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W4 reprise: Santa Claus

As Christmas is around the corner, several of my FB friends began sharing a link to this post (from last year) by William Lane Craig, in which he says many sensible things. Viz.,

On the one hand, the replacement of Jesus Christ at Christmas by Santa Claus is a sacrilege. Santa Claus is obviously a sort of God-surrogate: an all-seeing person endowed with miraculous powers, who’s making a list and checking it twice in order to find out if you’ve been naughty or nice. “He knows when you are sleeping; he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good, for goodness’ sake!” But never fear: Santa Claus is a kindly old man with a long white beard who never judges that someone has been bad. No matter what you’ve done, he thinks you’re good and delivers the presents. Such a caricature of God is so perverse that one wonders how Christian parents could possibly allow their children to believe in such a being. Christmas, as the word suggests, is supposed to be about Christ, not about this imposter.

On the other hand, who wants to be an old Scrooge, spoiling all the fun and dampening the festiveness of Christmas? Poems like “The Night before Christmas” are so much fun to read to your children. Isn’t there some way to reach an accommodation?

I think there is. Saint Nicholas was a historical figure, an early church bishop. We can teach our children about who he was and explain how people like to make-believe that he comes and brings children presents today at Christmas time. Children love to make-believe, and so you can invite them to join in this game of make-believe with you. When you see a Santa at the shopping mall, say, “Look, there’s a man dressed up like Saint Nicholas! People pretend that he is Saint Nicholas. Would you like to tell him what you want for Christmas?”

And this,

I strongly believe that Christian parents should not lie to their children about the existence of a supernatural, all-knowing being who is watching them and holding them morally accountable. Once they find out that you have lied to them about Santa’s existence, how can doubts not also arise that you have been wrong as well in telling them that God exists? Maybe the whole Christmas story is a myth which thinking adults should outgrow. In fact, I’ve heard ignorant atheists actually comparing God to Santa Claus and saying that there is no more evidence of God’s existence than Santa’s. In lying to your children about Santa Claus, you may be setting them up for fall.

Hey, WLC agrees with me! (That means he must be right, right?)

Back in 2009 I inaugurated what was possibly our longest comment thread evah by saying the same thing. Like Dr. Craig, I am not saying that you shouldn't enjoy playing make-believe with your kids, even about Santa Claus. What I am saying is that there is a sharp and bright line (yes, really, there is) between playing make-believe in a way that kids know is make-believe and actually attempting to convince them that something is true. If you know that what you are saying is not true, the latter is deception and (if it involves verbal assertion) lying.

For some reason, when it comes to Santa Claus, everyone loses their mind on this. If it were some other issue, perhaps this wouldn't happen. If, for example, I said that there is a sharp distinction between a family joke that the postman, Mr. Jones, is Superman and a serious attempt to convince my five-year-old that Mr. Jones is really superman, I would think that there would be no trouble seeing the distinction. There would also be no trouble (I would think) seeing that this is a not-so-good thing to do to my five-year-old, even if I plan on gradually helping him to figure out over the next five years that Mr. Jones isn't really Superman. Kind of a creepy game: First you try to convince Junior of something that isn't true, then you go through this long, delicate process of gently helping him to figure out that you lied to him in the first place. Weird. Why do that?

But when it comes to Santa, this weirdness is taken to be incredibly charming, and plain distinctions between obvious make-believe and deception become impossible for even smart people to make.

By way of stirring the pot this Advent season, here's a link to my original entry and some quotes therefrom.

Consider what it means to teach a young child to believe that Santa Claus is real. You are teaching the child that a person exists who is benevolent and has super-powers, who can do incredible things, who sees his actions while remaining unseen, who rewards good acts, and with whom (if you encourage letter-writing to Santa) the child can communicate.

If you're a Christian parent, you are very likely teaching the child at the same time in his life and at the same stage in his development to believe in God--a powerful and benevolent Being who sees his actions while remaining unseen, who rewards good actions and punishes evil actions, and with whom the child can communicate by praying. In fact, you encourage him to pray to this Unseen Being.

To induce belief in your child in both of these teachings, you are relying on the fact that children naturally believe what their parents tell them.

But one is an unimportant falsehood and the other is the ultimately important Truth.

Belief in Santa Claus is temporary. Eventually kids figure out that Mom and Dad have been telling them a white lie and that the causes of the presents on Christmas morning are mundane. ... [I]t isn't that much of a stretch for the astute child to wonder whether the other story about an invisible, benevolent Being who is the cause of all things, seen and unseen, has also been a white lie and whether the causes of all the things previously attributed to Him are, instead, mundane.

Atheists trade on this. I'm sure my astute readers could find dozens of examples of atheist rants to very much the "when I became a man, I put away childish things" effect. And this trope can be very effective for older young people as well. A Christian high school or college student will no doubt at some point encounter the following line of thought: "Why do you believe in God? Because your parents told you that He exists, right? But you believed in Santa Claus on the same basis. If you'd been raised in another culture, you would believe a different religion, and they can't all be true. At some point you have to start thinking for yourself. Just as it turned out that Santa Claus doesn't exist, so, you'll find, it turns out that God doesn't exist either. You're old enough to figure this out for yourself."

Very few teenagers or young adults like to contemplate the picture of themselves as cute, naive little children. Sometimes they don't even want to remember that they once were cute, naive little children. It is probably a fault in the age, but it's a widespread one. They want to distance themselves from anything remotely resembling wide-eyed pre-school-hood. It's embarrassing to think that they used to believe this or that crazy thing, that some older brother took them in with a tall tale...or that Mom and Dad did.

