Santa Claus, Belief, and Critical Thinking

     There’s a temptation to backdate proud insights and imagine I matured earlier than I did, so maybe I was eight or nine, but I think I was six when critical thinking clicked in. It wasn’t mathematical. It was intuitive and analogical. On Christmas Day we traveled the 250 miles from Auburn, Alabama, up to Lauderdale County where Tom Green, my Grandfather, was still in good health. In any case, as with most watershed events, I remember sitting by the left window on the back seat as little country houses whizzed by and performing a thought experiment. I visualized Santa Claus flying over to a roof, landing his sleigh, sliding down the chimney, distributing toys, climbing back up, and proceeding to the roof of the next house. 

     It soon became obvious that, at the speed houses were passing even on a two-lane Alabama highway, even if only a quarter of the houses had children, Santa couldn’t possibly service them all in one night. Besides, there were other highways in Alabama, much less in the world. Anyway, some of the houses didn’t even have chimneys. I stared and kept arriving at the same conclusion. Santa Claus was physically impossible. Over the river and through the woods, I lost my faith. I wasn’t upset. I still had a cap pistol to snap and sniff in the old house on the dirt road in Lauderdale County, but now I knew that my parents had wrapped it. I flash back now to the aroma of spent caps, better than barbecue.

      While I was still in north Alabama, I confronted Mother. “Santa Claus isn’t real, is he?” I said (or words to that effect) and explained my methodology as best I could. She was easy. Yes, she and Daddy played Santa. He was just a story to make Christmas fun for me. I was proud of myself and maybe even beat my older brother to the truth. For years to come, until I was almost in college, we maintained the tradition—a major wished-for gift tagged “Santa” and practical surprise gifts from Mother and Daddy—so I lost nothing by exposing the myth. “What do you want from Santa Claus?” mythologized the privilege of having generous and solvent parents.

     Some years later, I told Louise, a girl my age who lived across the driveway, that Santa was, of course, merely her parents leaving presents, and she refused to believe me. I was astonished that she’d take this position at her advanced age, at least ten. Louise’s embarrassing response was to ask her mother in my presence if Santa was real, which was like dispatching the fox to secure the henhouse. Her mother said yes, of course, and I knew I was licked. Correct but licked. I suspect that Louise knew perfectly well that Santa Claus was bogus but wanted to keep the gift-stream flowing. Truth cannot stand against mammonist mythology. My Louise embarrassment is the story of my life.

     The mass of people seem to me innumerate, the mathematical equivalent of illiterate. Not that I’m a mathematician, not after Mrs. Haggard in high school (my story, and I’m sticking to it), but I can run ratios. For instance, I recall 9/11, when America fell into the grip of numbing fear and rage—when I heard a woman wonder if it was worth bringing children into "such a world." And it was all over the loss of three buildings and some 2,800 lives—a terrible, sudden thing, I grant, shocking and unexpected, but still modest on the scale of the misfortunes that single year. For instance, thirteen times as many died of flu and fifteen times as many in auto accidents. The tragic deaths in the Twin Towers amounted to about one tenth of one percent of total deaths in 2001, a year that still saw an overall increase in life expectancy. If terrorism deaths were a teaspoon of salt, deaths from other causes in that year would be ten pound bags. 

     My point isn’t to dismiss victims of 9/11 terrorism, but to suggest that, with a thousand times as many deaths from other causes, many of them equally horrible, if our responses to risk were reasonable and proportionate, these other deaths ought to arouse comparable levels of numbing fear and rage—comparable doubt of the use of bringing children into such a world. But we know that didn’t happen. Why did we calmly accept 36,000 influenza deaths while a small fraction as many dying from terrorism created a passionate watershed in national history?

     Millions of Americans saw on live television the planes lodged in the World Trade Center, the towers collapsing in clouds of dust, and felt the tragedy intimately in our homes like a death in the family, very different from flu and auto deaths that mostly occur out of sight and in other people’s families. We read of the Dresden fire bombing with only mild anxiety, perhaps even the leveling of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but let our garage catch fire, and it’s serious. As Cicero wrote:  “How many funerals pass our houses? Yet we do not think of death. . . . When, therefore, misfortune befalls us, we cannot help collapsing all the more completely, because we are struck as it were unawares” (Of Consolation: to Marcia, ix). I stood transfixed by my television that morning seeing 9/11 unfold, so that I flash back today to the shadow of the second airliner as it struck a toylike tower where I knew hundreds of human souls were bound to perish. I saw it all, even if only as points of light on a screen, and (echoing Cicero) misfortune befell me. Like millions of others, I was struck unawares. 

     Working here also is Francis Bacon’s Idol of the Tribe, the obvious fact that we are most affected “by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins almost imperceptibly to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind” (Novum Organum, xlvii). The burning towers spawned in the American psyche (in my mind too though I fought it) obsessive fantasies of suitcase atomic bombs in Manhattan, and it justified a war in Afghanistan that still hasn’t ended, then a second Gulf War--that and thousands of other consequences (vastly expensive) beyond the locks on cockpit doors that would have prevented any recurrence of the incident. The sudden strike on the Twin Towers inflamed the national imagination and founded a religion of Homeland Security.

