Actor Kirk Cameron recently noted that the Biblical command to “turn the other cheek” is not a command that Christians must “tolerate tyranny.”
During his Feb. 21 appearance with podcaster Tim Pool, the former Growing Pains star spoke about his efforts to promulgate religious freedom across the nation.
During the conversation, Pool noted that Christians have been playing their own part in America’s decline by being too tolerant and accepting, the Christian Post reported.
“Christians in this country are good people who keep saying OK to these people, being tolerant, allowing them to live the way they want to live,” Pool said, summarizing a point made by businessman Patrick Bet David.
“But what happens is they push more into the institutions, they introduce dangerous, bad ideas, they start targeting kids, and now we’re here where we are today,” Pool noted.
But Cameron said that the Biblical concepts of “turning the other cheek” and “loving your neighbor” were never meant to stand by and ignore evil.
“I see so many who are just tolerating evil and that’s not loving your neighbor,” Cameron exclaimed. “At the end of the day, the two great Commandments of Christianity are to love God with all of your heart, mind, soul and strength, and the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.”
The actor added, “If you ‘tolerate’ the kinds of things that bring misery to your neighbors and ultimately strip them of their liberties, you’re not loving them.”
Cameron added that the U.S. Constitution is another way that we protect against the overreach of tyrants.
“We don’t tolerate tyranny, either from the outside or the inside, and that is a very essential Christian virtue, is to not tolerate that type of thing,” Cameron said.
“If you’re gonna cuss me out and you’re gonna steal my coat, I might love you anyway and give you my shirt too,” Cameron said. “And in doing that, people go — their conscience convicts them and they come back around and go, ‘Why do you do that? Why do you live that way?”
But that tolerance is not extended in all cases.
“But you come after my kids, or you start stripping away my liberties, or you make my neighbors live in poverty and misery so that you can go live on Epstein island? No, I think we shouldn’t tolerate that,” he said.
Cameron said that he does not necessarily follow a particular religious tenet and added that he loves the history of the United States because the founders rooted their ideas in “Christian teaching.”
“I love understanding the Bill of Rights. I love understanding why the Founding Fathers decided to enshrine the things they did and why, and … this is a historical fact, it was concepts of biblical teaching,” he exclaimed.
“The Founding Fathers just didn’t read the Bible and say, ‘Let’s do what the Bible says,'” Cameron said. “They actually thought about what it would mean to create a government that opposed those teachings.”
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