And if they come to believe that God does not exist, that would-be superiority will be turned against Christianity, too. "When I became a man, I put away childish things." Deconverts are some of the hardest to get back.

So if you want to "tell" your kids about Santa Claus, I suggest you just make it a fun pretend thing you share together, making it clear that it's a joke.

Comments (32)

Traditionally in predominantly Catholic societies in central (and parts of eastern) Europe, it was little Christ who would bring presents under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve before the family went to midnight mass. And on 6th December children would clean and put their boots on the window so that St. Nicholas could put candies in the boots, and a twig for kids who weren't nice. But today we have also a "Santa Claus" phenomenon coming from America through western Europe.

But of course that is not so important. That about the way children perceive such things while they are growing up and the impact it could have on their religious believes later is well said.

Is it mere coincidence that 'Santa' is an anagram of the name of that being who has convinced so many he does not exist?

DeGaulle

that's surely an interesting coincidence:-)

Yes, Craig mentions the fact that his family lived in Belgium when his children were young and that the Feast of St. Nicolas (December 6) was useful because it a) tied the figure clearly to the historical saint and b) separated St. Nicolas from Christmas Day.

Almost any child knows the story of the good deeds of bishop Nicholas. Btw in many folk sayings as that of my childhood for example there is also "Crampus" (a demon or monster) accompanning st. Nicholas, warning children that their soul "will get so ugly and scary as he is" if they will not be good to their parents and other people. It's interesting folklore isn't it? Maybe better than Santa giving children presents (and a Cola nowadays ) for good behaviour?

Why Hollywood, why?.......

I love telling my little kid up on monkey bars to jump into my arms, and then turning around and walking away when he is in the air. And when I drop my pre-teen off at a ball game, telling him "I will pick you up when the game is over", only to go out drinking and forget all about him, leaving him to fate and the winds of chance. Because it is so much fun watching a knife slice him open to the heart.

Don't you?

Atheists trade on this. I'm sure my astute readers could find dozens of examples of atheist rants to very much the "when I became a man, I put away childish things" effect...[snip]

It's embarrassing to think that they used to believe this or that crazy thing, that some older brother took them in with a tall tale...or that Mom and Dad did.

And the embarrassment sometimes turns into not just rejection of Christianity, but into an intense hatred of it and everything associated with it. And everything associated with religion. You get deconverts who insist that Christian parents are LYING to their kids about God, about Christ. They have absolutely no interest whatsoever in distinguishing between the parents being mistaken in believing there is a God, and wanting to pass that along to their kids, and parents intentionally befuddling their kids about reality; to them even discussing the difference between these amounts to a con man's shell game.

Which, come to think of it, is not all that far off from the attitude that people like Richard Dawkins. Wiki says this about him:

Both his parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms.[33] Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".[34] He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god.

Even if he were right about science and evolution, he could not possibly have had enough science (and logic, and philosophy) to have determined this on his own understanding as of "halfway through his teen years", and his predilection for science in opposition to religion was nothing more than a bigoted, prejudiced feeling, a preference manufactured of wishes and desires than of objective fact objectively ascertained by him. And, thus, a bigotry handed to him via older people who taught him their view that "religion" per se is opposed to science, which is false and calumnious but he believes them still, in spite of plenty of available evidence to the contrary. But in any case, one wonders whether his parents also foisted upon him the "normal" lie about Santa Claus, which he "outgrew" when he got older by turning against religion.

"Even if he were right about science and evolution, he could not possibly have had enough science (and logic, and philosophy) to have determined this on his own understanding as of "halfway through his teen years", and his predilection for science in opposition to religion was nothing more than a bigoted, prejudiced feeling, a preference manufactured of wishes and desires than of objective fact objectively ascertained by him."

Indeed, he still doesn't, at least enough to make a plausible sounding case.

I honestly don't remember when or how my parents first told me about Santa Claus (it was definitely before I was five), or at what point I grasped that he was, at least as he'd been thus presented, a myth (that was probably sometime around ten or eleven). Certainly there was never any gleefully spoileristic revelation from friends or relatives about it, nor any aghast epiphany on my own part or fury at my parents for "lying". But I remember very vividly a ceramic chotschke that was one of our favourite Christmas decorations: it was a model of Santa kneeling, his expression deeply reverent, his hat off and hands clasped before him in prayer, before the manger in which the Christ Child lay.

To me as a kid this completely addressed everything I think this post is worrying about -- it made it clear that whatever role Santa had in reality or in the celebrations of the season, it was only as a part of something much more real and important. (And if "Santa" is that spirit of giving and desire to bring joy that Nicholas of Myra, in his portfolio of sainthood, works to bring to people's hearts, I don't need to believe in fur hats, reindeer and an Arctic palace full of elves to assert that that is as real as anything else we know.)

Stephen, I don't want to pick on you, honestly. But if I'd *really believed* that there was this man named Santa who knows what I want for Christmas and literally comes to my house on Christmas Eve and brings presents, and then later I decided that there wasn't, then that would have been a matter of changing what I believed was true. (This didn't happen to me as a child because my parents made no attempt to convince me that it was true in the first place.) Moreover, if my parents had, with apparent sincerity, told me that that was true, it would have really bothered me that they had misled me.

I realize that it didn't bother you or shake you up in any way. Okay, that's good. But it has done so for other people, and I have to say that I believe it's *wrong* for parents to attempt to convince their kids that the story of Santa is literally true when it isn't. I'm not trying to rag on your parents or make them out to be evil people. I just think that it is, in fact, wrong. And it can do harm, though in your case it didn't.

