58. Dr. Lois Lee on the Magic of Santa, Secular Rituals and Why Christmas Still Matters

“[Magical beliefs in childhood] serve an important function.”  - Dr Lois Lee

For our festive special, Dr. Lois Lee, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and one of the world’s leading scholars of non-belief, joins Humanism Now to explore why atheism spreads culturally and what Christmas reveals about humanist meaning in everyday life.

Connect with Dr. Lee

• University of Kent profile
• Explaining Atheism Profile
• Explaining Atheism Project

Topics we cover

 ✔︎ Why atheism still needs explaining in the 21st century
 ✔︎ Why socialisation and cultural visibility matter more than intelligence or education
 ✔︎ What children’s belief in Santa reveals about evidence, reason, and doubt
 ✔︎ Magical belief as a bridge between childhood and adult worldviews
 ✔︎ Christmas as a modern, child-centred ritual with humanist ethics
 ✔︎ Ritual, meaning, and non-religious culture
 ✔︎ Humanist privilege, school Christmas, and questions of inclusion

Resources & further reading

• Becoming Non-Believers (childhood research) – Dr. Lee & Dr. Anna Strhan
• Towards a Sociology of Irreligion – Colin Campbell (1971)
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• A Visit from St. Nicholas (“’Twas the Night Before Christmas”) 
• The Snowman –  Raymond Briggs
• “Father Christmas Executed” – Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Dr Lois Lee & Why Atheism Needs Explaining
• 3:00 How Culture And Socialisation Drive Atheism
• 6:02 Demographics, Elites and Britain’s Shift Toward Non‑Belief
• 9:54 The Meaning of Christmas in Secular Society
• 13:40 Children, Santa and Evidence
• 16:18 Magical Beliefs as a Tool for Reasoning
• 19:44 From Adult Feast To Child‑Centred Fest
• 22:46 Humanistic Ethics in Christmas Values
• 24:25 Function of Magical Beliefs in Development
• 27:19 Magic As A Bridge To Maturity
• 29:16 Supernatural Beliefs Among Atheists
• 29:16 [Ad] Hard Hats & Justice
• 29:50 (Cont.) Magic As A Bridge To Maturity
• 33:22 Role of Rituals and Future Evolution
• 38:14 Understanding Secular Privilege
• 41:24 Defining Non-Religious Cultures & Worldviews
• 44:46 Changing Minds

Transcript

James Hogson: 0:02

Welcome to the Humanism Now Podcast. I'm your host, James Hodgson. This week, for our seasonal special episode, we're delighted to be joined by Dr. Lois Lee, senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Kent, and one of the leading voices in the study of non-belief and secular worldviews. Dr. Lee has spent a career exploring how people find meaning and connection outside of religion and how atheism, agnosticism, and humanism are shaping modern life. Lois is the founder of the Non-Religion and Secularity Research Network and the Journal of Secularism and Non-Religion. She's also written widely on these themes in books including Recognizing the Non-Religious and the Oxford Dictionary of Atheism. She currently leads the Explaining Atheism Project, a major international study looking at how and why people become non-believers. And Dr. Lee's latest research turns the humanist and secular traditions of Christmas. Dr. Lois Lee, thank you so much for joining us. It's a real pleasure to welcome you to Humanism Now.

Dr. Lois Lee: 1:06

It's lovely to be here.

James Hogson: 1:08

So, as mentioned in the introduction, you are one of the leading academics and researchers behind the Explaining Atheism Project. And I suppose a lot of people might think, why does atheism need explaining in the 21st century?

Dr. Lois Lee: 1:23

Yeah, it's a funny one. There's a lot of how you think about whether atheism needs to be explained might say something about you and the context in which you're living your life. Because I meet people who think, well, there's not much atheism about, is there? Why would we need to explain it? And then I equally meet people who think, we're all atheists now, aren't we? Why would you need to explain it? So one step on that journey is trying to be a bit clear and document sociologically and through the human sciences. We're a big interdisciplinary team, so we've got people using all sorts of methodologies, but all honing in on what atheism is and how much of it there is. And then coming back to questions about why it is that any particular individual person or any particular society might become atheistic when another one isn't. And that sits against some theories that make that unexpected in some scenarios. So in cognitive, the cognitive study of religion at the moment, for example, there's people forwarding this view that there's a kind of all sorts of natural cognitive mechanisms that lead the human brain to interpret all kinds of phenomena as caused by God, for example. Really interesting research that then leaves open the question of what's happening with those other brains, that they're not interpreting those phenomena in that way. Or sociologically, why is it that some countries have lots of atheism and others don't? So, yeah, it was a very big program of research that I led with colleagues, John Jonathan Laman at Queen's University and Ayanna Willard at Brunel as well, from different disciplines, trying to get a lot of different vantage points on it.

