I caught Father dissing Santa Claus

It seems that, once again, a vicar has got himself into trouble for telling children of primary age that Santa Claus is ‘not real’ – I seem to remember that exactly the same story appeared in the run-up to Christmas last year, and perhaps even the year before that. It feels like it is becoming a Christmas tradition. Santa is, of course, a longstanding source of anxiety to earnest clergy; the worry being that once children realise Santa ‘isn’t real’, and a key component of what makes Christmas magical turns out to be just a story, they might decide that there is no reason to believe in other elements of Christmas, like Jesus Christ. Whether or not the media has misrepresented the Rev. Dr Paul Chamberlain (and it does seem there has been some exaggeration), this is not an isolated incident; it does seem that in the minds of some clergy, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus exist in a kind of cosmic opposition, with belief in Santa representing a hindrance to faith in children because it keeps faith always at the level of childish fantasy. The trouble with this approach, however, is that it fundamentally fails to understand the nature of faith and belief – and speaks, in fact, to a deep lack of faith in those religious believers who feel threatened by myth and story.

If you think that when children stop believing in the reality of Santa Claus they might also stop believing in the reality of Jesus Christ, you are implying that the existence of Santa and the existence of Jesus are equivalent in plausibility. You have, then, an entirely flattened conception of belief and unbelief. A digital conception, even – people either believe something to be real or they do not, 1 or 0. But the reality of belief is very different from this. In fact, neither philosophers nor anthropologists have so far succeeded in giving an adequate account of what belief is. We still don’t really know what it is to believe something. We know what a certain kind of belief is that might be described as ‘confessional belief’; this is an act of conscious mental assent, subsequently incorporated into our ongoing understanding of self and personal identity, that a certain statement is true. It was this kind of belief that was privileged by the Protestant reformers – although it is not really true, as some claim, that the Reformation invented this kind of belief; medieval Scholastic theologians valued it too.

Whether or not confessional belief represents a ‘gold standard’ of belief to which every kind of belief should aspire, it is nevertheless clear that a lot of people believe all sorts of things without meeting the exacting standards of confessional belief. The classic case is superstition; people may avow themselves to be entirely without superstitions, and deride superstition openly; but this does not stop them behaving superstitiously and avoiding taboos. But between the confessional believer and the self-hating superstitious person there is a whole spectrum of more or less avowed and more or less conscious belief. It is for this reason that the word ‘belief’ is actually not very useful at all for describing the ways humans behave in relation to objects of belief – because it leads us to expect a greater commitment from people than they usually have. Rather, people interact with the objects of belief in a variety of different (and often subtle) ways - like those in Ireland and Iceland who will tell you they do not believe in fairies or elves, yet still fear them, or the many people who will tell you ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve seen one, and they’re real’. What are we to make of such a statement? How can someone who is sure that ghosts are real, and has direct experience of the fact, still refuse to believe in them? Well, what I think such people are saying is that they subscribe to no particular account of what ghosts are, and refuse explanations; ironically, in fact, those who have experienced paranormal phenomena at first hand are sometimes the least likely to seek or want an explanation for them. If you have experienced something at first hand, you do not need theory to help you construct belief: ghosts just are.

If the person who says ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I saw one’ is at one end of the spectrum, the child who knows (at some level) that Santa Claus is a ritual parental performance, yet makes the conscious decision to believe in Santa is at the other. There is always an element of performance to belief, and there is an element of ritual; we like to reassure ourselves, in various ways, of the truth of the things we believe – even if that is only by reading newspapers and social media feeds full of people who agree with our political convictions. I was one of the children who makes a conscious decision to believe in Santa Claus; I do not remember ever thinking, in an absolutely naïve way, that someone other than my parents left presents in my stocking on Christmas night. Even as a young child, I was capable of understanding that the Santa mythos was a participatory performance, a story into which we all entered and in which we all took part. Perhaps I am unusual in this; I must confess that I am not a naturally sceptical person, and I am more inclined to believing things than to disbelieving them (my mental bent towards faith rather than scepticism meant I was a rather poor fit as an undergraduate student of Philosophy at Cambridge…). Given the choice, like Kierkegaard, my choice is usually to choose to believe.

But if children are capable of simultaneously believing in Santa Claus – that is, in participating in the complex performance of belief and behaviour that is the modern Santa mythos – they are also capable of distinguishing between playful performance and religious faith, and capable of distinguishing between mythical figures and historical persons. While there is no shortage of glib atheists willing to dismiss all faith as ‘fairytales’, most people (regardless of their own personal faith or lack of it) are capable of acknowledging that faith is a distinct characteristic of human life and experience that is not the same as naivety, credulity or excessive absorption in a fantasy. Faith claims are wide-ranging, ultimate, unverifiable, and unfalsifiable tenets about the nature of reality itself, even if they usually have specific historical claims associated with them as well. Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person who really existed, but the claim that Jesus is the Son of God is not a claim that can be known historically. It is also not a claim that can be verified or falsified in any agreed or straightforward way, because it is a religious claim based on a particular faith’s understanding of ultimate reality. The claim that Jesus is the Son of God is not the same sort of claim as the idea that St Nicholas visits every home in one night on Christmas Eve and leaves presents for every child in the world, because the latter claim has nothing to do with beliefs about ultimate reality and is clearly just a playful myth.

