Hitchens on Santa Claus (by Timothy Dalrymple)

Last updated on: December 23, 2010 at 11:40 am by Scot McKnight

Hitchens on Santa Claus (by Timothy Dalrymple) 2010-12-23T11:05:49-06:00 Scot McKnight

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From Timothy Dalrymple:

When my daughter has grown old enough to articulate (what I’m convinced she already secretly believes) that my every parenting decision has been wrong, thoroughly damaging, and clear grounds for lawsuit to cover therapy costs, I will at least be able to explain why I did not raise her to believe in Santa.

“Christopher Hitchens,” I will say, as her eyes well up with tears. “Christopher Hitchens killed your Santa.”

This, of course, will take some explaining. In October I attended, at a Pew Forum in Washington, D.C., a discussion between Christopher and Peter Hitchens on whether civilization needs God. Not since the Karamazovs have a set of brothers so well illustrated a fundamental question of religion and society. The first-born Christopher possesses transcendent literary talents and a two-fisted approach to rhetorical combat, and his anti-religious manifesto God Is Not Great has made him into a sort of Martin Luther for atheists. Peter is also a journalist of great eloquence, who converted to Christianity while observing the catastrophic consequences of godless communism. What brings a bitter urgency to their disagreement is not a mysterious patricide, as in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, but the severe esophageal cancer that threatens to devour the elder brother from within.

Like others of the “New Atheists,” Christopher finds the claims of faith not merely false but contemptible. Belief in a divine creator who intercedes in human affairs is wrong not only factually but morally: a betrayal of the ideals of reason, an expression of fear and narcissism, and a concession to the kind of fanatical irrationality that has constrained social and scientific advancement and thrown the human race into the slaughterhouse of a wretched and gory history.

Peter rejects this view. While civilization can certainly survive without religious belief (he cited modern Japan), faith in God and striving to surrender human desires to a divinely revealed will serve as powerful reinforcers of the kind of moral framework upon which societies are erected. The decline of Christianity and the rise of atheistic societies have brought about more violence and not less, as individuals, groups, and entire cultures pursue their own interests unconcerned with absolute standards or eternal accountability.

The arguments advanced by Christopher are neither new nor surprising. God Is Not Great is a pastiche of various figures from the philosophes and the Marquis de Sade to Nietzsche, Marx, and Orwell on the nature of religion, the corruptions of the church, and the corrosive influence of faith on the body social and politic. While these men were engaged in the grand exchange of western philosophical discourse, Christopher repeats only one side of the conversation, like a college freshman who returns home from his first philosophy course convinced he has heard objections to faith that no ear hath heard before. If he brings something fresh, it is his constantly updated 21st-century catalogue of history’s worst holy hypocrites and vilest religious atrocities.

Here is where the story turns toward Santacide. At the Pew Forum event, in his least articulate and most revealing comment, Christopher said, “I don’t want tohave to care what you believe.” Hitchens is not a philosopher or a scientist who might offer some innovation on the grand arguments for the existence of God. He is a journalist, and his strongest objections are not against God but against the ways in which “God” has been used in human societies. Let God live in the sanctum of your imagination; let God be dead in the public square, where he always makes an appalling mess of things.

In an essay he has recycled in slightly altered form over the years, Hitchens complains of the “moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas,” and compares Christmas music and decorations to the “official propaganda” that is “inescapable” in a totalitarian state such as North Korea. What is worse, he says, legions of “Christian enthusiasts” insist that the slogans and banners and other Christmalia “must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader.” Hitchens apparently believes “the soldiery in the Christmas wars” would be gobsmacked to learn (what my church taught to children) that December 25th was originally the date of a pagan solstice celebration, and that reindeer and pine trees are not native to Palestine. Still, the point is clear: “If the totalitarians cannot bear to abandon their adoration of their various Dear Leaders, can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private?”

Hitchens does not care what you believe as long as you keep it properly to yourself. When you hurl your beliefs into the public square—especially in “the world’s first secular republic”—then he has to care. If the zealots enforce a regime of compulsory holiday cheer, or of sharia law, or of forced conversion or ethnic cleansing in the name of faith, then Christopher Hitchens has to care what they believe. He does not want to have to care.