James Hogson: 2:59

And what were the main conclusions that you were able to draw from the research?

Dr. Lois Lee: 3:03

Well, a lot of us have been involved in really establishing the study of atheism, non-religious worldviews, these sort of diverse related concepts, getting that study much more established in academia in general. And so, in kind of building whole fields of research, I think there's lots more to say and lots more questions, even to ask as we go on a journey. You know, there's established religious studies, which is infinitely broad, and we think there's as much to say about atheistic worldviews, and there's lots of different dimensions to atheism. It's not just about atheistic worldviews, lots going on. Um so there's a lot to say. But we were particularly looking at that question about why it is that a particular person or a particular country would become atheist when another wouldn't. And we took, we put a lot of different models into the system. There's loads of different theories out there, some of which tell us a little bit about the biases of the people holding those theories, whether it's there's a set of theories that basically sort of imply that atheists are more intelligent than religious people. So whether it's about, are you better at analytic thinking rather than intuitive thinking, or have you had access to more education? So there's a set of theories that have to do with a kind of clarity of thought associated with atheism. But equally, on the other hand, there's a set of theories that talk about broken homes and quote unquote, and the absence of father figures and though those being causal. So you can see there are two quite different understandings about what it means to be an atheist going on underneath the theories. And then there's some sort of more mundane academic theories in the midst as well. And we looked at all of those in very broad terms. We funded lots of smaller projects with loads of people. I think it was 50 plus researchers working on this. And basically the short story was lots of them don't matter at all. Almost all of them don't matter at all. And the thing that really stands out is whether you've been socialized into atheism. So is there atheism in your background or in your current cultural context? So you're thinking about there's a person over there, they've turned out to be atheist. Why has that happened? It's a lot about cultural exchange, which is all the same things that sociologists and others have thought about religion for a long time. But it's quite a big shift in thinking. You think the sort of it's pointing to something I think we'll talk about when we talk about Crispus, which is what we're here to discuss. I've got my jingle bells here, so I wave them. We're going to draw back Christmas episode. But it's a way of thinking about atheists as having a culture, having connections with people. And that is a different way of thinking about atheism to those more kind of rationalist accounts, the kind of, in some ways, the tradition of free thought, which I see as a tradition, but in its whole, that whole kind of way of saying we're free thinkers, we're sort of liberated from traditions in our thinking. There's that kind of very interesting tension at the heart of some of our ways of thinking about atheism that I think this research offers an interesting perspective on.

James Hogson: 6:02

So if I understand correctly, you're saying that a lot of these theories about, as you say, intelligence or open-mindedness or specific cultural influences actually are less important than just awareness, normalization, representation of non-religious people in society and being familiar with it, it will allow people to be open to think that that might be that might be happening.

Dr. Lois Lee: 6:25

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, we tested as I said, we tested all of these models. And there's some kind of minor effects for some of them, but they're really quite marginal. And I think what the data is pointing to is a very broad cultural transition towards atheism, which is all about how we share culture with one another and how we bring people with us. There, one of the kind of earliest sociologists working in this area, Colin Campbell, he wrote a book in 1971 called Towards a Sociology of the Irreligious, which was this really formative book. And it didn't take off at the time. It's taken until the 21st century for that really to get going. But it's a really kind of touchstone for any of us working in the field. We all turn to that book. And one of the things he says at that point is he's looking at the demographics, right? And he's saying, Yes, we do see these demographics, which we have seen since in other parts of the world where atheists are much more likely to be elite white men. And some of the theories we have about atheists really relate to that. So we're looking at education levels, for example, that's very bound up with that. And you can interpret that as saying, ah, the more educated naturally come to this more correct philosophical position makes so much sense. But what he was pointing out as a sociologist was that's also the demographics of most radical movements. As in the people who are able to push new cultural ideas forward have to have a bit of capital of all kinds, social capital and economic capital and so on, in order for that not to be just an incredibly terrifying and vulnerable position to be in. And so we often find that movements are pushed by not the kind of established most powerful in society, but the nearly as powerful who've got a chance to make a play for taking up, taking over that dominant space, because they're not it's not as risky exactly. So he says that's what that demographic is about. And what we'll see over time is that atheists demographically will come to resemble the general population more and more. And that's of course exactly what we've seen. So now, gosh, 50 years on, gosh, is it that? Yes, 55 years on from 1971 when he published that book. It was only actually in the last wave of our major social attitude survey, the British Social Attitude Survey, that we had the largest number saying they don't believe in God. So it's not an absolute majority, it's a relative majority. But more people now say they don't believe in God than do. And that was in they ask about God every 10 years. So that took place somewhere between 2008 and 2018. That shift took place. Yeah, as I say, lots of people are sort of like, isn't atheism really widespread and there's nothing to see here and it's really non-controversial and so on. But actually, it's only quite recently that we actually get this dominant position really being visible in the data. But yeah, when you get to the point where 40% of the population say that have belief in God, it might not be surprising to notice that all of those demographic patterns just melt away. 40% of the population is just getting so close to 100% of the, you know, it's got so much in common with the general population. So yeah, I think he was I think he was prescient in that observation.

