Reflections for a Thanksgiving Weekend* *William Pfaff* Paris, November 23, 2007 – Thanksgiving, the most generous of American national holidays, has come under attack in some quarters because its origin is Protestant and religious, and hence non-inclusive, connected to events in American history to which the mass of immigrant America is indifferent. One would think this irrelevant, as those who have come to America, past or present, joined an existing nation, and in courtesy and responsibility should accept the terms of the nation’s existence and the burdens and rewards of its history. Of course the holiday is religious. What else could it have been, originating in a Protestant sectarian community that had left England to escape persecution for religious views unacceptable to the English majority, and to the established Church of England? The Pilgrims were dissident low-church Anglicans and Calvinist non-conformists who abandoned the Anglican church in England because they considered that notwithstanding its break with Rome, and its adoption of a Protestant stance under Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth, it was still unacceptably tainted by Papism and heresy. The rigorous and intolerant theological view of the “Puritans” (originally a polemical term used by their enemies) asserted an unadulterated biblical supremacy and a priesthood of believers. In this respect they were American Protestant forerunners, American Protestantism having remained predominantly low-church. Through many vicissitudes Puritan beliefs softened in time into what became mainstream American Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, and under the influence of Enlightenment doubt, into Unitarianism, Transcendentalism and Emersonian sentimentality. The Puritans had other influences. They had come to America to find religious liberty, but were unwilling to yield it to churchmen who disagreed with them, or to the dissidents who were to emerge in their own community. They fell into the disorders of the witch-hunts, which regrettably were to become something of an American cultural tradition, manifested in what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics. The Bush administration’s extraordinary exploitation after 9/11 of fear of conspiracies, terrorists, and foreigners, and assertion of the existence of an ineffable universal threat, demonstrated that this factor in American culture lives on. The Puritans provided the United States with its founding myth, of the City on the Hill, appropriated for another age by Ronald Reagan. But their City on the Hill was a theocracy, and in political terms a utopia. They were out to build God’s kingdom on earth, a common religious illusion, which since the reported death of God in 19th century western civilization, has assumed secular form and given us death-dealing totalitarian movements also building utopias on earth. The Puritans were convinced that their austere settlement represented a new start for humanity, and this idea has been appropriated by following generations to mean that the United States possesses a unique moral status in the world and a divinely-endowed mission to fulfill. There is no reason whatever to believe that this is so, flattering as the idea may be. However most of America’s foreign policy in the 20th and now 21st centuries has been constructed on this assumption. When the Puritans landed in New England to establish their colonies, there already were English settlers in Virginia with no such utopian ideas, nor had any of the later settlements, which mainly were commercial or proprietary. American religious utopianism is mostly home-grown. That first Thanksgiving, several days of feasting and festival following a successful harvest, was attested to in detail by a letter home to England from Edward Winslow in December 1621. He is the one who tells of neighboring Wampanoag Indians (who had introduced the newcomers to corn), attracted to what was going on, who contributed by entering the forest to hunt five deer which they brought back for roasting. The tradition of harvest festivals is old, and although from time to time there were later presidential convocations of the American people to give thanks to God, the modern holiday was proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the third year of the Civil War, during which the crucial battles of Chancellorsville, a Confederate victory, and Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, all Confederate defeats, had taken place. In October Lincoln proclaimed a day of thanks for “the gracious gifts of the Most High God Who, while dealing in anger with us for our sins, hath nonetheless remembered Mercy.” He is thought to have chosen the date in recollection of the Mayflower’s initial landing on November 21, 1620. Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day was to become an annual observance on the last Thursday in November, until Franklin Roosevelt moved it back a week to appease business demands for more shopping time before Christmas – the first great step in Mammon’s recapture of Christmas from religion. Thanksgiving in the 20th and 21st centuries has largely been appropriated by food and football, but the sentiment and good will of the occasion has largely survived, even when there is little to be cheerful about, as this year; although what multiculturalism may do to it in the future, God only knows – if one may be permitted the reference. ©Copyright 2007 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved. This article comes from William PFAFF http://www.williampfaff.com < http://www.williampfaff.com/ > </div>