When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, who our father thought was a pompous and ridiculous person. Suddenly, Ellen slammed through the kitchen door and pounded upstairs to our father’s study.
“Daddy, Daddy!” she cried out in anguish. “Margaret Mumm says there’s no Santa Claus!”
Our father stopped typing, considered briefly what she’d told him, and then said, “You tell Margaret Mumm there’s no God.”
From The Atlantic, January 2025, “Walk On Air Against Your Better Judgment, What Seamus Heaney Gave Me.” by Caitlin Flanagan
If I really put my mind to the question, I’m pretty sure that I grew up believing in neither. Certainly not Santa Claus. Paul and Esther made it perfectly clear in whatever first moments of reckoning I experienced that no such mythical being existed. Even as a kid, I bought what they told me. No one person (even with speedy reindeer) could fly around the world to EVERY house and EVERY child and deliver presents.
On the other hand, Mother and Daddy seemed to believe in God. We took turns praying to him before every meal. We went to the McPherson Church of the Brethren faithfully twice each Sunday. My folks donated much of their free time to church activity: fellowship and funeral meals, choir, board meetings, church record keeping, Sunday School teaching. Before my baptism at twelve, I attended classes and received a Bible with my name on it. Then I could participate in Easter week activities including a foot-washing ceremony. Years later, my sister and I orchestrated funerals for both parents in the church. And here in Helena, Dave and I took the girls to a small old-fashioned Episcopal group and honored his parents with Episcopalian services for the departed. I held one for Dave as well.
So the evidence would suggest that, as the Nicene Creed outlines, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. . . .” In fact, I don’t—however many times I’ve stood in my Sunday best and said those words.
To the question of Santa Claus, Mother always explained that we were all each other’s Santa Claus. That Santa Claus was the spirit of giving to people we loved, and for that matter, to people we might not know but who needed our help.
And for sixty years of my life, rather unconsciously, unthinkingly, that’s exactly how I justified going to church. Even as a little girl, I never bought a perfect-person-judge-father-god in heaven. I found it pretty obvious that heaven wasn’t a place—any more than there was a toy workshop at the North Pole. I always felt OK about being thankful before a meal because missionaries and the National Geographic reminded me that other children didn’t have food. And the lessons I heard in Sunday School and Bible School and sermons (when I was old enough to pay attention) were mostly about behavior. About being kind to other people and helping them. To being honest and hardworking. To use resources and time well.
All those words—written, spoken, and sung—captured a fairy tale, a fable, a legend. A powerful historical morality story. A parable, in fact—which we actually called some of those teachings. And in that context, I found it perfectly fine to listen and read and sing. To be reminded—big time—at least once a week to live more thoughtfully and have kinder thoughts about some of my teachers and friends.
Plus, quotations and wise sayings were a big part of my growing up. My dad’s employer, the Alliance Insurance Companies, provided salaried employees with a pocket-size monthly diary. Every day’s page had a wise saying on it and my dad handed those over to me when he got the next month’s. Mother had notebooks full of thoughtful quotations that she harvested for little Sunday School bulletins. Oddly enough for a kid, I poured over those resources. We took the Reader’s Digest, too, and I always read “Points to Ponder.” So, life was full of advice and instructive imagery.
Life was also full of fellowship. Many, though not all, of our friends were fellow church members. I graduated from the Brethren college in McPherson. I was with other peace church college students during my summer as a guinea pig at the National Institutes of Health. I joined other Brethren young people in one of those pseudo-serious-intense-college weekend workshops that featured Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings. All earnest discussion and seeking–after a perilous overnight trip from McPherson to Chicago. Gettysburg meant occasional Episcopal services with Betty. Washington D.C. meant cooking or sleeping in on Sunday. And then here, that weird group we attended until one Christmas Eve service lasted until two in the morning and included a homily that attacked all that I knew to be healthy and caring.
There were, always, parts of the legend that troubled me. As I type on, I anticipate believers and Biblical scholars shouting “heresy.” But Christ dying for our sins gave me pause. I never got the framework. The trade-off. Honestly, even simplistic, early historical stories included sacrifice—without question and in the hope that others would be spared. But how is it that Christ’s death—most certainly painful and gruesome—could erase ALL of humankind’s corruption.