Of course you don't have to believe in fur hats and elves in order to believe in the spirit of giving, etc. I fully agree with you there. All the less reason to try to convince your kids in the first place to believe in the elves and the man in the fur coat as literally true. I like the kneeling Santa painting/ornament, etc. It's great. But of course it more or less implies that Santa isn't literally a real man who brings the presents to the kids and lives at the North Pole. That's kind of the point of the image. I'd say teach them the idea of "Santa kneeling at the manger" from the beginning instead of later.

and ceased believing in a god.

No he didn't - his god simply changed to Richard Dawkins.

All the suggestions seem sensible. I fact, the real St. Nicholas is probably more interesting - who wouldn't want to learn about a bishop who punched a heretic in the nose? In Argentinean culture (perhaps other parts of Latin America?) the gift giving at least used to be associated with the magi, so you would open gifts on Epiphany. Been almost 40 years since my last Christmas there, so don't know if that has been Americanized.

I've been wanting for a long time to do semi-serious research on whether St. Nicolas really punched Arius in the nose. What are the most ancient sources on this claim?

it made it clear that whatever role Santa had in reality or in the celebrations of the season, it was only as a part of something much more real and important. (And if "Santa" is that spirit of giving and desire to bring joy that Nicholas of Myra, in his portfolio of sainthood, works to bring to people's hearts, I don't need to believe in fur hats, reindeer and an Arctic palace full of elves to assert that that is as real as anything else we know.)

Something strikes me as curious here. WHY would we think it important to anthropomorphize the "spirit of giving" with Santa?

If the spirit of giving is really some kind of Platonic form of kindliness and generosity, well, then it is - and is real - without being made over into a fictional man. Sure, we can tell stories about a fictional man who illustrates the Form, but we don't need to. We can talk about the spirit without the fiction, and indeed even if we were to employ a myth to illustrate the spirit, we would have no reason to pretend the story was TRUE instead of mythic story.

If the spirit of giving is, rather, really what exists concretely and actually because people emulate someone who was a MAN who had the spirit of giving par excellence and ab origino, as the exemplar, why would we make up someone else to represent him story-wise?

I am happy for those who, after being fooled for years by parents and grandparents and teachers and others, found out that Santa the elf is fiction without being bothered by that. I don't understand it, but I am happy for them. I was the last of a large family, I had virtually no chance to believe in Santa beyond about 4 and a half. I remember, after having more or less figured out - about 80% confidence - that the story was false, asking some grown ups for the truth, and being told the lie yet again. And I remember later being rather irritated (not terribly upset, not traumatized, not horrified or scandalized) that I had been used so: that others felt free to lie to me point blank merely because THEY decided my right to the truth was less important than continuing to play the game on me. That they decided to continue to play the game on me, i.e. at my expense, even after I showed that it was unwelcome. (That's what asking does: if you don't want to know for sure when you have large doubts, you don't ask.) It was no different than unwelcome teasing, being made the butt of a mean practical joke, or other such mean-spirited behavior that older kids use to lord it over younger ones.

But if I'd *really believed* that there was this man named Santa who knows what I want for Christmas and literally comes to my house on Christmas Eve and brings presents, and then later I decided that there wasn't, then that would have been a matter of changing what I believed was true. ...Moreover, if my parents had, with apparent sincerity, told me that that was true, it would have really bothered me that they had misled me.

I suppose the only answer I can give is that I intuitively grasped that the "false" bits of the story weren't the important ones: that the story wasn't about the literal trappings of the myth, but about the joy of gift-giving and the delight of receiving, and the love that underlay the whole business. I didn't ever believe reindeer literally talked, either; that didn't mean I couldn't enjoy the animated Rankin-Bass special about Rudolph, or that I couldn't get the point of the story.

(Perhaps there's a mercenary element as well: I suspect most kids care far less in practice about where their gifts really come from than about the simple fact of getting them. I would have been much more upset about finding out Santa was a myth if I'd been told I wouldn't get presents any more once I stopped believing in him!)

But Santa is far from the only myth that children believe wholeheartedly and later discard. Avoiding stepping on cracks, the ability of the blanket to protect you from monsters, the monsters under the bed themselves... Children regularly change their minds about what they think to be true all the time, and parents regularly have to present condensed, elided, or exaggerated explanations for their children which are, if not literally true, true enough to help their kids grasp the point until they get old enough to understand things in more literal detail. I don't see why the Santa myth should come in for such excessive moral scrutiny, especially as it's one of the few such myths that is a generally uplifting and positive one rather than a fearful one -- if the fear is of consumer commercialism overshadowing the religious spirit of the holiday, simply cutting the Santa myth out of the seasonal observations won't do all that much, especially if your kids are still too young to understand why consumer commercialism is a bad thing anyway.

If the spirit of giving is, rather, really what exists concretely and actually because people emulate someone who was a MAN who had the spirit of giving par excellence and ab origino, as the exemplar, why would we make up someone else to represent him story-wise?

