favor of a network literally nobody has ever heard of is precisely the kind of thing you’d expect a deeply devoted Christian to do; Candace, meanwhile, put the icing on the cake by telling the Wall Street Journal that her new channel would “keep traditional marriage at the core” of its productions, in contrast to mainstream production studios which are tripping all over themselves trying to shoehorn a bunch of LGBT content into their Christmas lineups.
Well, of course she got the backlash, and the blasting, and the slamming, and the bla bla bla, the standard operating procedure in a media environment in which half the news stories are about someone’s tweet and the other half is about other people reacting to the tweet. Candace was criticized most prominently by One Tree Hill star Hilarie Burton and YouTube star JoJo Siwa; none of it mattered, it wasn’t important, nobody really cares all that much. And yet it’s been a big thing for the past few days, just wall-to-wall headlines over a woman’s oblique reference to the normality of a 10,000-year-old human institution. I think this may have been my favorite headline from the whole stupid controversy:
“Pictured.” They snapped a furtive shot of her coming back from Starbucks and they act like she’s weathering a sex scandal. You got to love this. Hilarie Burton is a grumpy former teen soap opera star and JoJo Siwa is one of those odd, almost tragic Gen Zers who makes deeply bizarre YouTube videos that look like fever dreams. The idea that Candace Cameron cares about the “backlash” from these people is just laughable; this woman has been on her game for 40 years on her own terms and she’s plainly not interested in the catty melodrama.
But doggone it, even when she has the chance to do so, Candace won’t twist the knife at all, she’s just too classy:
"To the members of the media responsible for using this opportunity to fan flames of conflict and hate, I have a simple message: I love you anyway. To those who hate what I value and who are attacking me online: I love you. To those who have tried to assassinate my character: I love you. To everyone reading this, of any race, creed, sexuality, or political party, including those who have tried to bully me with name-calling, I love you. ... And in the sole motivation of pure love, I hope you'll join me in sharing God’s hope for all the world this Christmas season. Call that my Christmas wish."
Sometimes it feels not fair. In a situation like this you want to see your hero vanquish your adversaries, just completely smote them; it is certainly well within Candace’s abilities to do so. Yet instead of that we get this: Love, not war; forgiveness, not revenge; peace, not strife. As a devoted follower of Christ, Candace is in effect pulling the same redemptive cosmic prank on us that Christ pulled on the Disciples 2,000 years ago. The joke still slaps after all that time!
You don’t have to be a Christian, of course, to be able to shrug off this kind of tawdry melodrama in favor of something better. (It helps, of course.) The message here is broad and broadly applicable: Stop caring what people think of you. If you believe something, say it; don’t be afraid. Don’t apologize when people get mad at you for holding defensible, reasonable beliefs about important topics. You don’t have to be afraid of “name-calling,” or social media backlash, or any of it. You will be immensely happier and freer if you cease worrying about people’s reactions to the things you believe in. Give it a shot and I promise you you’ll love it.