The covenant
Hey, kids under 8 years old, thanks for reading The New York Times. But this time, please don’t. Maybe go play Minecraft or something instead.
… O.K., are they gone now? Cool. Here’s what President Trump said to a child about Santa Claus on Monday: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”
“Yes, sir,” the child, Collman, responded twice. She had spoken with the president for at least 10 seconds before he suggested that her parents had been lying to her all her life.
Ah, are we going to talk about that?
No; the next paragraph is about Collman putting out cookies for Santa.
Whatever. But the thing is, if she does think Santa Claus is real then her parents have been lying to her all her life, and she will find that out before long. Is the idea that that would be bad at age 7 but it’s fine at age 8? If so, why?
Mr. Trump’s faux pas was roundly mocked on social media, where he was criticized for breaking the covenant in which we have all agreed to deceive our children.
I think that is one strange covenant.
I wrote a somewhat sarcastic column for The Freethinker about it.
I’m curious as to whether Santa is a “gateway belief” to God-belief, as you suggest, or if learning the truth about Santa doesn’t act as a gateway to questioning God.
Screechy, it acted as a gateway for me. First was the Tooth Fairy. Santa fell quickly afterward. God didn’t have a chance. Fairy tales, myths, and legends. Have them for fun, but don’t believe them, because they are not real and may lead you to do things that aren’t nice (especially God. The tooth fairy never asked me to slay non-believers in the tooth fairy, and Santa Clause never threatened to burn me in a fiery furnace for eternity).
Ah actually I don’t suggest that Santa is a “gateway belief” to God-belief…I didn’t write that title. I forgot to come up with and include a title so other agents composed one for me.
As I mention in the column, I do actually remember (I was sitting in the back seat of the car, I think on a summer trip) mentally arguing from Santa to God…which tells me I’d been wondering how believable god is, but also that I used Santa to say “totally believable.” That tells me I wasn’t very sharp, because if I wondered how believable god is, why would I think Santa was more so? Hell if I know.
Anyway, yes, I think it can go either way. But more, I resent the whole abuse of the credulity of children routine. What about not telling children any lies about magical beings at all?
grumble grumble
I don’t think you should be so hard on your younger self. Pictures of Santa were/are everywhere; God, not so much. Santa actually lives somewhere and shows up at people’s homes, or is reputed to do so. He did a lot of work for Coca Cola back in the forties and fifties. Sure Jesus-on-a-stick is his stand-in, but god doesn’t really show up for the photo shoot or the interview.
Santa is a “fun” popular delusion/myth/lie, whereas ideas about god have been the cause actual wars. Santa, by comparison is a bit frothier and sugar coated and safe. That lack of gravitas with which the whole god thing is loaded makes it easier for the general public to join in on the Santa thing without sparking sectarian violence. There’s a bigger popular constituency for Santa Claus than there can ever be for god, the idea of which has been splintered amongst the whole spectrum of faiths. Despite the Christian origin in St. Nicholas, Santa has been pretty much co-opted by commercial, secular interests and had the dangerous religious bits largely excised. Unlikely theodicy has been replaced with unlikely physics. Naughty and nice lists are easier for a child to grasp than The Problem of Evil. “Magic” is the blanket answer for fitting down chimneys and the faster-than-light travel required for Santa to get the job done. So with that in mind, I could see a child thinking SC was mor real (or at least more “accessible”) than the god dude.
Just a thought…
Hahahahaha “He did a lot of work for Coca Cola back in the forties and fifties” hahahahahaha good point.
I was introduced to god-belief very young. Not directly, by my parents or via regular church-going, but through school. I was enrolled in a religious kindergarten, probably because it happened to be logistically convenient (my mother worked, and this was the early ’60s when few mothers worked and day care was not a common thing.)
So I learned about God and Christianity. I remember thinking very seriously about it all, and trying to read the Bible (I was an early reader.) I also remember thinking it all sounded a bit unlikely, a bit like a story, but grownups believed it and said it was true, so…
When I learned Santa Claus was definitely just a story (I’d had my suspicions for a while,) I did think of God, and while I didn’t turn into a baby atheist immediately, I’m quite sure a seed of skepticism was planted.