Well, of course, the bluntest and most literal answer is: To sell Coca-Cola, at least as far as the last hundred years or so goes. (wry face)

But if we're looking for a reason why the Santa Claus / St. Nicholas / Kris Kringle / Father Christmas gift-giving figure took off historically as separate from Christ Himself, I speculate -- in a total vacuum, I here admit -- that perhaps it's because when the festival you are celebrating is the gift of Christ's Presence appearing in the world to begin with, and the truth that when He was born He was an infant needing gifts rather than the Man who would ultimately give the greatest gift of all, people psychologically need a more believable figure as their Gift-Giver. Santa is a stand-in for God the Father rather than God the Son, in this instance, but a humanized one so that we can have enough psychological room to take joy in the gifts for their own sake rather than be overwhelmed with the humility appropriate to Who is giving them.

If the Spirit of Christmas is real, and it is, then the trappings we use to tell its story don't matter nearly as much as the sincerity of the love behind it, I think.

Although to follow up and address a more serious fear (and my apologies for not reading closely enough to grasp this the first time): If the fear is that the realization that Santa Claus as he's presented is a myth may cause young minds to conclude that Christ Himself is a myth, this is certainly a more sobering possibility, but in practice I honestly don't think it's significant enough that it justifies the complete excision of the story from Christmas celebrations. If parents have been doing a decent job raising their children, I think it generally takes more than one discovery that they have not been literally truthful about something to cause those children to reject wholesale everything the parents have taught.

In my experience, rejection of familial religious teaching comes far more as a side-effect of clashes arising between parents and children for other reasons than it does as a side-effect of discovering Santa Claus isn't "real" in this manner. This may be the flip-side of that mercenary impulse I mentioned in the last post: adolescent atheism, in my experience, tends to be driven far less by objective concern for truth than by anger at parental restrictions (or, at times, well-merited and sincere anger over abusively failed parenting). Anger at being "lied to" over Santa tends far more to be an excuse than a real psychological motivation, I think.

I didn't ever believe reindeer literally talked, either; that didn't mean I couldn't enjoy the animated Rankin-Bass special about Rudolph, or that I couldn't get the point of the story.

Um, sure. We agree on that. But it seems to me that in the larger context you are blurring distinctions. Nobody made the slightest effort to convince me that reindeer do literally talk, and nobody thinks you have to believe it in order to enjoy the movie. So there is really no comparison to parents' elaborate attempts (as Tony says, rather like a practical joke) to convince their kids that Santa literally brings their presents. Nor should we assume that kids can't _enjoy_ Christmas, and even clearly fictional allusions to Santa, without believing them.


But Santa is far from the only myth that children believe wholeheartedly and later discard. Avoiding stepping on cracks, the ability of the blanket to protect you from monsters, the monsters under the bed themselves.

First, if they change their minds, it shouldn't be because their parents deliberately misled them. Maybe some parents do, but they shouldn't. I never believed wholeheartedly in a single one of these. And parents whose kids are afraid of monsters are generally trying hard (and should be) to convince them of the truth that there *aren't* any monsters under the bed. Not agreeing that there are monsters (as if the child is an insane man who must be humored) and then making up some fake talisman to slay them (to make the reality-challenged subject feel better).

(My fear was of the *possibility* of burglars. Given that I grew up in Chicago, this was only a somewhat exaggerated fear. But my parents never told me that there were, or had been, actual burglars in my house that had been driven away. They always showed me that, e.g., the outline of the shadow of my father's hat and coat that had frightened me was *not* a real man in the hall, and so forth.)

I don't see why the Santa myth should come in for such excessive moral scrutiny,

Well, if *as many* people went to similar lengths to convince their children of the literal existence of the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny, I'd bring those up for for exactly the same reason. It's all the same principle, and if people are doing the same thing in other areas, then that's also wrong. I talk about Santa because that seems to me the most widespread instance of a situation in which parents *deliberately* and at *great length* attempt to play a kind of practical joke on their children by teaching them that literal statements are true when they are, as the parents know, false.

Again, let's not blur distinctions. Telling your children, with all apparent solemnity, that this man exists, comes into the house to bring presents, knows all their doings, etc., is *not at all like* telling them without further explanation that the garage door goes up because you pressed a button. The latter is *incomplete* from a scientific point of view, but it is completely true as far as it goes. Other examples could be given where we give *incomplete* information to children but do not deliberately concoct a tale that is untrue and teach it to them. There really is quite a sharp distinction here between teaching the Santa story *as true* and legitimate limitations on communicating with young children.


If the fear is that the realization that Santa Claus as he's presented is a myth may cause young minds to conclude that Christ Himself is a myth,

I think it can raise doubts, at least temporarily, and I think it *contributes* to an overall idea that there are these sweet stories that your parents taught you that you just have to outgrow. That can easily *contribute* to undermining trust in parental honesty and knowledge. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing matter. I'm not saying that someone (bang!) becomes an atheist because he realizes that his parents made up the Santa story. I'm saying that it contributes to a "narrative" that is friendly to atheistic deconversion later in life.

but in practice I honestly don't think it's significant enough that it justifies the complete excision of the story from Christmas celebrations.

Again, you aren't making distinctions. Both Dr. Craig in his piece and I in mine *explicitly* talk about including "the story in Christmas celebrations," but *as* a story. Not responding to it in a nasty, grinch-like way. Just being positive about it as a fictional story that is part of the season. Like Rudolf, for that matter. Only with a longer tradition behind it.

I make a similar distinction among the following:

1) The fairies brought the new baby down from heaven and left it under cabbage leaves.

2) The new baby came out of Mommy's tummy.

3) [Insert at least somewhat detailed explanation of the process of human reproduction.]

#1 is false and should, at most, be told with a large wink for children of every age as a clearly and admittedly fictional tale, never as if it were the literal truth. #2 is completely and unambiguously true, but incomplete, and appropriate for all ages. #3 is a fuller version of the literal truth, and parents decide when and how to relate it to children in an age-appropriate way.

