ABC; Rick Diamond/Getty ImagesOh, Mike Seaver. You used to be so adorable when you spoke.
Kirk Cameron's still got the dimples that won him many a fan back in the 1980s when he played the troublemaker of the Seaver clan on the classic sitcom Growing Pains, but some of the values he's been espousing in more recent years have people scratching their heads, as they wonder when the teen heartthrob became ultra-conservative.
(News flash, he's probably always harbored certain views, there was just no way back in the '80s and 1990s to disseminate them at the drop of a hat.)
His latest controversial comment to receive an understandably infuriated reception on social media: He told the Christian Post recently, "Wives are to honor and respect and follow their husband's lead, not to tell their husband how he ought to be a better husband. When each person gets their part right, regardless of how their spouse is treating them, there is hope for real change in their marriage."
Context is always nice. However, making a good point doesn't change the fact that in 2012 he called same-sex relationships "ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization."
So, we know that post-Growing Pains stardom, Kirk Cameron has been busy making religiously minded films, sharing his brand of values on speaking tours and his website, and otherwise making the occasional headline with a controversial remark. He also makes coffee!
Yet so many who never wanted to know what Kirk Cameron thought in real life are left to wonder what happened to "Mike Seaver"—which got us thinking about the stars of all the other shows we were watching, um, religiously right around that time. Here's what some other 1980s and '90s-era favorites think about religion and politics:
Ricky Schroder, Silver Spoons: "Here we are, face to face, a couple of silver spoons..." Oh, so good, with young Alfonso Ribeiro playing Ricky Stratton's best pal Alfonso to boot. Schroder kept the acting flame alive with TV movies and then had a he's-all-grown-up renaissance when he joined NYPD Blue in 1998. It was onto big arcs on Scrubs, 24 and more, and he's never really been off the radar. He's also a huge supporter of the military and spent more than 100 days with U.S. troops in Afghanistan to make the docu-series The Fighting Season.
On the personal side, he married wife Andrea when he was 22 and they are now parents of four. And throughout he considered himself a Republican, even speaking at the 2000 Republican National Convention—the same year he was baptized in the Mormon church, his wife's faith. Schroder told the Deseret News in 2008, when asked how he balanced his faith with his famously liberal profession, "You have to separate sometimes what you do for work and what you do for your own life. They don't always go hand and hand...You have to make a living, you have to hold a job... Business is business, and church and religion are different than business."
He later told Celebrity Baby Scoop in 2010, "You know the older I get, the more tolerant I have become. Today, I don't align myself with any party; I take things issue by issue. I am a patriot to the core."
Soleil Moon Frye, Punky Brewster: Who didn't want to tie bandannas around their ankles and wear different colored shoes on the right and left when this heartwarming sitcom was in its prime?! The environmentally minded actress and author of Happy Chaos: From Punky to Parenting and My Perfectly Imperfect Adventures in Between has now been married to husband Jason Goldberg since 1998 and their fourth child is on the way.
And she did take to heart some lessons learned from her first major role. "I love that Punky was groundbreaking in her style and she taught me to very much be unique and to be who I am," Frye told The Huffington Post in 2014. "Punky and I are so much this same person, in so many ways."
Jason Bateman, Valerie/The Hogan Family: David Hogan disappeared for a while into Teen Wolf 2 purgatory, but after bouncing back in Arrested Development...he's a bigger star than ever these days. A father of two daughters with his wife of 15 years, Amanda Anka, Bateman is also a longtime Democrat, though not memorably outspoken about politics. But of course he's asked about it sometimes, and he told The Short List in 2012 during the presidential race, "It'd be foolish to underestimate the appeal of the Republican party in America. Who would have thought George W. Bush could get elected and then re-elected? Having said that, I can't imagine anybody being more appealing than Obama."
Candace Cameron Bure, Full/Fuller House: Though a proponent of more conservative-leaning values like her older brother, the co-host of The View has avoided becoming completely defined by said values—though she doesn't shy away from sharing her opinions, either. She memorably made a splash with a part in her 2014 book Balancing It All: My Story of Juggling Priorities and Purpose in which she talked about taking a more "submissive" role to her husband of now almost 20 years, Valeri Bure, with whom she has three children.
"I think this word sounds so ugly to so many people, especially when they don't understand the biblical definition of the word," she told HLN's Vinnie Politan after the excerpt blew up the Twitterverse. "I think they're thinking of it in terms of a perverted, Fifty Shades of Grey kind of definition, or an oppression, or even a dictatorship. And that is not what I'm talking about."
