Candace Cameron Bure has dealt with a fair amount of criticism over the course of her career. From her decision to become one of the first stars to switch from Hallmark to GAF to her viewpoints during her tenure on The View, she’s used to being the subject of online discourse by now. Yet, she recently spoke with her brother Kirk Cameron about how she deals with the critics online and elsewhere.
In a wide-ranging interview, the Fuller House actress opened up about her faith and the traits she feels she has been given, including “joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” It’s the latter Bure said helps her to deal with the online discourse surrounding her points of view. She told her brother Kirk:
I feel because God gives each and every one of of us self-control, that’s something that we need to have when we’re in those hot topics and divisive conversations. A lot of times I know our emotions can want to jump out first, but it’s so important to represent Christ well. And I think that means taking a pause, taking a breath. take a beat. Consider the other perspective, where they’re coming from. Take a second to pray and then speak your voice, speak your opinion.
Speaking with Kirk Cameron on TBN’s YouTube, the actress spoke out about how self-control is the key tool she uses while dealing with critiques on the interwebs. She also called out “calmness” as a trait that helps her to get through exchanges with people who disagree with her.
But I think that calmness just in the very beginning really helps when you take that beat and that breathe, because I don’t think anyone’s ever going to change their opinion when you yell at them or bark at them and tell them how awful they are for how they’re thinking.
From a practical viewpoint, she feels getting bent out of shape during an exchange of views generally never gets anyone anywhere. Previously, Bure also opened up about the “endurance” she's picked up dealing with flak online, so there’s certainly more than one skill set that has come in handy for the actress when it comes to sharing opinions.
Just to mention, the conversation with her brother came after she said her new network GAF would focus on projects featuring “traditional marriages” unlike Hallmark, as the network had recently started to include more diverse content including LGBTQ+ romances and those highlighting different faiths.
So, Why Does Candace Cameron Bure Speak Up In Public At All?
Specifically touching on her run on The View, which Bure was a part of between 2015 and 2016, the actress noted she was hired to share her perspective, even when she was often the odd woman out on the show. Her brother specifically asked about how she handled herself during the tenure of her daytime talk show run, revealing he personally “struggles with” things other people say he feels are "personally offensive." He asked her how how she approached this sort of discourse on the show. Per Bure:
In that platform, being on The View, it’s your job to speak your voice. So, there were many times when I knew my argument wasn’t going to convince anyone and I would have rather stayed quiet. But I couldn’t because I had to speak.
Still, the experience on The View hasn't stop[ed her from speaking out on social media over the past several years on topics ranging from her husband grabbing her boob in a viral post to her faith in the years since her Christmas film career picked up.
In general, she does seem to have mostly positive things to say about her run on the series, despite former guest Danny Pintauro also calling her out online recently for the way he felt their interview together on the show went down. She noted a lot of times even if things did get heated, she could follow-up and get to a more copacetic place.
It was always nice to sometimes follow-up those conversations. Sometimes they just disappeared after; we’d move on to the next topic. But when it’s something incredibly important, I had follow-up up conversations and you tried to help someone understand, ‘Here is my point of view. Here’s why this was offensive.’
Regardless of how conversations have gone during The View or elsewhere on the interwebs, the GAF star seems clear about sticking to her guns when it comes to her point of view. She’s spoken prior about how “hard” she felt it was growing up religious in Hollywood, but that she and her family have been able to maintain “that God’s the priority” in their lives. She’s set herself up to stick to these tenets, switching from Hallmark to GAF and quitting opportunities in which she has felt God is less of a priority. Next up, she’ll be appearing in an upcoming Christmas movie for the cabler this winter.
