The King has a Christmas song that is a laugh out loud American moment: Presley, so iconic he is richer dead than alive, sings about Santa, no higher Q rating than fabulous he, and then drags in God, someone most Americans know exists. “Here comes Santa Claus,” Elvis croons and then encourages us by pointing out that Santa knows we are all God’s children and that this makes Santa’s judgment alright.
Santa will judge us kindly, because of the common image of God!
This is errant theology that is only matched by the simpleton Internet atheist who cannot believe in faith because faith is “belief despite the evidence.” Faith is belief based on evidence that is not a certainty, but an intellectually substantial hope. Fortunately, unlike the cultural barren wasteland that is Internet atheism, the King can sing.* He was also no fool and knew that nobody believes in Santa, after much about the jolly old elf is the marketing creation of Coca Cola. For Elvis Santa is a stand-in for the Spirit of Christmas. He uses this fun idea to buttress two very good ideas: moral responsibility and the common nature of all of us.
We unite in jollifcation. Our fun (Santa) is combined with a good lesson and everyone has some fun: good for Elvis. Nobody listening to the King originally took Santa’s seriously, they understood that the jolly old elf was a bit of fun to celebrate a joyous holiday. Yet we have become so ignorant that perhaps the song is now dangerous. Somebody, somewhere, will assume that the Pelvis did not know the difference. Maybe he did not, who knows? Thinking hard was not his job.
Here is the truth: there as a man named Nicholas who helped the poor and stood for Jesus in tough times. His feast day is near Christmas and in many nations he became associated with the holiday. If there is one thing Americans do well it is puffing a person and we sold Saint Nicholas hard. We took little children’s fables and turned them into a marketing mega-character, but we were marketing something simple, but fine: the possibilities that exist in a child’s imagination.
We need not lie to children, but we should let them pretend. Imagination is the mother of science and of art. We need more not less of it. Somehow, however, this became perverted into the odd notion that we should lie to children and pretend Santa is real. Why?
My parents read us Santa stuff, Baum is best, but nobody ever suggested Claus had a different status than Narnia. He was part of the world of imagination and in the world played (like Trumpkin or Aragorn or, perhaps, Arthur) by Christian rules. The Elvis song played in our house and was harmless fluff like a simpleminded Aslan or Pilgrim’s Progress.
I fear the combination of lying to children and bad education has left us unable to understand this happy song by the King of Graceland. All that is left to us is the silly conflation of God and Santa, because we are not teaching sound theology in our churches or sophisticated philosophy in our schools. We might come to take Hallmark movies seriously and confuse faith with wishing. Why have we gotten to this point?
Who can be sure?
I suspect it is because sensible religion is given no airtime and yet soft secularism, live for self and stuff, is incapable of sustaining let alone creating a culture. We turn to the levity of the past and turn the sort-of-serious joke into a something it cannot be: a way to live.
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*If you think this harsh, Google “Dan Barker, music, atheism.” QED.
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