The essence of the war over Christmas is the more basic disagreement over the proper expression of religion in the public square. Even if the founders in general never envisioned that the Constitution would be interpreted to mean that no nativity scenes could appear on state-owned premises, is this the actual implication of the establishment and free exercise clauses? Do nativity scenes on City Hall lawns, and Christmas trees in schools, and even the words “Merry Christmas” in government offices, amount to tax-supported endorsements of a particular religion?

Yet Hitchens prompts me to ask another question. In the war over Christmas, evangelicals have long insisted that the Constitution should not be understood to prohibit expressions of faith, much less the Christian faith that has nurtured this nation since its infancy, from tax-supported public spaces. What if we won that war? If there were a nativity scene in front of every City Hall, what would be the consequences?

Many evangelicals believe that the stories and ceremonies of Christian faith would have a leavening effect upon American culture, communicating a vision of the true and the good and the beautiful that is life-giving and that nurtures a society that is loving and just—and, ultimately, that gives witness to and draws more toward the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Perhaps, they believe, the reassertion of the trulyChristian symbols of Christmas would sweep away the secular symbols—like Santa and the elves, the tree and the presents—that have made Christmas into a riot of rampant materialism. To win the war on Christmas, then, would be to re-secure the rights of towns and states and even the federal government to honor the story of Jesus’ birth, and so to re-permeate American society with the specifically Christian symbols of Christmas.

I wonder, though, if such a win were possible in contemporary American society, how it would be received by those who are not Christian, and thus whether a win in the war over Christmas would lead to a loss in the struggle for souls.

To be clear, I do not believe that Christians should withdraw from the public square. Christians should never acquiesce to the pressure to make their faith merely private. Christian faith permeates every aspect of life, private and public alike. We are called to be imitators of Christ, not to be nice and accommodating and inoffensive. But our faith should be public in the right way, and we should choose our battles carefully. Some wins come at too high a cost in the larger battle for hearts and minds.

Perhaps Christians should focus on the spiritual meat of Christmas and cut away the fat. Perhaps the better witness would be for families such as mine to put into practice the meaning of the incarnation of God. Perhaps we should concentrate on being bearers of light and life into places of darkness and death, on bringing the good news of God in humble forms, on giving ourselves to live and to sacrifice and to die for our fellow men. Sometimes it is better to put off the fight for your own rights, in order to work for the blessing of those less fortunate.

My wife and I were already contemplating the Santa question. I am choosing not to perpetuate the Santa myth in my own family, not because I don’t want my daughter to conclude that I will lie to her about invisible things (although that too is a concern), but because I wish that our society in the Christmas season would turn away from Santa and Macy’s and, yes, tendentious legal battles that serve only to alienate non-believers, and would focus instead on the story of a magnificent Creator God who so loved the world that He sent his son to live and teach and sacrifice and suffer and die and rise again amongst us. And if I wish that our society would do these things, then I should begin the change in myself and in my family.

The Christopher Hitchenses of the world will not be swayed by legal battles or by forcing more nativity scenes into the environment in which they live. They will not interpret these things as love. Nor will they be swayed by Christians who devote more time to Santa and presents than to Jesus Christ and what his birth implies for the world. Whatever St. Nicholas once meant, he is now mostly a marketing tool, and more American households teach the Santa story (38 percent) than they tell the Christmas story from the Bible (28 percent) at Christmas. But which is more important? If I could choose whether those Christopher Hitchenses would see more nativity scenes in tax-supported spaces, or more Santa Clauses in store windows, or more Christians inspired by the birth of Christ to bring love and hope and good news to others, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat.

So, sorry sweetheart, no Santa for us. It is time to make a break with the way in which Christmas is presently celebrated and fought over. If we would form a better witness to the world, we should focus on the essence of Christmas, not its accessories, however jolly or round-bellied they might be.

You can charge me for the therapy for every other wrong decision I’m making. But you can blame the Death of Santa on old Hitch. Or thank him. As we forsake Santa and focus instead on reading—and living—the gospel story instead, our society will be the better for it.

Dr. Timothy Dalrymple is the Associate Director of Content at Patheos, and writes weekly on faith, politics, and culture for the Evangelical Portal. Follow him at his blog, Philosophical Fragments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

His columns appear at the Evangelical Portal each Monday.

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