James Hogson: 9:46

Hugely ahead of his time to be writing in the early 1970s. Absolutely. No, thank you for that background and context. And so, as I mentioned, this is our Christmas special or our festive special. And I know you've been writing more recently about the idea of Christmas and what it means to us as a secular society. So, what have you uncovered about Christmas, Easter, these uh historically religious times of the year for celebration when we now approach them as non-religious people or humanists?

Dr. Lois Lee: 10:20

I often get asked to do media spots and so on at Christmas because I think it's a point of time where people notice there's something slightly paradoxical going on where we have increasing numbers of people who are non-religious, people who say they have no religion have been an absolute majority for since 2010 and the biggest group since 1993. So they're really established as a big group. And yet, let's I think it's fair to say that Christmas remains a big deal. And there's a kind of generalized account that I think people realize isn't quite right, they're not convinced by, but the sort of story that gets told is either it's a quite a meaningful existential festival for Christians, or it's about rank, unfettered consumer culture, maybe connecting with the family and some sort of secular tradition, we come together arbitrarily to be together, and it acquires some kind of meaning to us as a result of that. And that's a sort of story that's told. And I think when we get asked, when I get asked, and people in my area get asked every year to talk about the non-religious in that festival, I think what they're getting at is there's something more to say. And essentially, we noticed the same thing in this. I was doing working with Anna Strahan and Rachel Shilito, they'd done this brilliant project with children. Uh, they sort of aged between eight and eleven, so middle childhood. And I then came on and analysed some of the data with them against some new questions. And one of the things we were looking at is again this question of why people become atheistic. In this case, we're interested in children. So all of these children were asked, do you believe in God? And if they said no, or even they weren't sure, they were included in these very sweet conversations in pairs, talking about all sorts of things, meaning religion, so on and so forth. And we were looking at how it, yeah, how it is that they were taking on those these sorts of atheistic ideas and bringing it into their identity and their sense of self. Or if they were at all, that might not be part of their identity at all, it might be a bit of a non-event or a background thing. And then when we were going through that, we just started to notice that Christmas was coming up a lot. The parents were asked about it. We interviewed parents and teachers, or the team interviewed parents and teachers explicitly, and they were asked about some festivals like Christmas and Easter. But the children didn't have any questions that were put to them about it. And in every interview, Christmas comes up, and not just Christmas, especially especially Santa Claus, they say, there's a bit of a cultural shift. Parents and people of my generation always refer to Father Christmas, but the kids say Santa Claus just as an aside, the Americanization of our language is happening. Anyway, they Santa Claus is a big deal, and specifically in the context of these interviews where we're asking about non-religion. So they're saying things like, oh, I have beliefs, and they're connecting those with being non-religious, but I don't believe in God. For some reason, they see their belief in Father Christmas's Santa Claus, I should say, honor their language, um, really relevant to talking about belief, atheism, God, non-religion in a number of different ways. So we just went back and we searched the whole data set.

James Hogson: 13:29

So it's children see it as relevant to their beliefs, or the adults, yeah.

Dr. Lois Lee: 13:32

Yes. Yeah. So they're raising it spontaneously in all of the interviews. They weren't ever asked about it. And all the questions are about meaning, God, non-religious identity, things in that kind of area. So we reanalyzed the data set for every mention of Christmas in Santa Claus and realized there was this theme running through the data. It's not just Santa Claus, I should say, although we're that time of year, but and we focus on Santa Claus because he's definitely the major focus. But in their imagination, Santa Claus sits alongside the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy as these kind of magical beings. So it comes up around belief. They know these are the kinds of beings that you might believe in rather than you know that they exist. And so in that way, they're connected with questions about supernatural forces, including gods. And that's one of the kind of connections that's coming through. But they also sometimes they're making distinctions. This is these children, so they're eight to eleven, they were just at the age where they're thinking about whether Santa is definitely real and existing in the way they've thought about before. So a lot of those conversations happened in the interview themselves. So one thing comes through is just how much Santa Claus matters to these atheistic children. But also, we were struck by the way they're talking about Santa Claus. So they're using all this kind of evidence-based reasoning, really empiricist thinking, to assess whether Santa Claus exists. They're saying, I don't know, because how could Santa Claus get around the world at night? But then they're coming up with they're just slightly wanting to hold on. They're at that age, they're slightly wanting to hold on to that belief. They say, Oh, it is the longest nights of the year. So that could be, but there's all this sort of very evidence-based reasoning going on. They talk about what's the best evidence of Santa Claus, the present presence that turn up in the morning, but they also talk about quite extensive practices that we should have a trigger warning for this in case anyone's listening to the podcast in the car. James, I think you've got to add that, possibly even before this point. But the children have definitely found evidence of Santa Claus in carrots that have been eaten by the reindeer, or even snowy footprints on the stairs, one of them spoke about. So they're drawing on and just talking in this very evidence-based way about these beliefs. The parents are talking about the forms of magic that are imbued in this meaning system. So we start to notice there's a very humanist consistent way epistemology going on, way of thinking about how we know what's true.