My seeds of doubt were planted in public school, when there was still a fair amount of religious stuff (particularly songs we sang during daily “opening excersizes.”) One of those songs, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” was one of the things that started me on the road to doubt:
God sees the little sparrow fall,
It meets His tender view;
If God so loves the little birds,
I know He loves me, too.
I wanted to know why God didn’t catch the sparrow. It was not obvious to me that his seeing the falling sparrow he failed to catch meant that he had any regard for me. Catch the sparrow, then we’ll talk. I’m sure that kindly Mrs. Luke would have been saddened that teaching this children’s song of childlike (or childish?) faith had a result directly opposite to the one she had intended. This was grade three, so I would have been around eight years old. I know maybe the year before I’d tried staying up late in Christmas Eve in my oldest brother’s room, to listen for Santa. (His room was closest to the chimney, so it was a natural place for a Santa stakeout). I don’t ever recall trying the milk and cookies thing; sleigh bells on the roof would have been enough. God was much less inspiring of empirical investigation or hypothesis testing. God drove no reindeer.
Atheism took a lot longer than Santa letdown, but I’d given up on traditional Christianity by the time I got to high school. I’d read the Gospels, and was rather impressed with some of Jesus’s ideas. But I had no interest in Paul’s letters or Acts or any of the other bits of the New Testament. I noticed some of the variations and discrepancies between the Gospels, and learned a bit about their origins in specific times and places, for particular audiences (and much later, learning that each had their own theological axes to grind).
I came up with my own set of rules or guidelines as to what a fair, just god should and should not be and most traditional religions missed most of the boxes I needed or ticked the ones that were deal breakers. In the course of this progression into disbelief, I never sat up on a stakeout for god. God was never going to be that “real” or corporeal; I’d already absorbed enough theological cop outs that I knew that such a being wasn’t going to be knocking on the door or coming down the chimney… I would tell people I was agnostic or atheist depending on what kind of day I was having. Oddly enough I tended to ascribe my “better days” to my agnostic phases while on a bad day There Was No God. It was my early thirties when the final, attenuated flickers of deistic ideation finally guttered out.
And it started with that little sparrow.
In my case, atheism took longer than Santa because it was ultimately quite safe not to believe in Santa, it just meant you didn’t get stockings anymore (and since my mother always filled my stocking with things my older brother and sister liked, but I didn’t, not such a loss). Failure to believe in God could be fatal…and not just because “I pray the lord my soul to take” (though I had many horrible nightmares from that one, and slept poorly even as a child, partially because of horrible nightmares). My family was (and is) devout and dangerous. A lethal combination, and one I recognized even when I began to question God, at the age of 10 as I began to work my way through the big people’s Bible, not the sweetened up stories for children. I kept my mouth shut and had no one I could ask questions until I was in college. By then, I’d abandoned it pretty much on my own, but I wasn’t really aware of people who didn’t believe. I knew about Madlyn Murray O’Hair, because she was the embodiment of evil for my family, but it wasn’t until I was in college that I actually met an open atheist. He was one of the nicest, most moral people I knew, which flew in the face of family doctrines.
Since my family were neither nice nor particularly moral (by my definition; their definition mostly had to do with sex), it was a turning point for me.
The sugar coated, cutsified visions of the story of Noah’s Ark are particularly horrible. In the original, god is of course a petulant, omnicidal maniac. So you cap off a story of impossible physics, impossible biogeography, impossible genetics with the horror of global murder and ecocide. There’s a whole world of ugly underneath the child-friendly pictures of the ark with all the cute animals.
YNNB – oh, yes, I recognized that ugly. Why did God have to kill all the animals? And the other thing I noticed, even at the age of 10 (because I knew about problems that can arise from mating with close relatives) – how did the animals survive, if they had to ‘marry’ their brothers and sisters after the animals left the ark? (Oh, yes, my mother would refer to animal mating as “married”. Can’t have impressionable children think animals have non-marital sex).
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