I talk about Santa because that seems to me the most widespread instance of a situation in which parents *deliberately* and at *great length* attempt to play a kind of practical joke on their children by teaching them that literal statements are true when they are, as the parents know, false.

To be honest, I'd have to say that for me this is an example of a significantly blurred distinction. As a great despiser of practical jokes, from having had them played on me all too often in my adolescence (I had the twin disadvantages of not having much sense of humour and being far too gullible with my friends if they acted serious enough), I can state with some confidence that the whole point of a "practical joke" is to amuse the joker at the expense of the victim -- and this does not accurately describe the sentiment of the Santa myth, in either theory or practice, from any decent parent I ever heard of.

The Santa myth is told to increase the delight of both child and parent in Christmas; that it does so by willingly indulging the ability of children to believe the fantastic does not seem, to me, anything like lying to someone for gain or at their expense. What I felt with my parents back when I still believed in a literal Santa Claus, and what I felt at realizing I'd been the victim of a practical joke from my friends, are reactions so diametrically opposed that I find it really hard to see the identification you suggest.

Which goes back to your initial question about why Santa Claus is always taken as the exception to the general principle of "don't lie to your kids even for harmless benevolent amusement" (which, I should probably note for the record, I do agree with): For almost all of us, Santa Claus, and the excited anticipation of his arrival, is a core element of some of our happiest childhood memories and our closest family gatherings. Any contention that the Santa myth should never be literally believed even by children strikes, for most people, at the heart of those memories and that happiness; as if to say that because the story was falsely believed to be literally true, the happy family memories involving it are also false, or at the very least significantly undermined. That is not a rational reaction and it's obviously not what you're saying as part of this argument, but it is an inescapable human one, and I think it unlikely ever to be quashed by even the most sober devotion to truth in principle.

(I have to admit that I also think concerted efforts at such pre-emptive quashing might actually do more harm than good, given how they always tend to play out in actual practice. If you get used to adding, "Now this is only a story, but -- " in front of every traditional childhood myth, it strikes me to be just as likely that the children will add that disclaimer themselves once actual Gospel and Biblical teaching is brought up. Skepticism is a habit that can be taught by example just as easily as belief.)

I should add as a follow-up here that I actually played Santa Claus for my own sixth-grade class, back when I was eleven -- I was a ham and a performer and the teacher felt like giving me an outlet for it -- so I am not coming from a place of wishing I'd been able to maintain my own childhood belief longer than I did. But I got an example very early on of how much fun it was to play the fantastic Gift-Giver figure, so that may also explain my own nostalgic fondness for the myth.

I have to admit that I also think concerted efforts at such pre-emptive quashing might actually do more harm than good, given how they always tend to play out in actual practice. If you get used to adding, "Now this is only a story, but -- " in front of every traditional childhood myth, it strikes me to be just as likely that the children will add that disclaimer themselves once actual Gospel and Biblical teaching is brought up. Skepticism is a habit that can be taught by example just as easily as belief.

Wow, no, I completely disagree there. I realize this must sound simplistic to you, but there simply is no rule such as "be generally skeptical" or "be generally gullible." The *habit* we should inculcate into our children is both to believe the truth and to tell the truth. Making it clear (and there are a variety of ways to do this) that something isn't intended as a literal story, and *at a minimum refraining* from *trying* to communicate that something false *is* a literal story, does not cultivate a "habit of skepticism." What it cultivates is an assurance that Mom and Dad are scrupulously honest about marking the difference between fact and fiction. Which means that if they tell you about the gospel and biblical teaching with all solemnity, clarity, and matter-of-factness, you can be quite confident that they are *not* doing some fuzzy-wuzzy activity in which they portray myth as fact because it is "true in its inner spiritual essence" or something like that, which inner essence you will discover when you grow older.

By the way, I latched onto the phrase "practical joke" as an attempt to *soften* the judgement of the activity of the parents, not an attempt to make it harsher. Usually one excuses a practical joke, in part, because the truth will *eventually* be revealed. Also, one doesn't generally think of practical jokes as traumatizing people, scarring them horribly, etc. And some people actually enjoy the aftermath of being the subject of practical jokes. (Like you, I'm not one of those people, but some are.) So I was using the phrase in an attempt to make it clear that I'm not speaking hysterically about the Santa falsehood.

I've been wanting for a long time to do semi-serious research on whether St. Nicolas really punched Arius in the nose.

Why do you want to ruin everyone else's fun? Just let us enjoy the holiday myth-making in peace! :-)

Neither my parents nor my wife's did the Santa thing so we didn't do it with our kids either. I've been told more than once that we're "robbing" them of something, but their love for the Christmas season says otherwise.

But Santa is far from the only myth that children believe wholeheartedly and later discard. Avoiding stepping on cracks, the ability of the blanket to protect you from monsters, the monsters under the bed themselves...

Like Lydia, I did not believe in these wholeheartedly. Unlike either Lydia or Stephen, I did not believe in these AT ALL, in any way, shape or form. Somehow, this did not damage my childhood.

The Santa myth is told to increase the delight of both child and parent in Christmas; that it does so by willingly indulging the ability of children to believe the fantastic does not seem, to me, anything like lying to someone for gain or at their expense.

This is certainly at least a part of why people resist the thesis put forward by Craig, and by Lydia, to which I subscribe fully. Probably the major reason. I think it fails, for at least 2 reasons. the first more pragmatic, the second more historical.