James Hogson: 16:11

Could you draw that out for us there? Because it's really fascinating to hear about the magical beliefs and the kind of an element of faith, I think. It's this is something the children believe, but they know the sort of rational problems with it. And they're, as you said, they're analyzing. I'd love to hear about the benefits of magical belief, but how do you see this as a humanistic way of thinking?

Dr. Lois Lee: 16:34

Yeah, so I think this is one element of it that so we we argue that through these kinds of rituals, actually, what's going on our parents help children to assess the world in these sort of empirical ways and to say that's the way that we know things. And parents talk about supporting this belief, but safe in the knowledge that their children will come out of it. One parent makes a real distinction between that and beliefs about God. And she said, Oh, I'd never I wouldn't want to create this false belief in God because I don't know if my child would ever come out of that belief. Whereas what's going on with Father Christmas and Santa Claus is parents participate in this kind of absolutely quite and quite clearly committed to the idea, the understanding they're going to come out of these beliefs. And they're quite specific, they say ages eight, nine, and ten. So if anyone's got an eight, nine, or ten-year-old at home, this is the age that parents identify as this moment of transition. I mean, we go so far as to say it's a bit of a rite of passage because children are kind of have that moment of taking a different relationship with this ritual. Anyone who's got younger children as well, the older child might get let into this grown-up secret, but maybe they're asked to preserve the magic for their younger siblings. So they get this sort of mature role. And it operates, yeah, much as we see rites of passage operating in other settings where you have someone moving from being childish in their beliefs to having this mature status. Parents say that coming out of that belief can be quite bittersweet because they see it as the end of childhood. So all the language is all about these different phases of maturity and understanding. But in terms of your question, the kind of humanistic heart, I think then thinking about looking at the data again, we start to notice also a set of ethics that are being celebrated at Christmas, which are very, yeah, again, they're kind of they're not ethics that are exclusive to humanism. There's things about equality and inclusion, not letting people be alone. These are ethics we find outside of humanist traditions. But if you start to look at the kind of constellation of things, it follows a fairly human humanist profile. So it's not only about equality. So equality comes through in lots of ways, but it in terms of ethics around Christmas. But one is just that it's a child-centered ritual. Humanists in lots of ways celebrate humanity as a species. Our forms of knowledge, we see, well, humanists see morality as kind of embedded in the human species. And through this kind of knowledge that's innate in us as human beings and shared in our relationship with other humans, we're able to make moral evaluations and assessments. So it's very human-centered in that way. And actually, children then are quite special within that culture, have a sort of distinct role as the next generation of humans, also as kind of vulnerable species members, which, if we're celebrating the species as a whole, those vulnerable species members have a certain kind of significant symbolic value to us. And you start then to notice that, okay, actually, Christmas used to be totally adult-centered until the mid 19th century. And it's about the time that humanism as we know it is really being consolidated in that intellectual thought.

James Hogson: 19:53

Interesting.

Dr. Lois Lee: 20:00

Christmas used to be about the raucous, uh, fun, unmisproduction. Behaviour of adults who were did role reversal with their employers, for example, and the landlord of the estate would become the servant for the day, and totally different set of ethics being explored and celebrated. And then a key moment actually is the poem that we still have with us, twas the night before Christmas, which I haven't got it in front of me actually. It's the 1830s or 1850s. I've now forgotten. It's that sort of time period, and it's absolutely crucial. And then obviously Dickens' Christmas carol is subsequent to that. But those movements really reshape Christmas as the festival we know it today, which is above all else child-centered.

James Hogson: 20:47

Yes.

Dr. Lois Lee: 20:48

And all those rituals we've been talking about, leaving out which the children are taking as it's helping them form their evidential reasoning. These carrots have were there and now they're not there. And my parents, who are authoritative figures, say that it was a reindeer. And okay, that all marries up. They're also cult festivities are absolutely for children celebrating children. So again, in this kind of dot joining that we're doing in this article, which I just loved, just really loved. We're then thinking, well, hold on, you can look at Christmas as a kind of a hangover from our Christian past in post-Christian societies. And that makes sense. True, that helps us understand Easter, although the children are very concerned with the Easter bunny, which isn't necessarily the most Christian figurehead. But the other festival that they really associate with together or set of rituals is around the tooth fairy. And a tooth fairy, as far as I'm aware, any listener knows otherwise, I'd love to know. I don't think it has any embeddedness in Christianity. So the common denominator there is actually that they're child-centered rituals in which these magical beings, which children know have a kind of special status, because they initially come up in the interviews, the interviews opened with a question, what do you believe in general terms? That was one of the main places where they'd start talking about these beings. And they know they're the kind of beings that are somehow a bit uncanny, that you don't know to be there, but you might believe to be there. And yet you turn to these evidential evidence to prove that. Once you start getting into Christmas research and thinking about Christmas as a humanist ritual, you start to see that how embedded that is in our culture as well. From a recording, they've just launched the new John Lewis Advert, which has become a sort of event in our Christmas ritual in its own right. And the sort of ethics in that kind of culture that comes through in the UK context, I think there are differences to Christmas culture in different parts of the world. I don't think it's quite the same in the US as the UK, for example. But focusing on the UK, that sort of ethic of love, care, giving, also sadness and those existential things coming through. So again, contrasting with the idea that if you're not Christian, you're engaging with Christmas in terms of a lovely meal with your family and spending too much money. Actually, if we think about Christmas culture, whether it's the snowman, which is profoundly existential, with the, you know, that's making this kind of statement about what it means to live a good life and the sadness of the end, the material demise of the melted snowman at the end. A lot of our Christmas culture is really existential. It's about what it means to be alive, and doesn't fit easily in those Christian or just sort of secular in the most this worldly sense that it's just about presence and these really material aspects, the passing of time, the sell thinking about the seasonal change and all of those things have these kind of existential dimensions. So we see it within the in this date with children, and then once you start to see it, it's all around to to uh quote a famous Christmas film.

James Hogson: 24:17

That's wonderful. So it's it's it it sounds as though you're saying that these magical beliefs, for children at least, act as a kind as a a safe bridge between the innocence of childhood and the realities of the real world. And and so these are things which it's harmless to hang on to for a little bit longer, but to chip away at as analytic thinking develops.

Dr. Lois Lee: 24:38

I'd go further than harmless and say that they seem to be serving quite an important function. So not only are they not pulling away from helping children develop empirical understandings of the world where you draw an evidence and so on, they're actually imbuing those ways of thinking with magic. And people talk a lot about the kind of magic that's built in early childhood through Christmas as carrying through to this later stage of maturity where we know it's not real, and yet we continue to participate and we continue to make Christmas special for our children in all kinds of ways. Extraordinarily, in doing this research, we found an article by Claude Levi Strauss, who's one of the kind of 20th-century anthropologists, but considered one of those really canonical thinkers. And his first article, published after he did his PhD in 1952, is called Father Christmas Executed. And it's exactly about this a tension that was going on in France at the time between the Catholic Church and Father Christmas, Pen Noel, who was considered a sort of cuckoo in the nest, that in France we had this very strong move to remove references to religion from the schools through this kind of lacite form of secularism. So real push to get religion out of the classroom. And that this article is looking at the way the Catholic Church then began to think that Father Christmas had been veigled himself, as it were, into school settings. And Levi Strauss says this Father Christmas is one of the great symbols of irreligion and secularity of our times. He then doesn't get into what are the sort of meanings underlying it, but we absolutely agree with that. And he writes beautifully about we should reflect. I think he's saying a social scientist, but I think we can reflect all of us on, he puts it really beautifully of the tender care that we take of this character, Father Christmas, in the lives of our children. Why are we doing that? And I think in this article within this research, we've been trying to say, ah, I think what's happening here is exactly it's about celebrations of worldviews that matter to people, and particularly the humanist worldview that's being celebrated.

James Hogson: 26:54

That's wonderful. No, thank you for expanding on that. And this idea of magical beliefs, how does it play out in wider society outside of childhood? Do you think there is value in magical beliefs? Does it perhaps have links to spirituality in any ways? What has your research shown there?

Dr. Lois Lee: 27:13

Yeah, it's it's funny, isn't it? There's that sense that magical beings and believing in supernatural forces, I think sometimes we're quite narrow in how we think about what those beliefs are doing. And these parents are saying supernatural beliefs in God might play out really differently to supernatural beliefs in Father Christmas and Santa Claus because of this the broader context of those beliefs. And I think that's right. I think what these beliefs are doing for a lot of the children we're talking with is teaching children a really embodied experience of magic. So it's less about the belief in that thing, but through at this particular age in their lives, they have these beliefs that have just are so exciting. And sociologists tend to think about different sort of language, like emotional repertoires and all these sorts of ideas that are just trying to say you end up with a sense we're training our bodies to sense the world in a particular way, and that these rituals, all rituals do that. They teach us to experience the world in particular kind of emotional affective ways. And Christmas and indeed Easter and visits of the Tooth Fairy are doing this, they're changing our disposition to the world. And actually, it's much more about that than it is belief in these beings, of which absolutely everyone's confident they will disappear. And the whole school system, the whole social system that these kids are embedded in is set up to ensure that would happen. Older schools support these beliefs at certain points in time and then they change the way they talk about these beliefs. Older siblings start dropping the suggestion that it might not be real in the same way. There's all these sort of structures in place to mean you don't meet 18-year-olds that do believe in Santa Claus. I at least I haven't met any. Again, spoiler alert for people listening.

