Simon Jenkins—Columnist for the Evening Standard and the Guardian
Christmas has always been a challenge to the rational parent. It has long superseded Easter as the defining festival of Christendom. While Easter celebrates crucifixion and resurrection—fused with pagan rituals of spring and rebirth—feasting over a special baby has come to seem a more natural family event. Of the twin theologies, a crude shelter, a parent with child, and copious present-giving compose a more comforting myth than political murder. Splice it on to six weeks of rampant commercialism and the modern Christmas has become a secular festival, booming even as its origins grow insignificant for most celebrants.
It is best left that way. Like most non-practising Christians, I cannot remember when I “stopped believing” in baby Jesus and Santa Claus. My family was devout and said prayers at Christmas, but I have no recollection of any switch from belief to non-belief. I regarded, as I still do, such cultural traditions as integral to a British family and community. I also loved the specialness of the season, as I rather miss the one-time “specialness” of Sunday. What I vividly remember and try to maintain is the sense of occasion, the awe at the beauty of things and of music. As for belief, I rely on the little girl who, when asked if she still believed in Santa, said “Yes, but only for one more year.”
I therefore treat Christmas with a light touch. I would want children to know and understand the Bible story, as a component of their cultural underpinning. How else would they understand the majesty of western literature, painting and music? But I would “teach” the Christmas story only as what “some people” believe—or used to believe. Historical truth and scientific method are the rocks on which human reason must be based. Unreason in all its forms—however genteel—is the greatest menace to progress. Children should never be led down that path.
So, yes to the wonder and the transient mystery of Christmas. But we need no myth or metaphysic to appreciate beauty or to bind our families together in the commune of humanity.
Amanda Craig—Novelist and Journalist
Christmas is special for children because at its heart is a story which most children respond to—a story about a child both frail and strong, who resists efforts made to destroy him, and who becomes a saviour. Whether you believe in baby Jesus or not as an adult, that story is one of the oldest kinds of myth, which we see repeated in the infancy of Moses, Hercules and Harry Potter. Clearly, it’s one we need.
Like you, I dislike the commercialisation of Christmas—though that is probably because, I do all the shopping for it—but Christmas to my fiercely atheistic, largely Jewish kindred is not about Christianity but about light and warmth, music and fun, the celebration of family and making an extra effort to be kind to those who most need kindness. It is above all a celebration of life and love at a time when half the hemisphere is sunk in cold and darkness. I would never sneer at somebody else’s religious belief (providing it did not bring about cruelty) but neither do I believe in disabusing a child of the notion that Father Christmas might exist. A sense of wonder, of the permeability of the real by the imaginative, is intrinsic to childhood. Magical thinking comes naturally to the young, and my own ardent belief in a jolly old man in a flying sleigh was such that I “remember” seeing him swishing over the library in Primrose Hill when I was three or so. Had I persisted in believing this as an adult, it would have been unusual; but in any case children can’t wait to disabuse each other as to their stockings being filled by Dad (or rather, once again, Mum) rather than St Nick. Indeed, learning that Santa Claus is pure fiction may actually prepare them for the gradual diminution of religious belief—something you would surely approve of.
I do not believe that civilisation is only built on history—itself always partial and prejudiced—or on scientific enquiry—which at its most inspired has a good deal in common with the sense of wonder mentioned previously. Nor do I believe that what you term “unreason” is the greatest menace to human progress: on the contrary, it is above all the lack of imaginative sympathy, or being able to think of another person as like ourselves, which remains that.
I have to say that, although my own children lost all vestiges of religious faith after reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, they still expect their stockings to be filled, religiously, on Christmas Day, and not just with chocolate either.
Respect for other people’s belief in Christmas I leave to one side. What other people hold to be true about matters of the supernatural is their business. But I do regard religious belief as among the most suspect of tribal instincts, because it is so easily, so widely and so dangerously abused. (I used to visit schools in Northern Ireland).
