Why mislead children about Santa? Demystification is essential to faith
|
Version 0 of 1. "I had no intention of undermining their belief in the reality of Santa Claus," wrote Canon Tatton-Brown to the local headteacher after his little Christmas address upset some parents because, apparently, it led their children to question the truth of Santa's existence. Some parents have got so worked up about all this that they have threatened to turn up at one of the good canon's Christmas services and tell the congregation that Jesus doesn't actually exist either. Apparently, it's not just children that find it difficult to grow up. Perhaps the problem is not with the children at all – they are generally much more robust about these things – but with over-anxious parents thinking their protective role extends to a protection from the truth. The over-the-top reaction of some parents suggests that Santa stands for something way more than a badly dressed Lapland present-giver. What I find interesting is the assumed connection between growing up and de-mystification – the idea being that we bring children up on lies until a certain age when they are deemed mature enough to know the truth. "When I was a child I thought like a child. When I became a man I put away childish things," wrote St Paul. But why do we lie to our children in the first place? Why not just tell them the truth from the outset? Surely lying to our children erodes their trust in what we tell them about the world. The problem with this line of argument is that it wants to treat children as mini-adults, thus denying them the important role that fantasy and role-playing has in their emotional development. Indeed, the engagement of the imagination through fantasy can itself be a way in which a child comes to encounter a world beyond him or herself. That is, fantasy can often be a way of mapping out reality, not least, emotional reality. Letters to Santa often include the expression of wishes not expressed elsewhere: the desire for parents to get back together, the pain of a lost sibling, even a sense of identification with children less fortunate than themselves. None of which I would put into the category of fantasy in the pejorative sense. Yet the link between maturity and de-mystification is often made, not least when it comes to religious faith. Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's emergence from self-incurred immaturity"– which is sometimes taken arrogantly to mean that pre-Enlightenment human beings were foolish, ignorant and gullible, whereas post-Enlightenment human beings are mature and wise. Of course, this conversion narrative is itself a certain sort of fantasy. Few but the most stubborn defenders of Enlightenment rationalism can still maintain this Whiggish view of history as that of continual progress and human betterment. Nonetheless, when it comes to the personal development of ideas about faith, demystification is essential. It is generally pretty weird if people have the same ideas about God that they did when they were children. Those who cling on to the man with a beard in the sky are usually overly fearful that reality will kill faith. That is the assumption that makes them dig in so much in defending something that can't be defended. Better to have faith enough to go through some atheistic dismantling, trusting that something new will emerge the other side. In fact, in my experience, faith is a continual process of ideas about God being dismantled and reconstructed. The faith bit is a trust that the God thing will survive the next stage of deconstruction. And while many who do not have faith will scoff at this as continually shifting the goalposts (which it kind of is), the same process of trust is needed when children loose their faith in Santa – trust that many of the important things that children have learned in childhood will indeed survive the onset of a different reality. <em>Twitter: </em><em>@giles_fraser</em> Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |