As a boy I would pillory my mother with idle questions. I once asked her “what was the oldest trick in the book?” After a moment’s thought, she answered: “to blame someone else for your decisions, as Adam and Eve blamed the serpent.” I was disappointed that what I thought to be a profound question could be answered so definitively by consulting the Bible, but I could not think of anything better. Indeed, after rewatching Miracle on 34th Street with my family this year, I am now convinced there was more truth in that answer than I could grasp at the time. Taking shelter in blaming others is not only the oldest trick in the book, it is antithetical to faith. Only by rejecting this impulse can we truly believe.
Miracle on 34th Street appears to present a battle between faith and reason. The characters are forced to consider whether a kindly old man in an assisted living home in New York City is actually the one-and-only Santa Claus. While he is obviously an uncommon man, there is no definitive proof or supernatural sign that puts the matter to rest. A few skeptics believe he is by the end, but most of the others simply decide that no good can come from pressing the issue too hard. After considering Lewis’s trilemma of “lunatic, liar, or Santa,” they surmised that the choice of lunatic made the fewest demands on their psyche: only a little bit of “playing along” was required. The conclusion of the movie seems to be not only a triumph of faith over reason, but of faith over truth itself! Yet if one studies it a bit more closely, one can see that the skeptics are not as reasonable as they pretend, and the “faithful” are operating more closely to observed reality.
The protagonist, Doris Walker, is introduced as a no-nonsense manager and a hard-nosed realist. She wrangles an army of hapless performers into a successful Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. She has trained her daughter, Susie, to reject fairy tales because they are false. While watching the parade, Susie politely rebuffs her neighbor, Fred Gailey, when he tries to tell her stories about giants. Yet Ms. Walker is more consistently ruled by fear than reason. Her employer, Mr. Macy is not a tyrant. But as a manager, she knows she is judged on her judgment, and she is terrified of that judgment being wrong–or being seen as wrong. She is always on the lookout for other authorities who can affirm her decisions.
She meets Kris Kringle when he informs her that the Santa she hired for Thanksgiving is too drunk to play the role–right before the parade begins. It is sheer Providence that she can convince him to take his place at the last second. Kringle’s performance is a smashing success, and he continues to perform even more admirably as the Macy’s department store Santa. His practice of telling parents where they can find the toys their children want, even if those toys are at a competitor’s store, earns Macy’s goodwill, positive press, and leads to the practice becoming standard policy across the company. Walker herself profits from it by earning the praise of Mr. Macy and a bonus. But Kringle is unconventional, which worries her. Convention, even when it is wrong, is comforting because other people believe in it. Individual judgment, even if it is right, may have to stand alone.
Susie, while killing time with Mr. Gailey at Macy’s, observes Kringle speaking fluent Dutch to a young orphan girl from the Netherlands who is on his lap. This surprises her because, even if a man could learn Dutch, it is unlikely that a department-store Santa in New York speaks Dutch well enough to respond to this rare scenario on the spot. She updates her beliefs based on this new evidence, and begins to question whether Kringle really might be Santa Claus. Doris, alarmed, demands affirmation from Kringle that he is just an actor. When he refuses, this breach of convention overwhelms her and she seeks expert opinions to guide her response. She first pulls his employee record, which lists his name as Kris Kringle. This shakes her, because at least two authorities (the Macy’s personnel department and Brooks Memorial Home for the Aged, where he lives) concur that his name really is Kris Kringle.
She next seeks judgment on his sanity from Macy’s in-house psychologist, Granville Sawyer. While Kringle passes the psychological evaluation with ease, Mr. Sawyer takes an instant dislike to him. Sawyer perceives that he can exploit Ms. Walker’s craving for affirmation from authority in order to expel Kringle from the store. He succeeds to the point of unjustly institutionalizing Kringle in Bellevue Hospital. The methods he uses are defensible (best-practice psychological evaluations, the testimony of credentialed experts, and a clear red line that justifies termination of employment), yet the evidence of Ms. Walker’s eyes clearly demonstrates that Kringle, even seen in the most uncharitable light, does not belong in Bellevue.
Mr. Gailey, now deeply involved in the lives of the Walkers and Kris Kringle, decides to stage a rescue attempt by legally representing Kringle and demanding a hearing in court before he is officially committed. This surprises Judge Harper, who is used to resolving these cases with a rubber stamp. It is ambiguous whether Mr. Gailey “really” believes that Kringle is Santa. Mr. Gailey sees him as a dear friend, and he separately believes that some fictions contain some unquantifiable social good (anticipating Jordan Peterson seventy years later). He does have faith, however, in his own ability as a lawyer. This faith is sufficient for him to quit his job, begin an independent law firm, and withstand the ire of the woman he had been wooing.
The hearing is a circus. Very few people in the court believe that definitive proof that Kris Kringle is Santa Claus can be produced, yet Judge Harper is unwilling to make the unpopular declaration that there is no Santa Claus. Reason has now exited the stage, not because it has lost, but because it has forfeited. Before, Ms. Walker needed affirmation that her obviously successful department-store Santa was a safe hire. Now Judge Harper needs affirmation that his own reasonable judgment will be seen by others as acceptable. He does not personally believe in Santa Claus, but wants to risk neither social opprobrium for saying it out loud, nor professional opprobrium for giving credence to unreasonable arguments. What he wants, more than the truth, is a way out. As an elected judge, he is judged on his judgment, and he is terrified of that judgment being wrong–or worse, being seen as wrong.
It is at this point that the first act of genuine faith happens. That night, while the court is in recess, Ms. Walker takes her daughter’s letter to Santa Claus, adds a postscript declaring that she herself believes he is Santa, and signs her name to it. Ms. Walker knows she has no one authoritative who will affirm her belief that Kris Kringle is Santa Claus–but for the first time, she does not seek that affirmation, standing on her own judgment that he is. She addresses the envelope to the courthouse and mails the letter.
Many people define faith as belief when truth is uncertain, but this does not hold up under scrutiny. Scripture contains examples of people who have undeniable personal, empirical experience of the LORD, and yet still choose to be without faith. The Israelites who were delivered from Egypt saw the LORD’s overwhelming power, repeatedly, and yet still grumbled after a few days with no food or water. On the other hand, the Blessed Mother Mary was visited by an angel, and she became pregnant without having known a man. Every day of those nine months was empirical evidence of the LORD’s power, and she faithfully bore the difficulties of the pregnancy with grace.
What makes the Israelites faithless, and Mary faithful, if evidence abounded in both cases? Faith is belief, not without evidence, but without consolation. Mary knew for certain that she carried the Christ-child. What more evidence could she have than that of her own senses? That said, she could not point to any earthly authority who could explain the embarrassing fact that she was pregnant before marriage. A virgin pregnancy had never happened before, and would never happen again. If she pointed out Isaiah’s prophecy to Ahaz, one could easily retort that Micah predicted the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and she isn’t from Bethlehem. Yet she served in her role without complaint despite the lack of consolation. Every martyr has endured, unto death, a most violent absence of consolation for their belief. It is their faith that has, as promised, moved mountains: it overthrew Mount Olympus and brought Mount Horeb to the entire world.
It is Ms. Walker’s act of faith that precipitates Kris Kringle’s acquittal. Her letter, addressed to the courthouse, produced in the mind of the post office line workers the idea that unaddressed “Santa” letters could be dumped there. Mr. Gailey had the correct intuition that Judge Harper would be satisfied if some governmental authority, such as the mayor or governor, would testify that Kris Kringle was Santa Claus–but he could not effect it himself by making phone calls to government officials. Ms. Walker’s trusting letter enabled him to employ his winning strategy. In the Gospels, Jesus never effects a miracle in response to a demand for proof, but always in response to an act of faith on the part of someone who seeks Him. Doris’s letter was such an act of faith.
Judge Harper is elated that the local post office delivered these letters to his court, not because it genuinely convinced him of Kris Kringle’s identity, but because it gave him some authority who could affirm his decision. The actions of this individual post office weren’t very authoritative: there was no statement from the Postmaster General or official written USPS policy on where to deliver Santa letters, but he was so desperate not to stand alone on his judgment that he took what he could get. Before the hearing began, Harper’s cigar-smoking Tammany Hall adviser urged him to recuse himself, arguing that he would be considered a “regular Pontius Pilate.” His adviser was right, though not in the way that he thought. Pontius Pilate, in his own judgment, knew that Jesus was innocent. But he also knew that judgment would be unpopular, and sought escape in being able to lay the blame for the decision on someone else. Using the flimsy excuse of his being willing to release a single prisoner once a year, he contrived a popular vote between Jesus and Barabbas. He did not have faith in his own, correct judgment, because there was no consolation in it. Better, in his mind, to participate in a popular lie than to have to justify the truth alone.
There is only one character in the movie who consistently cleaves to reality, with or without consolation: Susie Walker. She endures Mr. Gailey’s teasing when she rejects his fairy tales. She distances herself from the other children in the apartment when they want her to pretend to be an animal in their imaginary zoo game. She is the first to challenge her mother on whether Kringle really is Santa Claus, on the evidence of his speaking Dutch. She is also the last to truly believe, not taking solace in the manufactured consensus from the court hearing, but waiting to see whether Santa could deliver on his promise to bring her a house. Kringle tests her on Christmas morning by withholding from her the fact that he found her a house. Her act of faith is in the car ride afterward, where she, disappointed, repeatedly mutters a phrase echoing the words of Mark 9:24: “I believe, help my unbelief!” It is then that she witnesses her miracle: her dream house, for sale, on the path marked out by Kringle’s directions. Perhaps, when Jesus exhorts his followers to “become like little children,” he means for us to be willing to choose reality, even when it contradicts our own ideological inclinations and those of our milieu.
Modern movies have difficulty depicting faith because the people making them do not themselves understand faith. They often depict a character (e.g. Will Ferrell’s Elf or Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian) having a belief in an absurdity that is so stubborn that it becomes noble. Miracle on 34th Street succeeds where these works fail by accurately depicting the unreliability of systematic, skeptical thinking when performed by fallible human actors. Mr. Gailey reaches the truth when he says “Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.” Common sense is always common, but it is not always sense. Do you have faith enough to believe the truth, alone?
