A Letter to the Editor
I sent this Letter to the Editor in to the Wall Street Journal about two weeks ago, and it wasn’t published, so I’m posting it here.
Erica Komisar’s Friday, December 10th opinion “Don’t Believe in God? Lie to Your Children” caught my attention as an intersection between religion and philosophy, a crossroads at which I often find myself standing as a Lutheran pastor and an online philosophy professor. There is much to be commended in this stance since it concerns itself with the mental health of children and acknowledges the cultural nihilism that has such a devastating effect on their emotional well-being. No one benefits from the conclusion that death is the end and there is therefore no ultimate purpose in life, and the results of the Harvard study are not surprising.
But another idea occurred to me. Why not simply provide your children with the evidence, and leave it to them to make up their own minds? While it would certainly be traumatic for children to learn that their parents believe everyone dies and turns to dust and that’s all there is, it would also be traumatic for them to learn someday that their parents have been lying to them all along about something so important. It’s one thing to reveal to them, say, that Santa Claus was, after all these years, a fantasy; it’s quite another to have them learn one day that their parents thought no better about God.
So perhaps they might simply be brought to consider that there are many people who have drawn some much more heartening conclusions from the evidence. What, dear parent, have you got to lose? Consider: Where did we come from? Dust that somehow made itself into life? A big bang that inexplicably organized itself from randomness and disorganization? How is that logically possible? And how is it that the human race is so fashioned that we can reason and speak, and are even capable of lying to our children about God?
There are a great many people who actually believe the central message of Christmas, even if you don’t: that God not only exists, but that he is love, and that because he is love, he determined to enter his creation as a child, in order to redeem us and bring us back to himself? Is this really so far-fetched? It is true that the stories of Jesus are challenging to our rationality, but how much more incredulous is the notion that all things exist because of some pointless, aimless and random course of events which, as we all know, is capable of producing nothing but pointlessness, aimlessness and randomness?
Speaking of Christmas, for some is all so much nostalgia and sentimentality; but for others, Christmas is the acknowledgment that there is in fact something More, and that this isn’t merely in the realm of fantasy and imagination like Santa Claus. In 1897 the editor of the Sun famously told little Virginia Hanlon that “there is a Santa Claus,” and she was encouraged to embrace her fantasy; but this is quite different: just tell your children, even if you don’t believe it yourself, that there are many people whose inspection of the eyewitness evidence has led them to conclude that God is real, and that he is love.