More recently, in response to Madeleine Albright's "special place in hell" comment about women who were not supporting Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail this year, Cameron Bure slammed the picture the former Secretary of State was painting of conservative women. "There's so many women that...are not pro-choice, that are pro-life," she said on Fox News' Fox and Friends. "And to put them—to say that they're not feminist—that they're anti-women if they're not supporting another woman … that's to me what's wrong with feminism. That is a turnoff to me as a woman."
Tiffany Brissette, Small Wonder: Strange to think how much we enjoyed a show about a girl who obediently would return to her cabinet at her parents' behest. But she was a robot, of course, and her dad was an electronics genius who invented her! But couldn't tell anyone... Hmm, Small Wonder was a lot more layered than we remember... Anyway, Brissette played the pinafore-wearing Vicki the Robot on the quirky sitcom and we have no idea what she thinks about politics or religion (though she did attend Westmont College in California, a Christian university) because she's been busy being a nurse in Boulder, Colo., for years.
We wouldn't blame her one bit, though, if she was anti-technology after starring in that weird, weird show.
Scott Baio, Charles in Charge: A longtime Republican who campaigned for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and was pulling for Mitt Romney in 2012, the sitcom and reality TV star has become a familiar face on Fox News since endorsing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. He told the network that the GOP has suffered "an erosion of traditional values" and he wants Trump to "go into Washington and blow it up."
Figuratively speaking, we're assuming.
Asked about the frequent sparring matches he enjoyed getting into with Democrats on Twitter, he told Access Hollywood in 2012, "I have conversations with people who don't see eye-to-eye with me all the time. I don't get in wars with them—I just say, 'Hey, it's what you believe. I still like you.' I've got no problem with anybody."
Alyssa Milano, Who's the Boss: The fashion designer and host of Project Runway All Stars has been a fan of Sen. Bernie Sanders this election season, so let's just say that Scott Baio would probably be happy to have an argument with her on Twitter.
"I just can't with any of these candidates [other than Sanders]," she said on HuffPost Live in January. "I can't even—it makes me sick to my stomach, all of it. But Bernie I feel like is a really honest, cool dude. He doesn't seem like a politician. He doesn't seem too polished, too rehearsed. I think his intentions are really pure, and I think we need someone with pure intention."
The mother of two with husband David Bugliari occasionally talks faith, but in a personal way; for instance, she tweeted during her first pregnancy, "I love feeling my baby move in my belly. I kind of feel like it's proof that there is a God. Beautiful!"
Staci Keanan, My Two Dads: Also a star of Step by Step and the answering-machine-centric thriller Lisa, which was seemingly on cable 24/7 back in the 1990s, Keanan went to law school and now practices in L.A. She's married to actor-producer Guy Birtwhistle. She played an outspoken feminist on Step by Step, and is reportedly Catholic (with no other details forthcoming), but she's not publicly outspoken about either religion or politics. "Staci Keanan and I are actually quite close," SBS sister Christine Lakin told Starcasm in 2013. "She's actually a lawyer now… She's super smart."
Jaleel White, Family Matters: The erstwhile Steve Urkel/Stefan Urquelle got to play both a super-nerd and a super-suave guy who gets the girl on the hit TGIF sitcom before finally moving onto roles where he could just be a good-looking, charismatic young man. When he was 34, he noted in a 2011 Vanity Fair interview that he'd been working in TV for 31 years, since his days of starring with Bill Cosby in a JELL-O Pudding Pops commercial. Over the years, the father of one hasn't talked politics or anything controversial—other than when he acknowledged that he and Reginald VelJohnson didn't get along any better off-camera than Urkel did with Carl Winslow(!).
Michael J. Fox, Family Ties: Come on, the idol of teen idols, right? While winning three Emmys for playing Alex P. Keaton, the Republican son of '60s-bred liberals, the Canadian-born actor also became a huge movie star, and won another Emmy for playing NYC Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty on Spin City—a role closer to his own political philosophy. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in the early 1990s, Fox has become a major fundraiser for Parkinson's research and education, as well as an advocate for stem cell research. He appeared in an ad supporting Democratic Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a proponent of stem cell research, and when President Barack Obama tweeted to him on Back to the Future Day last year, Fox replied, "Mr. President, I never dreamed I'd be talking about the future with someone who's making History."