If Christmas is to be treated as no different from motherhood and apple pie there is no argument. I accept that emotions of awe, delight, surprise and sympathy for defenceless babies are part of the human make-up, and merit celebration. I am less inclined to leave unchallenged the specific myths surrounding Christmas. I am sure for many intellectually robust young people they are as you describe them, part of growing up. Like sex and parenting, their mysteries might be left to the playground. But if a child asks me “Was Mary a virgin? Was Jesus really the son of God? Were there angels, wise men, an ox and an ass,” I have to reply no, they are just stories. So is Father Christmas. My reply to the Santa question was, “Let’s pretend.” It was good enough for Hogwarts and it is surely good enough for Toys “R” Us.
The world is full of enough wonderful stories for us not to dress fiction up as fact. Reason must be held as sacred. History shorn of its disciplines is dangerous. The sleep of reason, as Francisco Goya said, brings forth monsters. A casual attitude to the Christian narrative may pass muster for some. But as a principle, to send children into life on a mendacity, however hallowed by custom, is not necessary.
I am not in favour of lying to children, least of all when it leads to bigotry. But surely one of the conditions of childhood is that children can delight in believing and not believing. Children do not believe that Cinderella or Jack the Giant Killer were real people but their stories can still feel freighted with emotional truth. Rather than dismiss the virgin birth as impossible, I’d discuss parthenogenesis, the position of women 2,000 years ago and why the story is important. A child can then make up his or her own mind.
I am against reducing a child’s conception of the world to a series of Gradgrindian facts. I think we need all kinds of myths and legends, and emphasising that these are “lies” is not helpful to a civilisation. “Let’s pretend” is a tiresome game compared to the great “What if…?” Reason is something to be prized, yes, but surely Goya’s claim that the sleep of reason brings forth monsters depends on the dreamer.
The most intellectually inflexible people I come across are those who reject fiction, for whom the noonday sun of the rational beats down on all. Creativity is irrational, and those who have tried to avoid that side of human nature by, say, keeping awake and not dreaming quickly find their reason is undone.
One person’s passionate faith is another’s bigotry. Those who seek a respect for truth are always dismissed as “Gradgrindian,” just as sceptics of religion “lack intellectual flexibility” and probably hate novels. Such charges are a flight from argument. The reality is that many, possibly most, children are highly vulnerable to lies and tribal bigotry. Christian and Muslim concepts such as martyrdom, atonement, resurrection and “life everlasting” are at best misleading and at worst lethal. Human beings continue to do appalling things to each other in their name. Even now we are desperately trying to rid Muslim education of myths and fictions to which clear consequences are attached. I am not sure “discussing parthenogenesis” quite meets the point.
Fiction is fiction and glorious for it. It interprets the human condition in ways that history finds hard. Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk are creations of both cruelty and delight, and children do indeed grow emotionally robust on their analysis. They are not religions. That Arthur C Clarke got some of his predictions right does not make him a seer, let alone a prophet.
The inculcation of unsubstantiated “truths” into impressionable minds has to be a dangerous practice. Few who do it mean that children should be left “to make up their own minds.” They do it because they want children loyal to a particular religion. Can we not reveal the wealth of wonder in this world, without having to invent worlds that do not exist?
Simon, you seem to take a view that children are either told that the Christmas story is all lies, or that they are in danger of “tribal bigotry.” I see no evidence for a population of bigots in this country as a result of a temporary belief in Santa Claus or even baby Jesus; rather I see a people whose tolerance, good humour and open-mindedness concerning religion is the envy of the world. The tiny minority which commit acts of violence in the name of faith are roundly condemned by the rest.
You place great emphasis on historical “fact” but we do not know what may or may not have happened 2,000 years ago. The evils of religion come when one story alone is told, and promoted, as “truth.” On that, at least, we agree; but as someone who is not inflexible, you might concede the possibility that atheism, too, may not have the last word. For myself, I would rather children were armed with many stories, and many verifiable facts, not to inculcate credulity but to enjoy richer, more intellectually curious lives.
This world is indeed full of wonders, and perhaps the greatest of them is the human mind, capable of both rational enquiry and strong imagination. It is natural for a child to begin in the latter camp and move to the former, but to belong exclusively to the entirely rational is to dismiss what John Keats termed negative capability, and to move into the darkness which we both deplore.
