COMMENTARY: Don’t Rewrite History of a Religious Thanksgiving

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) They were slightly more than a hundred souls, nearly one-third of them children, and they sailed for 66 days across the frigid North Atlantic. When they arrived at their destination, they were unprepared for the hardships of their new country and half of them died. The rest were saved […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) They were slightly more than a hundred souls, nearly one-third of them children, and they sailed for 66 days across the frigid North Atlantic.

When they arrived at their destination, they were unprepared for the hardships of their new country and half of them died. The rest were saved only by their faith, a change from communal to privatized farming and the help of their Indian friends.


When their labors reaped an abundant harvest a year after their arrival, they wanted to offer thanks to God. So they celebrated, gloriously, for three days. Both their vision and their industry became an enduring symbol of the American spirit.

The year was 1621 and the people were the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. It is a tale that ought to be told often, one that inspires courage and a thoughtful brand of patriotism. But it is seldom told at all now and when it is it is rarely told accurately.

The reason? These Pilgrims said they came to the New World “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.” This is their offense, apparently, for at least a few of their 21st century descendants.

Their story is so eagerly distorted. There are textbooks in use today that insist the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving to express gratitude to the Indians. There is no mention of God or the Pilgrims’ motivating Christian faith.

Last year in Garwood, N.J., a school child who mentioned God in a Thanksgiving poem was immediately censured and the offending reference to the deity removed from a class exhibit. In Maryland, teachers were told to explore the Thanksgiving story fully with their elementary school students but they are warned never to mention religion, which, of course, is the only historically faithful explanation for Thanksgiving. The lesson seems clear: teach the past but only the version that is free of faith.

It is a tragic state of affairs and it arises largely because the First Amendment of our Constitution has been reinterpreted by the Supreme Court from its original purpose, as a ban against a state church, to a ban against religion in public life. Busybody secularists like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom from Religion Foundation then press the case, searching for public expressions of faith. They then sue the supposed violators.

The ACLU, for example, has been trolling the cadets and the midshipmen at the nation’s military academies, hoping to find one of them willing to participate in a lawsuit intended to remove traditional prayer times and expressions of faith. The Freedom from Religion Foundation, apparently having nothing better to do, sticks its nose into local affairs in the pursuit of an atheist state: seeking the removal of manger scenes from public land or assuring that we are all safe from prayers at college graduation ceremonies.


Some people forget that:

_ More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, according to surveys;

_ A Supreme Court justice once penned, “our institutions presuppose a divine being”;

_ Keeping God in Thanksgiving is a matter of historical accuracy and not religious preference.

It is simply bad scholarship to insist that the Pilgrims weren’t moved primarily by their Christian faith, that the American republic wasn’t founded upon religious principle, or that the First Amendment was designed to secure a secular state. All are lies, but lies that prevail when truth is stripped from a “religion free” public square.

Karl Marx wisely said that “a people without a heritage are easily persuaded.” When faith is divorced from our grand history, it is denatured, drained of its power to inform and inspire. The story of the first Thanksgiving is more than a children’s story told once a year. It is a pillar of our national consciousness, a tale that imparts its nobility to each generation that is willing to hear.

Perhaps it is time for our generation to silence the voice of secularism and to hear, afresh, the voice of our nation’s faithful fathers.

MO/JL END RNS

(Stephen Mansfield, best-selling author of “The Faith of George W. Bush,” speaks and writes for American Destiny, a Nashville, Tenn., organization that teaches “the providential story of America.”)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Stephen Mansfield, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.


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