Santa and the ultimate Fairy Tale
Religion & Liberty Online

Santa and the ultimate Fairy Tale

Of course, Santa is based on a historical character. And in many (but certainly not all!) ways, he points forward to Jesus Christ. But in a broader sense, God has created a mystical, mythical, and magical world– that can be overdone or mis-imagined. That said, the more common error is to under-do or under-imagine– out of our “modern” heritage and tainted worldview.

I’ve blogged on this quite a few times– and three times in the past month, in noting the 100th anniversary of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, a connection between Harry Potter, D&D, Chesterton and Lewis, and the ultimately irrational hyper-extension of rationality.

My family and I just watched Elf the other night on TV– a charming little movie with the same message. (I’m on a bit of a Will Ferrell kick these days– after seeing Talladega Nights after this post.)

Here’s Tony Woodlief in the WSJ (hat tip: Linda Christiansen) on the same general topic– with applications to Santa Claus and our ability (&/or willingness) to believe (or not)…

After describing his 8-year old son determining that Santa was not real, “the talk” they had, and his son’s ultimate question (“He isn’t real, is he?”), Woodlief moves into deeper waters:

Perhaps a more responsible parent would confess, but I hesitate. For this I blame G.K. Chesterton [and] “Orthodoxy”…One of its themes is the violence that rationalistic modernism has worked on the valuable idea of a “mystical condition,” which is to say the mystery inherent in a supernaturally created world. Writing of his path to faith in God, Chesterton says: “I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.”

Magic-talk gets under the skin of many, like renowned scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins. This is doubly so when it is what the Christ-figure Aslan, in C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” calls “the deeper magic,” an allusion to divinity. Mr. Dawkins is reportedly writing a book examining the pernicious tendency of fantasy tales to promote “anti-scientific” thinking among children. He suspects that such stories lay the groundwork for religious faith, the inculcation of which, he claims, is a worse form of child abuse than sexual molestation.

I suspect that fairy tales and Santa Claus do prepare us to embrace the ultimate Fairy Tale, the one Lewis believed was ingrained in our being….

Eric Schansberg

Dr. Eric Schansberg is a Professor of Economics at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany where he has been on faculty for 17 years after earning his Ph.D. in Economics from Texas A&M University. Dr. Schansberg is the author of Turn Neither to the Right nor to the Left: A Thinking Christian's Guide to Politics and Public Policy, Poor Policy: How Government Harms the Poor. He is co-author of Thoroughly Equipped, a 21-month Discipleship Curriculum, and he is the editor of SchansBlog. Eric has been married to Tonia for 13 years and is the proud father of four boys—two by adoption and two the more conventional way. Their family is active in K-TAG—the Kentuckiana Trans-racial Adoption Group.