     At the time, I made several people angry by putting 9/11 in proportion, cold-bloodedly (and proudly, I confess) calculating rather than feeling, much as I did that on that Christmas trip in the 1940s. I have a lifelong habit of subordinating feeling to thought, heart to head, stiffening the upper lip, which (from the orthodox point of view) didn’t bode well religiously. In the company of friends whose “loss of faith” more-or-less synchronized with mine, the change seemed inevitable. It seemed obvious that no reasonable, well-read adult could believe the fables we'd been taught in Sunday school. I mean, why believe something that’s stated as factually true—say, the doctrine of the Trinity—but supported by zero testable evidence? The mother church devised the doctrine over hundreds of years and the smoking corpses of thousands of heretics, but for what? If it were authoritative, there wouldn’t be all those other religions and philosophies.

     Therefore, all reasonable people are at least agnostics, it seemed obvious to me and my friends. Clearly all religious dogma—certainly anything demanding miracles—are at best a-factual, and probably counterfactual. Anybody remaining religious after eighteen, it seemed, must be uncritical, ill-educated, or a sheep. I confess this now as an act of pride, the I-sense posing for a selfie in the center of the universe, the rational ego climbing Sinai, and I guess that even such an admission is a prideful pose: concentric Russian dolls of I-sense inside each other. 

     Recent conversations have yielded two fresh insights, which (like all useful insights) make me feel foolish when they seem fresh to me. The first is that people of simple faith—a genus still a bit of mysterious to me—are not bothered by a lack of testable evidence for their faith, even its unreasonableness. Paul allows that the gospel is "foolishness" to critical thinkers (1 Corinthians 1:23). For him, it is true because it delivers. It’s hard to argue with pragmatism. The second insight is that I never lost my faith because it never had any to begin with. All I had was belief.

     Of course, mystics seek the divine through traditional disciplines and ministers serve as passive conduits of inherited tradition. I understand that many people don’t think critically and meld into family and community. But I was blindsided by a middle path I had unconsciously pursued myself. A woman I respect was raised Roman Catholic in a predominately Catholic town, taught by nuns. Though she drifted away from practice in her late teens, her rebellion, unlike mine, was not about belief. Unlike me with my Baptist upbringing, she seldom read the Bible, and neither it nor a myth of salvation through blood sacrifice was central to her faith. It was, as far as I can tell, about participation in a living institution—the body of Christ visible in community. Her God-image was formed, not by proof texts and sermons, but by knowing guru-like nuns and priests. This kind of center, I think, holds even as Bible stories devolve into myths and theology creaks. Personal experience overrides critical thought. If a room feels warm, it is warm even if the feeling is subjective. Similarly, if a sacrament feels like grace, it is holy even if the feeling is subjective.

     As I write the above, I feel echoes of my own experience down a different path. I lived for forty years as a practicing Catholic, led there by my wife, and we left the mother church only after moving to a diocese where the bishop enforced strict preaching against homosexuality that, in my view, violated the Great Commandments (Matthaw 22:34-40). Having close friends and family members who are gay and are as God or nature made them--not as they made themselves--we could not endure a congregation of bigotry. We have found a place in an Episcopal church, where the succession is apostolic, the mass recognizable. In that consolation, congregation, and pomp, I take bread without any hope of recovering childish certainties and speak to God because how else am I to endure my desperate subjectivity? But is anybody listening besides my subconscious? Every Sunday, one week at a time like an AA alcoholic, I tread the waters of six decades of doubt and the same six decades of something I won’t call faith. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Sometimes I feel like a sneak thief of grace, kneeling under false pretenses.

     I was emailing on the subject with my best friend Robert Stacy, a Brit I met in 1949, talked to every day in high school, and still exchange twice-annual visits with, and, in a flash of lightning-like clarity, he wrote last week: “As for faith, I've never understood it in Godly context. (I even looked it up.) When I was a child I believed in God without question.” This was my case exactly. I shared belief with him before our certainties faded between ages fourteen and eighteen. As a child, I believed in God (and a truckload of concomitant theological baggage) on the preponderance of evidence—even beyond a reasonable doubt—because the same authorities that taught me arithmetic taught me that Jesus loved me. How did I know? The Bible told me so. 

     Bible-Belt Judeo-Christian ideology pervaded the media through the 1950s, an almost medieval solidarity that made faith redundant. We had Christian prayer every morning in home room and guest ministers prayed to Jesus in public school assemblies. The handful of Jewish kids could like it or lump it. Salvation through God’s son was tacitly assumed by the Montgomery Advertiser, Life Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and national newscasts (especially in December). “I Believe” was a hit song. Paul Harvey explained on network radio that Jesus was like to an equine avatar sent to horses in a barn on fire, a divine example of how to run out the door. News stories on the “death of God," which emerged with hippies and the Maharishi in the 1960s, would have been as unthinkable as an expose of Santa in Highlights for Children. 

    Tellingly, I think, a 2010 UK act of Parliament prohibiting employment discrimination requires that a “philosophical belief,” the secular equivalent of a religion, not be “an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available.” In other words, if you believe something on good evidence, it’s not a “belief,” not in the religious sense. You don’t “believe” what you merely think you know. This neatly describes my teenage crisis. I believed in God, as earlier I had believed in Santa Claus, “based on the present state of information available.” In both cases, as soon as I saw the shortcomings of the information, I abandoned the belief. And the  unprovable theory of a theocentric universe was so momentous, affecting as it did all of life (especially life, if any, after death), that it was held to the strictest burden of proof--to be confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt or rejected. It had to be either proven fact or a fable. It didn’t take a philosophy degree to see that in these terms it was a fable, albeit an endearing one.

(Anybody care to share your Santa experience? I'd be interested.)