Give the Gift of a Guilt-Free Christmas

If we want children to be virtuous and happy, don’t tell them they are born sinners in need of salvation.

No American holiday is more focused on promoting the joy of children than Christmas. Parents work overtime to shop for a cornucopia of gifts to appear under the tree for their children. But what if many of these same parents, perhaps without knowing it, are mixing something into the holiday experience that threatens to poison children’s motivation to pursue happiness?

The Christmas gift tradition reflects a belief in the innocence of childhood. Young children’s misbehavior results from ignorance and immaturity; they aren’t yet capable of malice. But especially at Christmas many parents bring an idea into their homes that undercuts the notion of childhood innocence — and sabotages their own children’s moral development.

The idea is learned at church. While the story of the newborn Jesus might seem to bring tidings of comfort and joy, we should remember that in the nativity story, Christ and Mary are the only innocents. One Christmas carol reminds us that no one else is: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.” Another recounts how Christ was born “To save us all from Satan’s pow’r when we were gone astray.” The angel who appears to Joseph in the book of Matthew reaffirms this: “He will save his people from their sins.”

The whole Gospel story conveys how Christ is born into a world of sinners: as Joseph suspects Mary is pregnant through an illicit affair, King Herod orders a massacre of all newborn infants he sees as rivals to his throne. In Luke, Caesar orders a draconian Empire-wide census forcing the couple to travel to a town where every innkeeper turns them away. Even after the child is born, a prophet warns Mary that “a sword will pierce her soul,” alluding to the fact that her child is destined to be sacrificed to inexplicably save sinners who cannot save themselves. The Gospel’s gloomy world filled with suffering and sin is portrayed in searing cinematography in Mary, the new Netflix drama.

St. Augustine notoriously amplified this view of the Gospels into his shocking doctrine of original sin, the idea that each of us inherits the sin of Adam from birth. Even young children, the ill-tempered lustful creatures he took them to be, are damned if they die before baptism. “Can you tell me how one deserved to be carried for grace, how the other deserved to be suffocated by its mother as she slept? Neither deserved anything good” (Sermon 26.13). No one deserves happiness or salvation in Augustine’s view; at most some receive it as an unearned gratuity the Lord condescends to give.

Historically, the Christians who took Augustine’s idea the most seriously, the Calvinist Puritans, were vehemently anti-Christmas. It’s why in 1644, English parliament decreed that December 25th “be kept with the more solemn humiliation, because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers.” It’s why in 1647, they banned Christmas outright. American Puritans did the same in Massachusetts in 1659. Writing in 1712, Cotton Mather lamented Christmas celebrations, calling his parishioners to reflect on their dependence on God’s grace in a sinful world.

It should go without saying that it’s baseless dogma that anyone is born a sinner. Of course, as children mature they sort themselves into naughty and nice by making vicious or virtuous choices. But no one is born destined to make these choices. Decent parents who want to teach the value of good choices will reward their children with praise — and presents. None would give a lump of coal regardless, especially not to very young children who have not yet formed a capacity for malice.

Yet teaching children the doctrine of original sin — in most denominations, an essential part of the Christmas story — is an insult much worse than any lump of coal. It’s an idea that undercuts the expectation that making the right choices matters.

By targeting the very idea of childhood innocence, the doctrine negates everything joyous about our modern and (thankfully) secularized Christmas spirit. As Ayn Rand once observed, that spirit is conveyed by “‘Merry Christmas’ — not ‘Weep and Repent.’”

Parents who are serious about helping their child learn to choose happiness should avoid the Christian doctrine like the poison it is. Especially if they subject their children to weekly doses of Sunday preaching about the need for regular penitence and expiation, children will lose the motivation to choose virtue because it promises happiness. They’ll learn to see morality as a pointless ritual and to live with nagging fear that they cannot escape punishment for their innate sin.

Teaching children the doctrine of original sin is an insult much worse than any lump of coal.

Parents who would wish their children a truly merry Christmas shouldn’t second-guess the decision to avoid the “Weep and Repent” message. They should appreciate that even the most expensive presents are at best a temporary balm when offered against the life-long scars of the doctrine of original sin.

Children are either born innocent or born as wicked sinners. Parents who really love their children should feel confident looking their children in the eye and knowing which of these alternatives they must choose.

“I will ask you to project the look on a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand,” wrote Ayn Rand. “It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world —inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as ‘sacred’ — meaning: the best, the highest possible to man — this look is the sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.”

Consider whether this look and the potential it represents should be sacrificed to the dogma that your child is a hopeless sinner. Consider instead if encouraging children to ask questions — whether about Santa or original sin or the very idea of a God — better protects what’s sacred about childhood innocence. Before putting anything under the tree, give them the gift of respecting their crucial need for an earned self-esteem.