James Hogson: 29:35

But I guess adults we're still prone to superstition, aren't we? We're prone to sometimes suspend our rational thinking and go, I want here. I want to believe something that I know not to be true. And do you think that still plays an important role later in life as well?

Dr. Lois Lee: 29:53

I think that's embedded in human life, as you say, in all kinds of ways. I don't think it's caused by these Christmas processes, for example, but rational thinking is really such a small part of how we're engaging with the world. And these sorts of enjoyments and connections, I think, matter in lots of ways. But this the wider research we've done with atheists, we sort of tend to find that it's a relatively sizable but very distinctive. It's a minority of atheists who have no supernatural beliefs at all. And we found that in the research we were doing. And for people who say who are agnostic in the sense they say we can't possibly know whether God exists or not, they tend to have even more supernatural beliefs. But then they've got fewer. Sometimes that's taken as, oh, they're not that's inconsistent with atheism. I would have been very surprised if we'd found anybody without any supernatural beliefs, let's say, because as you say, there are we participate in the cultural world around us, and there's lots of beliefs that we have that we don't need to scrutinize. Absolutely, a total waste of our time to scrutinize rather than engage intuitively with all sorts of things. Often we're describing, trying to describe experiences in ways we don't have a language for, and they, you know, things become important in that way. We do absolutely, as you would expect, find that atheists have fewer supernatural beliefs than the general population. So to me, that sort of confirms the naturalism of the outlook. And where you find that atheists had a purely, perfectly naturalist outlook, they would cease to not look sort of like, oh, are they robots or human beings? Like that, my understanding of all sorts of organisms just does wouldn't lead to that sort of neatness, just would seem bizarre. And in the end, indeed, the ways that our brains work. And what's the value of those different engagements with supernatural beings? There's all sorts of value that aren't just about the kind of absolute truth, you know, the reality of the sort of integrity of the idea about whether they exist or not. And so Father Christmas, I think, is a good example of that in the sense that I know I've presented this research to different kinds of humanist audiences, and I've spoken with some people in those audiences who say I really struggle with the idea, and perhaps I've for myself, I did not want my children to think this being existed. So I know there are people who have that view as well, which I think is really interesting. I think what we're saying in this research is that the kind of anxieties that might animate that, at least some of the anxieties that might animate that, based on a kind of idea that there's only one way of believing in supernatural beings, and that at least for the people we talk with who are believers in this research, there are particular functions or roles that those beliefs are playing in the lives of children and parents, including actually promoting humanist values at home and through schools. So it's sort of a complicated picture, and it's not, I don't think it would be true to say that believing in the tooth theory is really in any material way similar to believing in God. No. They're just playing out so differently, and the kind of functions of those beliefs are so distinct.

James Hogson: 33:07

Yeah, and I know a lot of your work covers this in terms of how beliefs are developed and what it is that atheists actually believe. And I think sometimes there is, as you say, criticism that perhaps it is the secularisation that is anti-Christmas or anti-the festivals and ceremonies throughout life. But it's my understanding of your work is actually you find that ritual is still very important to non-believers. And I wonder how you see ritual playing a role in an increasingly secular society. And do you think that Christmas as a festival will remain important or should remain part of the calendar for a majority non-believing population?

Dr. Lois Lee: 33:46

That's a really interesting question. That's a really interesting question. I think what we're seeing is that the growth of atheism is part of a broader cultural change, which, as I say, reaches back at least into the mid-19th century, it's a long-term change in which humanism has been increasingly widespread. I mean, I think one of the indicators of the Christmas research is that Christmas, to the extent that it functions or it can function as a humanist festival. So if we think of Santa-centered Christmas or child-centered Christmas as maybe being especially inclined towards humanist worldview, the humanist worldview, we'd have to see humanist culture as pretty mainstream in a way it isn't always presented as. So people participating in this child-centered approach to Christmas are very numerous. Let's say this doesn't look like a sideshow. This doesn't look like the kind of marginal interest of a small number of people. This looks like a dominant cultural force. And I think that's consistent with lots of ways of thinking about humanist culture, not always honoured in different parts of our public life, but there are lots of people who would take that view. And I certainly don't think that humanists need to, this sort of tension that people have with um is it okay that I'm celebrating Christmas? I think this research maybe suggests that those anxieties can be put to one or dampened a little bit. Whether it should what I if we're seeing cultural change over time, which I think we are, it won't stop. It's not stopping. So we haven't reached humanism in its 19th century form, and there we are. It will continue to adapt. And that will be true of Christmas and our other rituals. One of the reasons we see it as a kind of existential ritual or a ritual which has this kind of broader philosophical significance is a lot of the ethical work that parents do in performing Christmas, thinking about the children in I've got young children, and there's a lot of conversation around the idea that Father Christmas gives presents to children who are good, and people pushing back against that and saying, ah, okay, well, what if people with less financial means aren't able to give as many is the implication then that those children have been bad or less morally worthy in some way? So just in all the conversations around Christmas, I see a kind of big movement towards that narrative and just removing that. So these sorts of little changes are happening all the time, and that's how culture develops in conversation with each other, in exchange, drawing in new ideas and embedding them. Will that mean that as we get an increasingly atheistic population that at some point that kind of ultimately Christian ritual is replaced by something else? I mean, that seems likely. Very few human cultural artifacts stay in the same form forever. And I don't think there's any need to worry about that. We do notice in the article that there's some ethical issues around Christmas. There's a lot of joy. I mean, I brought my bells today. I enjoy Christmas very much as a non-religious person. But we do also notice that it's a very patriarchal and paternalist festival, which has the labour that goes on behind Christmas is often female caregivers, mothers who are doing a lot of labour, providing the gifts that is then bestowed in the name of this beneficent man. It's like everything else, not a festival that doesn't have its issues. We think recognizing Christmas as a humanist culture also addresses forms of humanist privilege in our culture, in which certainly at my children's school, they get taught about religious rituals associated with Islam, for example, with Hinduism, and they see those as practiced by a specific group of people. Whereas Christmas is practiced at school in this very broad and inclusive way, and it's available to everybody. It has lots of ideas contained in Christmas that aren't available to everybody. And that's a sort of form of cultural privilege that we're not always noticing. Scholars have written a bit about Christian privilege, but we're now saying actually we think there's some humanist privilege that goes on in that.

James Hogson: 38:00

That's a really important point, yeah.

Dr. Lois Lee: 38:02

Yeah, and I think saying, you know, I've started talking with my children and saying we're a non-religious family, which is an idea that sits quite uncomfortably within non-religious thought, where the emphasis is on free thinking and working out for yourself and so on. But equally, there's this a child said to me recently, Oh, I don't have a culture. And I sort of becoming conscious through this research that there's something problematic about that as well, and that we need to recognize our own positions in order to understand them properly, but also be critical of them, open them up to criticism of others, and acknowledge what I think is happening, which is that a lot of my beliefs about the world are being shared with my children. And pretending that's not happening. I wasn't pretending before those sort of ideas that my children are choosing for themselves, they're not a pretense. But neither do I now think, especially through this research, that's quite what's happening. And I wanted to be a bit more reflective on that and open about it and say, oh, we do have a tradition that we celebrate in a particular way. And you can question it and push back and all of those things. But let's make it visible and notice, notice who is able to participate in that legitimately and who isn't. I mean, interestingly, in this research, one of the most fascinating things, what examples were a set series of Christian families who were absolutely ostracized in one of the schools we did research in because they said Christmas was about Jesus. And more importantly, Father Christmas doesn't exist. And this was caused an absolute, you know, parents really upset. You're ruining Christmas for our family. So that kind of example really points to the ways in which there may be Christian forms of privilege, but there are this sort of centered Christmas is has become the norm in a way that doesn't work for everybody. And they talked about children from different religious backgrounds whose family practice other religious chills at that time of year, and they would sometimes sit out of the Christmas that's practiced at school, but it's being presented as something for everybody. So it's not to say we must remove Christmas from our schools, but being a little bit more conscious of that they did that Christmas does present a not infinitely inclusive outlook, but is a cultural phenomenon that comes from somewhere and includes some people, includes some ideas, and other I think there's a really interesting space that's not. All jingle bells and it's a really important message.

James Hogson: 40:35

And I thank you for bringing it back to that. And I think it's something we probably don't address enough, actually. The privilege, I guess, more of a secular privilege of saying these are the norms of the culture now, and how that actually might be exclusive in some other areas. It ties back nicely to your broader research as well, because we do often have this. I think maybe maybe it is a slightly privileged position to position ourselves in saying that atheism is the absence of belief. And obviously that means one of the nice things is that means you don't then have to defend it or have it questioned in quite the same way. But your work would suggest that there is a culture of around non-belief. And perhaps just before we go, I mean, how would you describe that culture in its current form? What are some of the key distinguishing factor features?

