Kirk Cameron is a born-again Christian evangelist and former teen star who believes that God sometimes miraculously grants the wishes of true believers. If you were Kirk Cameron and had some kind of movie career, you might believe it too. Those who were children or just had no lives during the 1980s may remember Cameron from the Alan Thicke sitcom Growing Pains. It was during the run of that series that Cameron, already well-established as the show's meal ticket, discovered religion and reportedly started throwing his weight around backstage, demanding script revisions when he was unhappy with their "moral content" and even sparking a rumor that he had a hand in the dismissal of a supporting cast member who had posed nude. (He also chose not to invite any members of his "TV family" to his wedding, a slight that he later apologized for.) In 1989, Cameron starred in a major feature film about heroic college debaters who appear before the Supreme Court and make an unanswerable argument against legalized abortion. (The film was called Listen to Me. Last year, when director Kasi Lemmons made a movie about a black ex-con turned radio DJ who connects with Washington, D.C. audiences and helps counsel them through the travails of the 1960s and early 1970s, it was called Talk to Me. In a comparison of the two titles, one might detect the key difference in conservative and liberal pop culture, in a nutshell.) Since that film bombed, Cameron has mostly focused on "Christian-themed" projects: he starred in the movie versions of the Left Behind books. Now he's starring in a new movie, Fireproof, "about a firefighter who saves his marriage by turning to God." As Julie Bloom reports in The New York Times, it was made for $500,000 by "an almost all-volunteer cast and crew" and in two weeks has made more than twelve million dollars. Miracles are breaking out all over.
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