First, by definition, there is some point at which the child must turn the corner and become an adult in this generational make-believe, if it is going to be a (presumably good) part of the culture. This transition does not typically occur at one moment, but if it does, I think that it is ALWAYS traumatic. My 11 year old daughter inadvertently let the cat out of the bag with a friend - who was 12 years old!!!! I have no idea how her parents managed to keep the wool over her eyes so long, but it must have been by dint of an amazing job of lying and fibbing and creating ever new layers of whole cloth with which to cover her head. If the transition is gradual rather than in a moment, then almost of necessity, you have the situation I described for myseif: a child is trying to grasp the TRUTH, and is capable of connecting some dots, and is working out patterns and how reality fits, and sees this gaping hole in the way things seem to work that is the Santa story. Early in the process, maybe the kid has a stronger affinity to the myth (as true) than to reality, and at that stage keeping on telling the lies is not emotionally harmful to him. But eventually, (again, almost by definition), the child's need for the REAL truth exceeds his preference for having the wool over his eyes. Because the child interacts with dozens of adults, the chances that ALL of them will rightly recognize the right moment to give up the lies and tell the truth, and will do so in a manner that is emotionally untroubled, CAN'T be much better than 50-50. Anecdotally, (in my experience), something like 50% of the people I know were upset when they were told the truth. At that moment, their emotional pain is real and they cannot be happy about the state of having been lied to.

I suggest that knowingly setting a kid up for this emotional harm cannot be justified by the 3 or 4 years of somewhat higher enjoyment that they (arguably) have from about age 3 to about age 6 or 7 thinking the story is true. (Before age 3-ish, the enjoyment of the child in Christmas is completely irrespective of whether the story is presented as true or as myth.) This is an example of (to turn St. Paul's phrase on its head) "doing good that evil might come of it." You cannot escape the charge of causing harm by saying "but sometimes evil (the emotional harm) DOESN'T happen. Sometimes it does, a fair amount of the time, and you CANNOT control the outcome. Nobody can say that they can control which times it will be painful, and which times it won't.

In this manner, it is quite a lot like edgy practical jokes, the ones that push the envelope. Even aside from people who, by temperament don't like practical jokes ever (and, unless you know them, you can't PREDICT who these are, because it isn't even correlated all that well with a sense of humor generically), any given instance of those edgy practical jokes may or may not fall flat. For example, if they land on the victim when things are going well for him, he may well brush it off and afterwards laugh at the whole thing. But if it hits him on a bad day, or if it hits him when he is in a hurry and it slows him down enough to miss an appointment or something, he may NOT later laugh with you at the joke. Employing such jokes on the 50-50 hope that this time, unlike the last, will be one of the times the victim will end up laughing with you, is morally defective. It REALLY IS to play a joke on him in such a way that HIS enjoyment is second fiddle to yours; disregarding the foreseeable emotional upset as irrelevant may be just wrong.

With an adult, if you spend a lot of time with them, you can eventually gauge whether they are of the sort that will actually prefer that you go ahead and try a practical joke, even if a certain portion of the time it may fall flat. When you see his reaction to his (a) doing it to others, and (b) his flexibility, and (c) his ability to take teasing, you can make an educated guess that his enjoyment of the successful times will EVEN IN HIS EYES exceed his dislike of the failures. THEN you get to try things on him that you have no business trying on relative strangers, relative unknowns.

A little child is a complete unknown. You can't gauge beforehand which type he will be. You can't plausibly be confident "he will be glad I did played hooky with the truth on him like this."

In my experience, rejection of familial religious teaching comes far more as a side-effect of clashes arising between parents and children for other reasons than it does as a side-effect of discovering Santa Claus isn't "real" in this manner. This may be the flip-side of that mercenary impulse I mentioned in the last post: adolescent atheism, in my experience, tends to be driven far less by objective concern for truth than by anger at parental restrictions (or, at times, well-merited and sincere anger over abusively failed parenting). Anger at being "lied to" over Santa tends far more to be an excuse than a real psychological motivation, I think.

While I see your point, I tend not to think you haven't quite hit the nail on the head. First, in my own experience (from family members) a child's loss of his Christian faith is very complex, and only a small portion of it comes simply from anger at parental restrictions. Far more of it, I think, comes from (and roughly in this order):

(a) ACTUAL un-Christian behavior, behind the parents' backs, that become habitual and that undermine the child's will to believe hard moral teachings. This is especially true, in the teen years, of sexual immorality (whether fully acted out or merely desired with no interior restraint), drugs, drinking, smoking, and other behaviors. Generally, a person doesn't WANT to believe that what they are habitually doing is wrong, one or the other gives way. Often, the faith.

(b) Hypocrisy in parents, "do as I say, not as I do", done fairly obviously and without apology. Done about large matters as well as small. One of the worst causes, here, is fathers not going to church, and yet telling the teens they have to. This is horrible, for the implicit message (as in all unapologetic hypocrisy) is "I don't really believe what I am telling you." The connection here to telling the Santa myth for years should be noted. Especially, older kids watching parents lie to the younger kids.

