In movie after Christmas movie this time of year, a single theme over-rides all others:
Believe.
Miracle on 34th Street. The Polar Express. Elf. Arthur Christmas. Even Netflix’s more recent The Christmas Chronicles focuses on the importance of belief.
Usually it’s belief in Santa, and in the context of the story, if Santa doesn’t exist, Christmas itself faces an existential crisis. “Christmas, canceled” wasn’t invented by the war on Christmas crowd. Rankin-Bass went there first.
The odd thing about all of this, of course, is that all this Santa-belief-sentimentality is aimed at a belief that most of us know is not factual in any literal sense.
Of course other movies focus less on believing in in Santa and more in believing in Christmas itself. Of course, not Christmas in any religious sense, but in a secular version of the “peace on Earth, goodwill towards men” kind of generic feel-goodness. In the TV show Community, their holiday Claymation episodes sends the show’s community college characters on a quest to find the meaning of Christmas. It ends with Abed, the character whose delusion has placed them all in his claymation world, saying that, "The meaning of Christmas is the idea that Christmas has meaning. And it can mean whatever we want."
He may not be all wrong in a secular sense.
What movies seldom do, if ever, is focus on belief in the event Christmas actually celebrates for Christians: the birth of Christ.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas heads in the direction that Christmas is more than Santa. It contradicts the narrative that if Santa fails in his mission, Christmas is canceled; it shows us a Christmas stolen in the material sense that lives on because of the holiday spirit of the Whos. In the end the Grinch famously realizes that “Maybe Christmas… doesn’t come from a store./Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means just a little bit more.”
Dr. Seuss doesn’t say what it does mean, but hints that it means more than food, presents and decorations. At the very least, it’s about continuing to sing, even if you’ve been burglarized.
Only “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, with Linus’s simple, heartful rendition of The Gospel of Luke Christmas story, tries to tell us (we are all Charlie Brown) “what Christmas is all about.” In 1999, my family went to a Peanuts 50th Anniversary Exhibit at The International Museum of Cartoon Art (it was then housed in Boca Raton, Florida). In one room, they had the Christmas special on a continuous loop. We went in the room and watched it from the beginning. At the end, one of the men who’d watched it with us had never seen it before, was offended by it. “I didn’t know it was going to get all religious!” he said, stalking out of the theater.
But I love belief narratives. If they are done well, I always find them moving. The end of Elf, when James Caan finally sings, Santa’s sled soars, and the snow starts drifting down, gives me goosebumps. So does the scene in Miracle on 34th Street when the mail bags come in at the end.
And the final pages of the original book of The Polar Express have a tendency to choke me up.
But this year, all of these movies made me feel differently. All of this “believe, throw logic and reason out the window” talk made me profoundly uncomfortable. Because this year is different…
This year we have flat-earthers.
This year we have holocaust deniers.
And Covid deniers.
And anti-maskers.
And anti-vaccers.
And election-results deniers.
And Q-Anon believers.
And people who claim school shootings are all hoaxes.
Our national zeitgeist seems to be to believe whatever you want - facts be damned. Facts are just an opportunity to dig in and defend your beliefs even harder. Believe that Covid will go away on its own. Believe masks do no good. Believe that over 300,000 dead is a hoax. Or, alternately, believe that over 300,000 dead is a small price to pay to keep the economy going.
My sentimental feeling about belief has suffered a bit this holiday season. I’m more apt to sympathize with Maureen O’Hara’s skeptical mother character in Miracle on 34th Street this year (though not with the staff psychologist - he’s just an idiot).
The pure rationalists among us would suggest that perhaps it is time to put away beliefs in things we cannot see: Santa, Christmas Spirit, God… Blind belief is dangerous.
This year, I see their point more than ever.
But then there’s this: If you believe only what your senses tell you, you become a logical positivist, and then you don’t believe in anything you haven’t personally experienced. I haven’t been to Salt Lake City - so it doesn’t exist. The pictures might be hoax. It’s a quick trip from their to the moon landings being faked.
