“You’d better watch out! You’d better not cry! You’d better not pout. I’m telling you why. Santa Claus is coming to town.”
Holy Crap! What will happen if I do cry or pout? Will I face some kind of punishment or will I be excluded from some kind of reward?
It’s interesting that in a cultural context in which so many things have been deemed morally archaic this song somehow survives. I’m not calling for its dismissal, I just note the general creepiness of it and how it functions as a method of threat and control.
“He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. So be good for goodness sake.”
Santa apparently keeps lists, and if you turn up on the naughty list then you get coal in your stocking. I guess that it is naughty to cry or pout, perhaps because either of these can be upsetting for parents. The message is clear, if you’re good, you get good stuff. If you’re bad, you get punished.
It’s one thing to turn Santa into a proxy for parental control and threat. It’s another to fall into the same temptation in regards to concepts of God. However, for many people, this is the concept of God that has dominated their lives.
“You’d better watch out!”
or, in the words of another parental threat,
“Don’t make me come down there!”
These threats are assigned, often, by people who want to control other people. In the world of church, threats like these are indicative of bad religion that protects the power of a person or a small group of people. The first major problem with this way of thinking is that it turns God into an agent for human power.
A conversation that should be troubling:
Question - “How do I obey God?”
Answer - “You obey me.”
Of course, parents are to love and guide their children, but as children mature they should see that their parents are, in fact, not God, and that blind obedience is not necessarily virtuous. When churches and other institutions declare themselves to be stand-ins for God then things can become really dangerous.
The signs of this way of thinking are present throughout our culture. I have officiated quite a few marriage ceremonies. The traditional marriage vows in some Christian ceremonies have included the injunction to “love, cherish and obey” with the “obey” noted often only in the vow of the wife, not the vow of the husband. When I officiated weddings that used traditional vows I recommended changing such language.
If Santa is who I suspect that he is, he does not like the lyrics of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. I know, from Christian scripture, that Jesus is a lot better than the “You’d better watch out” theologies that have hurt so many people. Here is the second major problem with these ways of thinking, they lead to a world and a faith dominated by “No!” Theologian Karl Barth argued strongly that scripture is clear that God’s approach to humanity is “YES”, not “No”. Barth goes so far as to say that if we start with “No” we cannot truly communicate God’s character and God’s relationship to humanity.
“You’d better watch out!” is a way of starting with “No”.
For Barth, the “No” of God is always contained within a larger “YES” to humanity.
The Christian is the witness to the great Yes which God has spoken to the world in total renewal and definitive liberation. This Yes which God has spoken to it is its own truth. The Christian is the messenger who tells the world this truth to its face. Whether loudly or softly, in words or works, he declares this Gospel by his existence.
(Church Dogmatics V IV.3.2 p. 622)
Many people who were raised with a transactional understanding of faith, a punishment model of spirituality, never fully shake it. You may be one of those people. Do you think that if you just do this one good thing or avoid this other bad thing, then God will reward you with a good day or will protect your family from trouble? That way of thinking is a shadow of the “You’d better watch out!” threat.
I’m not arguing that you should do a bunch of bad things, I am just hoping that you can be free from the threats of people who sought to control you for their own gain. God is better than that. I’m thinking that even Santa is better than that.
In the family where I grew up we all sang the “Santa Song” but somehow “Santa” must have dismissed the threats because he always came to our house at Christmas and was always exceedingly generous.
Thankfully I was raised with love. God (and Santa) were never used as a threat.
Frankly, I feel that the God of the Bible that I know is very often misinterpreted.
I would recommend a book called How the Bible Actually Works.
The author, Peter Enns, skillfully describes the God that I know, the “YES” God.