The Ghost of Christmas Never

It took me a long time to realize that two of our family’s most beloved Christmas stories are both about men given an opportunity by heaven to see frightening visions of their own lives. Ebenezer Scrooge is somewhat moved by the visits from the spirits of Christmas past and present, but he only repents when the deathly Ghost of Christmas Future shows him grief and judgment awaiting him.

Likewise, George Bailey, the downcast hero of It’s a Wonderful Life, comes within inches of committing suicide, but is saved when a guardian angel thrusts him into an alternative timeline where he was never born. With no wife, children, little brother, or hometown, George realizes that his life was far richer than his ambitions admitted, and soon he is praying himself out of the horrible non-existence: “Please God, let me live again.”

Both George and Scrooge have become blind and numb to reality. Their redemption comes through an encounter with non-reality. Scrooge’s impending future and George Bailey’s alternate present are both so hellish that each character is able to see his actual reality differently. There are important differences: Scrooge’s problem is (at least partially) ignorance, whereas George has applied the wrong standard of value to everything throughout his life. But each is given a chance to see life from a godlike perspective. Inhabiting a different possible world becomes for them a way of living virtuously in this one.

It also matters that both Scrooge and George Bailey receive visions of an alternate reality that genuinely terrify them. For Scrooge, his apathy toward the poor, especially the Cratchit family, leads in the future to Tiny Tim’s death, Bob’s despair, and the contempt of the world upon Scrooge’s own passing. Both Scrooge and George temporarily experience non-existence, and realize that their own lives are bound up with the lives of others (both Tiny Tim and George’s brother Harry die without Scrooge and George there to stop it).

A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life are both religious, if not evangelical, stories. They are culturally Christian artifacts that lack an explicit gospel, but obviously rhyme with Christian truth. George and Scrooge may be very different temperamentally, but they share fallen humanity’s tendency to be curved inward, shutting out the needs and duties that press on them from the outside. Scrooge and George share a fear of poverty, and this shared fear dominates their hearts and drives them to evaluate the people around them too low. Scrooge becomes wealthy and George stays relatively poor, but they each become the parable of the man who built bigger barns and was not “rich toward God.”

Fear is powerful. It warps the mind and shrinks the soul. It can deform character, like in Scrooge, or elicit despair, like in George. Most of all, it freezes. Fear paralyzes its host, suggesting that the next step will undoubtedly be wrong, or the next word will come back to haunt. Under the spell of fear, we hide away in tunnels of inaction, as possible worlds—alternative timelines where we are not under fear’s control—pass us by.

Risk aversion is my generation’s great besetting sin. Notions that millennials or Gen-Z are lazy and entitled are not always false, but they are superficial. Behind what looks like laziness and entitlement is fear: a pathological fear of falling short, of not obtaining what’s sought, of not knowing where to go or who to turn to.

Why do young men increasingly say they don’t even desire a girlfriend or wife? Certainly, the digitization of masturbation has something to do with it. But whenever someone retreats to a vice that is so much clearly inferior to other vices available to them, we do well to ask why. Fear is why.

Peruse any online space where men are active, or talk to a young man in your church or neighborhood, and you will hear a well-established cost-benefit calculus when it comes to love and marriage. “Why take a chance on being rejected,” they’ll ask. “I don’t want to have a bad breakup or get divorced. Why risk it?”

Daniel Kolitz’s infamous and very hard-to-read profile of the “gooners,” a group of online men who’ve turned pornography into a cult, reveals the fear driving brutally antisocial trends among men. Kolitz gets one of the subjects of his piece to open up about the anxiety behind his addictions:

It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

Each one of the boys that Kolitz encounters represents not just a tragedy in our real, current universe, but a tragedy across every other possible universe as well. There is an alternative history in which these men are better protected in adolescence from the allure of the Internet, and more willing to inhabit the risky, awkward world of love, marriage, sex, and family. In our current timeline are women who are not blessed by these men’s strength and fidelity, children who do not exist and belong to them, industries that are not powered by their labor, and other men who are not loved or encouraged by their mentorship. These are fear’s phantoms.

What Clarence and the Ghost of Christmas Future show their protagonists is dreadful. By wishing himself unborn, George becomes a true “nobody.” But this alone isn’t the judgment, since George already believes he’s a nobody. The judgment is that when he becomes a nobody, the people he loves become nobody to him. George can’t jump into the river, let his wife cash out the life insurance policy, and have everything be well. To throw himself away is to throw her away, to throw his children away, to throw his mother and young brother and cab driver and community away. George has to be shown this, by heaven, because he can’t see it on his own.

Young men paralyzed by fear of the real are trapped in George’s alternate vision. They don’t need to see hell, the way George and Scrooge did, because they’re already there. They need to see heaven. They need a visitation from a future of hope they don’t currently have, the Ghost of Christmas Never.

The Ghost of Christmas Never could reclaim young men away from fear and risk aversion by redefining what deserves fear. There’s a strong case to be made that the self-protective instincts of my generation were most deeply shaped in our education, where the lines between real learning and instruction-following have been blurred for decades. From an early age, twenty- and thirtysomething men have been taught that a life of meaning will only come if the right letters and right numbers are next to their names, and that family, friendships, and church have to be weighed against recruitment and scholarships.

Redefining value in this way is a recipe for generational pathology. It stokes fear: the fear of not getting the right grade, not checking the right identity box, not getting into the right college or internship or job. Young men are trained by this to evaluate their lives as either wins or losses in totally material terms. Many times, the winners of this system win precisely because they cut loose the people and values that make for a truly good life. The losers stew in resentment, giving up on their own journeys before they begin.

A “wonderful life” though is not one where the right boxes are checked or the right GPA appears. The men who tend to make an impact and ascend their spheres of influence are not the best test-takers, but the men who can make decisions, solicit and follow advice, and take initiative and then ownership of that initiative. Fear of taking the wrong step is the wrong fear. The right fear is taking no step at all.

Taking this initiative does not, of course, guarantee the big opportunity. The distinction between what David Brooks calls “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues” matters precisely because the economic results of our character are not what matter most. What should young men fear? They should fear living in such a way that their funeral is short and empty. Caskets are great equalizers. What goes before and behind us is not our money or title, but our love and our character. And how is our character oriented? Toward God and others.

The Ghost of Christmas Never would haunt men of my generation by showing them visions of a home where they give and receive love and fidelity. Instead of the struggle for existential survival or the endless quest for pleasure that won’t leave one emptier than before, they would see a wife whose body is theirs and who owns their body. They would see the freedom of covenant play out as they and their wife exchange the right to wander for the honor and healing of belonging. In these visions they would likely see things that contradict what they’ve read about women or relationships from angsty online forums. They might even grasp, just for a moment, what it means to love as Christ loved.

It might also show them a vision of trying. In it, these men would see the world not as a rigged game but as a place responsive to their presence and their powers. They could see opportunities and privileges come from taking the extra time, or doing the extra task, or suggesting the extra idea. Fear of failure would be assuaged by the reminders, from Scripture and their church, that they don’t labor in the fields of the world, but in the fields of the Lord. They might see themselves work, think, pray, play, and serve as men liberated from dread by the sensation that their Creator always sees and always knows.

How might the Ghost of Christmas Never come? I’m not sure. It could come through a father, mentor, or a church. It could come from putting away social media long enough to read something like this. But if Christmas fables like these are “true myths,” one thing seems certain. The Ghost of Christmas Never may come when we pray that it comes. Remember Marley’s words that Scrooge’s chance of salvation was a “chance of my procuring.” Remember the prayers in the opening scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life. “Please God, something’s a matter with daddy. Please bring daddy back.”