Of course, add to that limitation the fact that we do not see the world as it is, but as we perceive it, and the logical positivist point of view becomes untenable. We have to trust that at least some of the reports of the world around us coming from other people are true, or our world will become very small indeed. To be sane we have to trust that other people, other sources of information, can help us see reality better. To a very large extent, our view of the world depends on whose reports we trust.
To the extent that I honestly seek after what is true and seek out others who are doing the same, I am part of what Parker J. Palmer calls The Community of Truth. Reality is communal. No one person can have a handle on it, despite the fact that large swaths of the population seem to think they have a monopoly on reality.
We have stopped trusting the same sources, stopped trusting the same people in our country. On my worst days, I wonder how we can survive the parallel universes tugging our nation apart. We need a return to facts, a retreat from what Stephen Colbert’s original Comedy Central character called “truthiness.”
And yet, to believe in facts, even if those facts are 100% verifiably true, is not enough.
In his book How to Argue with a Cat, Jay Heinrichs says that a belief is as good as a fact - at least to the person holding the belief. I don’t disagree. But beliefs do more than replace facts. Beliefs determine which facts we accept or reject. Who to trust, who to distrust.
Beliefs can be based on facts, or at least on the best facts available, but they are not facts. We are being exposed to different facts about mask-wearing, and so we hold different beliefs.
The idea that human life has value and meaning is a belief that cannot be proved. In the end, science may prove many facts about human beings. It may even prove that believing in the value and meaning of human life is good for human mental health and observable happiness. But that is not the same as proving value and meaning. It sometimes seems to me that science prove much beyond the idea that we are all large-brained, tool-using, metaphor-and-narrative-making animals who delude themselves into thinking they have free-will until the day we die. We are moist robots.
But as the writer Jaron Linear has suggested, many people hang on to belief in God as a way to hang on to a belief in people. We have almost obliterated the idea of a human being.
In Terry Pratchet’s The Hogfather, the character Death talks about why believing in imaginary figures like Hogfather (the book’s equivalent of Santa) is necessary: believing in our holiday figures is practice for believing in other lies necessary for human existence and survival, things like JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.” (Death speaks in all caps.) He goes on to say that if you grind the universe down to finest powder, you will not find even the tiniest bit of mercy or justice. They do not exist in any ordinary sense.
In the end, none of the abstractions we live be even the abstract ideal of pursuing the truth, can be proven. If a random universe spit us up by accident, and we are destined for extinction either soon in some worldwide catastrophe or later as the universe runs out of steam expanding and everything goes to cold and silence, then why does it matter if we discover the truth? We will ultimately be gone, and the universe will not care one way or the other. Saying truth matters in the here and now, that believing in scientific truth will save us during a pandemic, returns us to the faith in the value of human life. That value of human life cannot be proved the way you can prove masks work to save human lives.
So to get through life, to even find it worth living, we must believe at the very least in some kind of abstract values. Whether those values evolved and are no more than an accident of our evolution, or whether values are inherent in the very fabric of the existence itself has always been up for debate. Also up for debate, apparently, is what those values should be - what we should believe given the facts that come at us.
So I guess, in the end, belief matters. Everyone believes something - even if it’s just a belief that beliefs don’t matter. The trick is to be wise about our beliefs. I believe in a healthy skepticism, too. But that is the other half of the coin - chipping away at destructive beliefs.
Some beliefs lead to hatred, division, destructive conflict, suffering and death. There is no denying that. There is no belief system, including science, that does not have blood its hands.
But some beliefs - like believing in the sacredness of human life, believing in love, in peace, hope, and the golden rule - lead to, well, life, love, peace, hope, and good will towards men.
Perhaps those are the real messages of belief that still give me goosebumps, even when watching sacred silliness like Elf.
Merry Christmas (it’s still Christmastide!) and Happy Holidays.
Discover good things to believe in.