But it seems that the facile antitheist view that children should never be told anything that is ‘untrue’, from Greek myths to the tooth fairy, has now infected Christians as well. We mustn’t tell children anything that isn’t true, lest they work it out, and never trust us again. One problem with this simplistic view, aside from the fact that it insultingly assumes children are incapable of distinguishing story from reality, is that it assumes that we as well-informed adults know for certain what is true and what is not. But we don’t; the disenchanted ‘reality’, without fairies or Santa Claus or ghosts or God that bien pensant society encourages us to believe in is as much a mythological construct as its alternatives. We can’t be sure of the limits of our reality, because the truth is that we are blind worms sniffing out some tiny corner of reality with very little grasp of its true nature. I am not a sceptic, because it seems to me wildly implausible that human sense experience is equal to the task of providing a complete description of reality. Reality is probably much stranger than we have ever imagined.

To denounce belief in Santa Claus is to disrupt the performance of a playful myth, and to intrude rules that do not belong in such a performance. It doesn’t matter that the myth is not old; I don’t see why it can’t command the same respect as other myths. From the very earliest centuries of Christianity, Christians were content to co-exist with mythology - a fact of which C. S. Lewis so memorably reminds us. Had I been told Santa was not real as a child, that would have made me cross – not because I didn’t know that my parents gave me my presents, but because that’s not what you say; to sound a bit too much like the later Wittgenstein, it’s a violation of the rules of the game. But, at the end of the day, Santa is just one mythical character; if the Santa of childhood myth (to be distinguished from the historical Nicholas) does not exist, the consequences are not reality-warping or earth-shattering, because our conception of reality does not depend on Santa’s existence. If God does not exist, that is another matter; and I think most people are capable of understanding the difference between these classes of being, and these different levels of belief. If some Christians cannot manage this, that suggests that their belief in God is little more secure than a child’s belief in Santa Claus: they believe in God because their belief has never been challenged, and they have never had to face any fact that might contradict it. What distinguishes faith from mere belief is that faith faces such challenges, and overcomes them.

Back in July, I wrote here about how clergy often became the ‘useful idiots’ of Enlightenment rationalism, advancing an agenda of rationalist disenchantment, and even policing and enforcing the disenchantment of the faithful. One ostensible justification for such a role was that the existence of God, unlike the other things people believed, was self-evident to reason. Clergy whose job was to protect faith, and to activate and encourage perception and awareness of the supernatural dimension of human existence, were deluded into doing the exact opposite - like plumbers being persuaded that it was their job to spring leaks. By taking on themselves the mantle of champions in the fight against ‘superstition’, clergy undermined the very ecosystem of human interaction with objects of belief that sustained people’s faith. It is remarkable, to me at least, that there are still clergy who believe it is their job to ensure that people hold only just enough supernatural beliefs as are entirely necessary to secure their Christian faith, but no more; and that there are still clergy whose conception of Christianity is little more than Enlightenment rationalism with the Nicene Creed bolted uneasily bolted on. Believing in the supernatural seems to be so difficult that we are each rationed to adding only one supernatural element to our worldview - and adding anything else to belief in God risks squeezing him out of existence, it seems. The business of believing in supernatural stuff becomes, on this view, a rather embarrassing necessity like going to the toilet - to be done behind closed doors, and preferably not spoken about in polite company.

This kind of Christianity spends all its time worrying about how Christians can relate to people who live in the ‘real’ world, rather than worrying how Christians can convince others of the truth - that the real world is a spiritual world, suffused with the supernatural (at least, that’s what I think). It is noteworthy that the angst-ridden clergy of the contemporary Church of England (or at least some of them), thirsting for ‘relevance’ and downplaying the supernatural at every opportunity, are a far cry from the anti-Sadducist clergy of the later 17th century for whom every supernatural belief and supernatural encounter, from ghosts and poltergeists to fairies, was grist to the mill of their project of displaying the reality of the supernatural world and confounding materialism. The anti-Sadducists had a generous, expansive and openminded conception of what the world might contain; but the contemporary Church is like an old family that sold the silver (supernatural belief) several generations ago and is now trying to claw it back piece by piece, but not too quickly or too aggressively in case potential customers become offended. Move too fast and buyers might call the whole deal off.

You might have guessed by now that I am unsympathetic to the religiously motivated denunciation of belief in Santa Claus. And I would add a coda: if you do believe in God, and in the unrestricted power of divine providence, then the miracles ascribed to St Nicholas during his lifetime are not impossible; and it is not possible to rule out that (alive as he is in the Communion of Saints) St Nicholas might perform miracles still. Just because Santa Claus does not visit in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, that does not mean St Nicholas is not a wonderworker for those who seek his intercession. Faith is not a zero-sum game. Santa might be more real than you think.