The Poor You Shall Always Have, Part 3

I'm working on a website that deals more in-depth with the concept I want to throw at you now (and as such, I would appreciate any feedback you'd like to give regarding it).

In America, all children are told about Santa Claus, although certainly not all are told as if Santa is a real person.  But many - nay, most - are told that he's real and believe in him until somewhere between the ages of 7 and 10.   Those who do believe are taught to pray to him, by sitting on his lap at the mall and whispering in his ear, or writing lengthy letters to him asking him for all the things they want.  Both believers and non-believers sing songs about him akin to worship songs we might sing in church.

In the pantheon of American civil religion, Santa is seated at the right hand of George Washington.

Both believers and non-believers are told one key thing about Santa - that you can ask him for presents, and if you're good enough, you'll get them.  Whether kids are taught to believe or not to believe, they both hear the same thing in songs and in writing:

He's making a list and checking it twice,
Gonna find out who's naughty and nice
...
He sees you when you are sleeping, He knows when you're awake;
He knows if you've been bad or good, So be good, for goodness' sake!
("Santa Claus is Coming to Town" by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie)

The idea here is that Santa has a list of the good children and the bad, and those who are good get presents, and those who are bad get nothing (or, in even worse versions of the myth, an anti-Santa named Krampus comes and takes them away).

The problem with this myth of Santa and his presents for good children is the following logic: If Santa always gives presents to good boys and girls, then boys and girls who do not get presents must be bad.  Therefore, poor children whose families could afford no presents must be evil.  It's not a far stretch to also assume that the more presents Santa brings - or, at least the better - the better the child is.  When kids invariably go back to school and start comparing gifts, they're left with knowing that they aren't as good as another child because they didn't get the same quality stuff.

 Rich = good, poor = bad.

When we're children, we also pray to God in the same way.  Heck, at middle age I still do, sometimes.  But our approach to God is that God is a omnipotent Santa, able to dole out gifts to all of us.

Most obviously of this same genre is Prosperity Theology, of the same kind as Joel Osteen is famous for.  The basic idea of Prosperity is that if people are faithful to God, God will be faithful to them financially - meaning that God will reward good people with material wealth.  This clearly creates the same conundrum: if Prosperity was true, then all rich people are good, and all poor people are evil.

Prosperity Theology says that this guy is more likely to get into Heaven than you are.
By Bashar_al-Assad.jpg: Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom / ABr derivative work: César (Bashar_al-Assad.jpg) [CC-BY-3.0-br (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/br/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Fortunately, most of the Christian world has theoretically rejected Prosperity Theology as heresy.  Unfortunately, that's only in theory.  Because we still teach it in church - we just mask it.

You see, when we believe the stuff I mentioned in the 2nd post on this topic - the idea, for instance, that the poor are all drug abusers and welfare fraud committers, we declare that wealth is good.  When we teach Santa Claus to kids, we declare that wealth is good.  We embrace Prosperity Theology because it backs up what we want to believe about our capitalist society, and the values we (I say we, having believed it in my past, though I am clearly no longer one) on the political Right espouse.  But we know it to be heretical.  And as such, it's important to reject those things that promote it.