Dr. Lois Lee: 41:17

I think we have to immediately say it's not a culture. And saying you have a non-religious worldview, some of the debates around Ari in the classroom have sort of moved in that direction and said, well, we already have representation for our world religions, for the paradigm that's in place. So we've got some discussion and some teaching around Christianity and then some about Hinduism and so on. And we'll just add in either just humanism or humanism and non-religious worldviews, or just non-religious worldviews, as a kind of extra seat, maybe two seats if you're lucky, at this world religions table. But of course, if we look at somewhere like the UK, where 50% of people are non-religious, it's not surprising to think that actually within that group are a number of worldview orientations, some of which are quite oppositional to one another. People with strong environmental or post-humanist, it's sometimes called, worldviews, who are quite critical of the human species and aren't willing to celebrate humans in quite the same way. The capital H humanist movement actually includes quite a lot of those different positions from the kind of philosophical humanism or kind of narrowly conceived. So we've got all these different things going on. Some of the work we're doing at the moment is trying to map those essentially, those different worldviews. The the tricky thing with non-religious worldviews, which includes alternative forms of spirituality, is that they're not associated with institutions that make them nice and visible. We were talking before the podcast about where do you go? If you want to hear a brilliant podcast about humanism, how do you search for it in the on the podcast menu? And it comes to that issue that we're not if without those institutions like the big churches and so on, it can be hard to know where to go to connect with those things. What we're trying to do with some of that mapping research is look at the kind of clusters of belief so that we can at least describe them and people can identify with them or not identify with them. These researchers have said this is what's going on. I don't think it is at all. All of which I think would be a really interesting conversation for us to be pushing forward as a society in that way. So I think actually there are a number of major non-religious worldviews that are part of our landscape. And actually, humanism, I think, is very much ahead of the game in having a sort of visible identity, some cool podcasts, humanist UK, you do amazing lobbying work, all of that, which lots of the other orientations don't have at the moment. So I think it's a really interesting space to be getting a better handle on. And all of it is just moving away from an interfaith model of thinking about religion and worldviews as part of our plural, pluralist, multicultural landscapes, and trying to describe much better something more like inter-worldview interaction. Or we're working that language is something that I think lots of people in different areas of society is working out, and which I think, yeah, I really think is important.

James Hogson: 44:20

Lots more work to be done, it sounds like this is this has been fascinating, really eye-opening. Thank you so much, Lois. And looking forward to reading the final article when it is out. And we'll link to everything in the show notes, of course. Before we go, our standard closing question what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what inspired that change?

Dr. Lois Lee: 44:40

It's a hard question, I think, for researcher because you're always seeking to change your mind incrementally at all times. But I actually thought that this research we've been doing on Christmas, we've had lots of fun presenting it in formal academic settings where academics come and say, that is definitely the first presentation I've heard about the tooth theory. I think we've started some new ground. But I think it is does really impact people's lived experience in a way some of our other research doesn't. You don't have to explain to anyone living in the UK and lots of the places I'm going to for conferences and so on what Christmas culture is all about. It's such a big deal. And I think that's something that has changed my mind about non-religious culture, which I tended to see as part of this post-institutional landscape. And so you'd often have journalists or so on saying, I don't know what picture to put on my article about atheists. At some point they got sick of putting that picture of Richard Dawkins with the atheist bus campaign, which they'd use so many times. But because great and interesting point in our culture, but not the only image of atheism, except it was, they weren't sure what's the picture, what's the culture? And I've often I've thought that it's not totally esoteric. It's not that every atheist has different touchstones to others. In our in the sort of interview research we do, people mention books and songs and films and all sorts of things that have been important touchstones in their formation as atheists, as humanists, and so on. Um, and there's some overlap there. There's some individuality and there's some overlap. But then the Christmas research says it's much more than that. So it's much more than those sort of the possibility of sharing atheist ideas and humanist ideas through culture in this slightly kind of decentred way. Actually, there's these absolute cultural dam-offs like Christmas, which everyone says, oh, it starts earlier every year. I mean, this isn't some humanists like EM Forster, but not all do. And maybe that's part of the picture. This is massive, culturally massive, economically massive. And so it's made me think about the way in which non-traditional worldviews are really embedded in our culture in new ways. And having researched in this field for 20 years, that's been quite a big shift in my thinking. So yeah, I think Christmas might really matter.

James Hogson: 47:09

Thank you. That's a wonderful way to end. Wishing you and all of our listeners a very happy festive season, however you wish to celebrate. Thank you, Dr. Lee, for joining us on Humanism Now.

Dr. Lois Lee: 47:20

My pleasure. Yes. Happy festive season to you all.

Humanise Live: 47:28

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