Maybe my skepticism turned on never feeling really BAD or unworthy or “unsaved.” Goodness knows, I was no perfect child or adult, but neither was I ever convinced that I would end up in hell. That was clearly as mythical as heaven. And I’ve never accepted a reality in which newborns are inevitably tainted with unforgiveable sin. Courtesy especially of my graduate school advisor, Tom Govan, I approached adulthood believing that adults are capable of both great good and great evil. And as Govan taught, Hamilton and other founding fathers recognized that human institutions had to prepare for waves of horrible self-interest and malevolence. History is full of villains, for sure (and we seem to have an abundance currently), but tragically they are not the ones seeking absolution from a crucified Jesus. They already proclaim their godliness without any intention to live the life Christ advocated.
So it’s fair to say that I spent most of my life believing not in God, but it the salubrious benefits of some church attendance. That dichotomy worked so long as I translated the words of any service into my own secular thinking. I chose not to see much wrong with that strategy.
Until, until a year after Dave’s death, I attended a funeral service for one of the Montana Historical Society’s most dedicated volunteers. I’d worked with Mary as she handled timekeeping for all the other volunteers—never a glamorous task. The Episcopal church was packed. I got a back row seat and drifted along thinking about Mary until the priest allowed as how she would now be experiencing that precious time after death when her sins might be forgiven, when she could “grow in Christ.” To which my soul all but stood up on the pew and shouted “Bullshit.” Mary most certainly did not require any further refining or cleansing or testing. The very idea that a god-like Santa was still standing in judgment of her to decide what eternal gifts she received struck a final chord.
Not all denominations believe in a friendly purgatory or even any purgatory. That priest’s pronouncements weren’t even necessarily held by his colleagues. Nonetheless, that was the point at which I abandoned the charade I’d been living.
And began wrestling with the perils of the belief system to which I’d at least given money and time. What follows is wildly simplistic, I know. Scholars and philosophers have written millions of words explaining why most organized religions—belief systems—rest on flimsy, fallible, dangerous thinking. But here’s me.
The historian in me took charge first. Faiths of many kinds, Western and Eastern have—across time—been the most brutal, intolerant, power and money hungry organizations on earth. Whether by a priest or a king or a president or a prophet–the very claim to be acting on behalf of and with the dictates of a remote supreme being automatically brooks no argument. Automatically creates conflict and combat between one set of believers and others who believe differently. Anytime any of us claim a direct message from a god, an edict given us by a god, we curtail discussion. We have set ourselves up to be the only “right” people on the issue at hand. We have embarked on a path of self-righteousness, not righteousness or compassion or love or understanding or helpfulness. With or without lethal weapons, we’ve declared a kind of war on “others.” And human history is crowded with vicious religious warfare or power trips justified by religion.
There’s this as well: saccharine superiority. Which characterizes many people, very much including those of my background, who are physically peaceable. Though they are firm in their understanding of a God with a capital G and the teachings of the New Testament, they would not assault anyone for a different belief. But, they are often quick to ask God to help those of us they see as disbelievers, to turn our thoughts to the right way. I find that belittling and insulting and smug. Once again, such action assumes that we are wrong and they are indubitably right.
And then, there remains the Episcopal priest at Mary’s funeral. While we are living, we have a host of opportunities to improve, to live the essence of the golden rule. But believing that a mythical being can judge us after we are gone—with a celestial grade book or from an eternal judicial bench contradicts the very premise of a loving god’s existence.
Finally, here’s this. I grew up singing about the beauty of the earth and all things bright and beautiful. But in a constrained way, limited as we all were within a world of rules dictated by a supreme being. Instead, for me, the world, the universe, all the vast expanses of time and land and water surrounding us are more fascinating, more complicated, more beautiful, more lethal than anything suggested in religious writing. I am far more awestruck by forces and extremes and timelessness and distances and species that I can never truly know – than I am by sightlines caught between “shoulds” and “musts.” Put another way, however broad the “heavens” of my youth, the very descriptors, the catechisms, the teachings that surrounded those “heavens” kept my eyes and imagination restrained, not untethered. Cautious, not exuberant. Beholden, not unbound to celebrate every furthest star.
When we lose someone dear to us in death, most of us experience moments when we want to revert. We want desperately to believe that we will see them again. I was guilty of that as well when Dave died. Until one of his high school friends called, asking for Dave, not knowing he was gone. After I explained, the friend paused a long time, and then in a broken voice, said, “Lola just died too.” Lola was Dave’s high school soul mate. One of a half dozen Dave Walter loves, including the three wives that preceded me. Heaven was going to be damned crowded and awkward.
How much sweeter, more honest, more authentic it seems to me to believe—as I did with Santa—that we are each other’s advisors, helpers, havens, forgivers, encouragers—daily, ordinary, thoughtful, wise gods.©
