We have domesticated God’s transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

Armstrong criticizes a common modern tendency to shrink the idea of God to something familiar, manageable, and emotionally comforting—what she calls “domesticating” transcendence. By comparing early religious instruction to childhood belief in Santa Claus, she highlights a developmental mismatch: many people revise childish myths as they grow, but may retain an unexamined, literal, or simplistic theology learned in childhood. The result is a concept of God that feels implausible or inadequate when confronted with adult intellectual and moral complexity. Implicitly, she argues for a more mature religious imagination—one that treats “God” less as a superhuman object within the world and more as a symbol pointing beyond ordinary categories.