(c) Unreasoned and unreasonable behavior by parents in making the kids live with restrictions. (This was not as much of a problem in centuries gone by as it is now, because back then most people lived in a community that all lived by the same standards and rules - the "restrictions" hit everyone pretty much equally. But now, some kids have Christian parents and other kids don't, and some kids have careful or abstemious parents and others don't, and ALL kids will feel "left out" if other kids "get to" do X and they can't.) Regardless of this newer problem, it is universally true that restrictions imposed without thought and consideration for cases, unique situations, different facts and circumstances, will lead kids to rebel unnecessarily. Kids can see parents being unreasonable (at times), and (if it becomes common rather than the exception) can spoil their acceptance of parental authority - including the natural parental authority to teach the true religion. Also, all kids, as they grow to adulthood, need to test their own judgment and decision-making as independent persons, to step out from under the wings of their parents. This process is natural and necessary. Parents who stifle it without thought create problem young adults, ones who tend to rebel against ANY old parental standard, including their religious ones.

(d) bad teaching, bad schools, bad pedagogy leading kids to the wrong beliefs. This should not happen if parents are conscientious and on the watch so they can counteract much of the bad pressure, but in practice the parents who are conscientious are the ones who don't even put the kids in those schools to begin with.

I think these 4 account for most of the major factors of children leaving their family faith behind.

I think that we are in a very unusual historical period here, where it is actually fairly difficult for parents to hand on their faith successfully to their kids. (Whether kids live up to that faith or not being a separate matter). Also, as far as I understand it, we are also in a somewhat unusual historical period, in parents TRYING to make kids believe the Santa myth is actually true rather than a myth. As above, I think that "being lied to" is actually a major factor in cases of kids repudiating their parents' Christianity, and the Santa myth is just one more instance of the lying. No one instance, typically, is the make-or-break point, it is the whole fabric of internal family talking and doing. There are, indeed, far worse ways for parents to lie to their kids. But the end result we are talking about is kids who no longer accept a family / cultural story about themselves, their origins, the meaning of their lives. Kids repudiating this family conveyance (in the face of God making children naturally accepting of what their parents say) takes a LOT of undermining. Each piece of that undermining contributes.

I'm going to throw in a connection here that may sound strange: I'm not the sort of person to get "messages from God," and I've never witnessed a miracle. I have had one incident (we're talking one in my whole adult life) in which I concluded upon sober reflection that it really looked like God specially moved a stranger to write me a letter to address something that was on my mind. This has been a big, big deal to me. It would be difficult to exaggerate. The feeling is one of great awe: Concluding that something has definitely happened within one's own life and perception that would not have happened within the natural order of things, and "it was all for me."

Now, the Santa story isn't _quite_ like that, because I suppose if one thought it through, Santa is more sci-fi than miracle. He's supposed to *be* a (highly unusual) part of the natural order. The idea is that there just really are elves and flying reindeer, and so forth.

But still, I think it's similar enough, and I think the child's pleasure in believe that Santa *really* came and brought *him* presents is rather similar to a person's becoming convinced that God has sent him a personal message or that he has witnessed a miracle. It's this, "It's all true!" feeling.

Now, that's undeniably pleasurable, but it's pleasurable *because* one really believes it to be true. I can say that I would definitely not look back on it with nostalgia if I later concluded that the letter I received was somehow "rigged" by natural processes. I would be saddened.

I realize that many people *do* look back with nostalgia on the time when they believed literally in the reality of Santa, and I admit to finding that rather hard to understand.

But I tend to think that the pleasure involved is that of believing, "It's all real! It's all true! And it happened for _me_," and I honestly can't imagine trying to create that "pleasure of a miracle" for my kids by feigning. I'm not trying to sound overly harsh here, but to me there is something almost sacrilegious about that. I excuse it because I know it's well-intentioned and widely accepted, and because it doesn't appear to do enormous harm all by itself, but I could never do it.

I want to follow up on what CJ says, above. While it is arguable that there can be SOME increased level of childhood enjoyment of Christmas that comes precisely from the feelings that are elicited because they think the Santa myth is real, it is also arguable that there is no appreciable increase. The relative experienced “value” is not cut and dried, empirically obvious. Again anecdotally, my experiences suggest more probably the latter: there is no significant increase from kids thinking the myth is true. They enjoy Christmas very much with Santa as a myth, and very much with Santa as real. Certainly my kids look forward to Christmas a very great deal.

I suppose the only answer I can give is that I intuitively grasped that the "false" bits of the story weren't the important ones: that the story wasn't about the literal trappings of the myth, but about the joy of gift-giving and the delight of receiving, and the love that underlay the whole business.

And nothing about THAT hangs on believing the Santa elf is real. If the benefits that come from the story are from the true parts (about love and gift-giving being a delight), not from the false parts, then telling the story as if it were true is not critical to the benefits.

But whatever increase might be experienced empirically by kids who think Santa is real, one would have to weigh against that perceived benefit the detriment that all lying (when found out) does to society as a whole. St. Thomas (and many others) make the point that society as such depends for its very being on truthfulness: there cannot be a society without people telling the truth. Telling lies inherently undermines the social fabric. This is not a "sometimes" sort of thing, it is fundamental to reality, it has this effect always. The more lies there are, the more fully you must doubt and suspect each other. And the closer to home the lies, the closer to home is the suspicion, which is exactly contrary to nature. It would be difficult indeed, if not outright impossible, to successfully measure the amount of detriment to society the Santa-is-real lie causes, to stand it up against the (possible) perceived increase in pleasure kids have in believing in the magic.

Furthermore, one has to doubt the reasonableness of that increase (hypothetically assuming it exists). There are sorts of pleasures and delights that one ought not expect or pursue. Just as one example, there are people who make an avocation of pursuing an adrenaline rush by extreme sports, putting their lives at risk over and over for the sake of the rush. A more mundane example of the same mentality is seen in teens who “dare” each other to shoplift or vandalize or other nuisance-level stupid acts: they have no special need or desire for the thing itself, it is taking the risk that is the fun. Contrary to Nike, “if it feels good, just do it” is a terrible conception of true human happiness.

So, speaking of the assumed increased enjoyment a kid gets in Christmas from thinking the Santa elf is real, is the pleasure an appropriate sort? This question comes on 2 levels. First, is it good for a kid to get that kick out of believing in magic and that the magic definitely is going to be dealt out to him? Is it reasonable, for comparison, for a Christian to think not only that God does visible miracles, but that God is _definitely_ going do to a miracle for him? Not really, no. In fact, it constitutes the sin of presumption, and even when it doesn't extend to actual sinfulness, it is a deformed way of thinking. Even for Christian children. Other than “it feels good”, i.e. the Nike brand of morality, what makes us think that the kid’s increased enjoyment IS actually good? (This of course ties in with what Lydia last said.)

Secondly, let’s look at the older child who has now come into the light and knows the Santa-is-real story is false. Is it good for him to look back on that period of childhood when he believed in the myth as true, and say of it "that was a good thing, to believe it, back then"? How could he do so, without some problem? If he says "that was a good thing to believe because it is fun to believe in magic", then that would also justify going on to believe fun things that are false as an ongoing feature of life: living in a make-believe world rather than the one we have. If, instead, he tries to compartmentalize it into a period-piece - good to do as a kid, no longer good to do as older - there has to be some principle that causes the difference.

And I think, if you sort through what could possibly serve, nothing satisfies: nothing that will serve as a principle under which it is GOOD to believe false stories as a kid but not as an older kid of 8 or 9. Or 28 and 39. Since knowledge is, per se, a good, being IN ERROR is, per se, a bad thing. (Ignorance of a truth that you do not need is different from being in error, the latter is a positive deformity of the mind whereas the former is merely not having a good that you might have.) There is no principle upon which to find it is GOOD to be in error about certain things.

I hate to throw around the word "Victorian," but there really is something of the 19th-century and early 20th-century errors surrounding sentiment that seems to come out in the idea that it's good to believe falsehoods in childhood. This worldview contains several erroneous ideas. For example,

1) Positive, pleasant sentiments, especially surrounding family, are absolutely good in themselves and justify whatever gives rise to them.

2) Children are angelic little creatures with a special insight into the Other World.

3) There is no sharp line between truth and falsehood when it comes to childhood belief in magic.

4) At a certain age children lose their innocence, which prevents them from seeing these semi-truths about magic the Other World.

If you read a lot of Victorian and Edwardian literature, you see these sentiments clearly taught very often. Elizabeth Goudge is one of the worst offenders. She often deliberately blurs the question, "Did your childhood imaginary friend really exist?" In her children's novel _The Little White Horse_, the childhood friend turns out to have been real, literally, but semi-magical, so that he stopped coming to play with the little girl when she stopped believing in him. But she meets him later in life and actually grows up and marries him.

The dog story writer Albert Payson Terhune was superstitious and believed ghost stories. He tells one ghost story in which a man would feel the muzzle of his dead dog comforting him when he was a child and confronting (if I recall correctly) his abusive father, and in other times of stress and fear. Terhune asks him when he stopped experiencing the ghost of his dead dog, and he says, "When I first knew the love of a woman."

The famous author of Bambi, Felix Salten, has a little girl character in his less-well-known Perri (about squirrels) who is able to understand the language of animals, but only as long as she is so young that she cannot speak human language. As soon as she becomes able to understand and speak normal human language, she can't understand or talk to the animals anymore. This is seen as a great tragedy.

Just a few examples.

William Lane Craig is a monothelite (i.e., a heretic). He contradicts the canons of Sixth General Council of the Church claiming that the Bible told him otherwise.

Monothelitism is obviously super-relevant to whether or not Craig is right about the topic of this post. I can't thank you enough for bringing it up.

Or maybe not.

of course, being a dyothelite is a predisposition for saying correct things about Santa Claus, everyone knows that.....

Does it follows than from such a line of reasoning that Craig is not right in assuming that God exists or that Christianity is true if some of his believes and ideas are incorrect or have certain errors?

of course, being a dyothelite is a predisposition for saying correct things about Santa Claus, everyone knows that

Heh!

I agree, NS, with what you are saying and implying. But I fear Anon is turning into some kind of Macho Catholic type of troll, so I hope we can avoid encouraging him to answer your question. I'm trying to restrain myself from all the comments I'm tempted to make.

I am not a protestant and I even don't know to what denomination Craig belongs nor do I care. I'm trying to make a good evaluation of ideas and arguments as far as I am able to do so, without caring to what denomination sommeone belongs. Just because many of his ideas are wrong (at least in my opinion) does not mean that his other ideas have no value and that someone cannot learn from him (and others). One should always have an open minded (not in a "liberal" sense) and critical attitude without prejudices.

I am personaly very much inspired by many protestant philosophers and theologians (as far as I am able to follow them) without embracing all of their protestant theology. We as Christians should always encourage a lively debate and not a "ghetto" atmosphere.

but that's my opinion, for now at least....

This is a local story that recently went "viral". While the various causes of the Santa myth are not morally great, I'm reluctant to say that knowing Santa was make-believe would have been more comforting in this case.
http://www.knoxnews.com/story/entertainment/columnists/sam-venable/2016/12/11/sam-venable-santa-grants-final-wish/95091356/

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